Lovecraft’s early failure “The Transition of Juan Romero” (Sept 1919) is located in “the Cactus Mountains”…

“In the summer and autumn of 1894 I dwelt in the drear expanses of the Cactus Mountains, employed as a common labourer at the celebrated Norton Mine, whose discovery by an aged prospector some years before had turned the surrounding region from a nearly unpeopled waste to a seething cauldron of sordid life.”

There really were and are “Cactus Mountains”, which lie south-east of Tonopah. Gold was first discovered there 1900, the gold rush there was 1903, and by 1915 the area south of Tonopah was the U.S.A.’s second biggest gold producing locality. The “Cactus Mountains” can be traced in documents from the 1840s, through to the following article in the Mining and Scientific Press magazine (1912). This article gives some of the history and details of a new 1911 gold discovery at the southern tip of the Cactus Mountains, Lovecraft’s exact setting…

There had also been new mines sunk at that spot by a British miner (recalling the nationality of the narrator of “Juan Romero”?), ostensibly for other minerals, back in 1908. The British miner’s name was Samuel G. Knott, and he was president of the Cactus Range Gold Mining company of Goldfield. His Mine Supervisor there was Elmer F. King. So far as my researches can tell, Knott was not known to have previously been in British India (as the British narrator of “Juan Romero” had been).

Mention of these mountains also occurs in a U.S. Navy report of 1977… “The 8 to 10 miles of blasting required along each antenna line occurs in the Cactus Mountains on the Tonopah Test Range…” The mountains are now better known as the Cactus Range (Lovecraft also uses this name in the story) and they form part of a vast highly-restricted military testing ground. The location in particular is now “Area 52, Tonopah Test Range“, sited 30 miles SE of Tonopah …

“lies mostly within the Cactus Flat valley, consisting of horst and graben geology. It is flanked by the Cactus Range hills to the west”

Yes, conspiracy fans, Lovecraft got there first as usual — this Area 52 is the neighbour of the fabled Area 51. 🙂 Which, for some, may bring a new frisson to the story’s descriptions — since they appear to somewhat prefigure the tropes of UFO folklore…

“[the mysterious sound from the newly-discovered bottomless cave] was like the pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not so mechanical; not so devoid of the element of life and consciousness.”

“At first I beheld nothing [in the bottomless pit] but a seething blur of luminosity; but then shapes, all infinitely distant, began to detach themselves from the confusion, and I saw — was it Juan Romero? — but God! I dare not tell you what I saw!”

Another curious co-incidence is that the story “Juan Romero” was not published until 1944. I’m no expert on the history of UFOs, but that appears to be the same year as the UFO craze first started.

Lovecraft also sites the action in “Juan Romero” directly beneath a “Jewel Lake”. Sadly this name, like the name “Norton Mine”, doesn’t lead anywhere. The area is a volcanic plateau at 6,000 feet, and is very dry on the surface although there are springs and water not far down under the earth. According to the following 1905 topographic map there was no actual named lake at the exact spot, and the history book Preserving the Glory Days: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Nye County, Nevada has no mention of a Jewel Lake (or a Norton Mine, for that matter). Although the blue dotted areas on the 1905 topo map perhaps indicate there were temporary flashes of valley-bottom water in winter?

There is a huge “Mud Lake” nearby, though. So I wonder if Lovecraft may have flipped the meaning of the name, from Mud to Jewel?

How did Lovecraft come to know of the area? He appears to have been inspired in his choice of a desert setting by reading an amateur journalism author he named in a letter as ‘Phil Mac’ (Prof. Philip B. McDonald), who had apparently used a similar desert / mining setting, but for a “commonplace adventure yarn” (Lord of a Visible World, p.69). It seems Lovecraft had copied out a “dull” and “commonplace adventure yarn” sent to him by McDonald, intending to send the copy to his correspondence circle with a detailed critique of his own. But then he decided to just spend a day writing his own story based on the same or similar setting, and he then sent out both… “Youze gazinks have seen both Mac’s and my yarns.”

Philip B. McDonald graduated M.E. (Master of Engineering) from Michigan College of Mines. In Lovecraft’s The Conservative, McDonald was stated to be “Assistant Professor of Engineering English, University of Colorado” in July 1918, though he later moved to New York to become assistant professor of English, New York University. It appears he was the husband of the noted amateur journalist Edna Hyde McDonald (“Vondy”). McDonald’s desert story was not used in Lovecraft’s The Conservative and seems not to exist today, nor any of his fiction. So we don’t know how closely Lovecraft used, or not, what he called “the richly significant setting” of McDonald’s “dull yarn”.

Stone Wings blog has walked and traced the route of the Lovecraft/Eddy Sunday 4th November 1923 expedition to find the notorious Dark Swamp in western Rhode Island, and reports with fine photographs. Dark Swamp was never actually reached by Lovecraft that day, although he and his “newly adoped son” C.M. Eddy hoped for another trip in summer 1924 that seemingly never happened…

“We now know how to reach the swamp most expeditiously, and will not again lose time in devious inquiries. It will be a pleasing day’s trip, and even tho’ we discover no unsuspected horror, we shall surely behold enough of the darkly picturesque to furnish out a dozen tales apiece.” (Selected Letters I, pp.264-67).

Their not reaching the swamp was probably just as well. Since it reputedly had many snakes, sump pools, and morasses, and was probably filled to brimming by the heavy October rains of that year.

Back in 2001 The Cthulhu Prayer Society (Newsletter, 11th Nov 2001) also followed the route of the walk to Dark Swamp. Jarett Kobek actually made it into part of the Dark Swamp and has online photos of White’s Pond and also part of the swamp.

The swamp had been penetrated by several naturalists early in the 20th century…

“Howard W. Preston, whose Botanical Notebook for the years 1877-1919 awaits and deserves publication, recorded his search for rhododendron in Dark Swamp, Glocester, Rhode Island by the Willie Woodhead Road.” (The Bulletin of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, 1966).

“As early as 1911, Fred Barnes served as a guide into the Dark Swamp in West Glocester for a research group from Brown University” (Glocester, the way up country: a history, guide and directory, 1976).

The swamp was/is not far from Chepachet, the north part of the road from Chepachet to Pascoag being of course the setting for the opening of Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook”. That was where Malone recoils in horror at reaching the junction and unexpectedly seeing buildings not unlike New York tenements in style. Such buildings can still be seen at that Pascoag junction, using Google StreetView, although they are on the right rather than the left turn. Lovecraft had been for another ramble in this area with Morton, a little earlier in 1923, in search of Durfee Hill (one miles east of the swamp, and Rhode Island’s second highest point), and so it’s possible he may have walked the same stretch of road that appears in “The Horror at Red Hook”.

According to S.T. Joshi’s I Am Providence, the visit to Dark Swamp was also recorded by Lovecraft in a letter to Edwin Baird. But I’m not sure where that’s been published, if it has been.

L. Sprague de Camp wrote in Lovecraft: A Biography that part of the Dark Swamp was submerged by the Ponaganset Reservoir a few years after the Lovecraft/Eddy trip — but judging by the modern satellite photography, trail maps, and the fact that Ponaganset Reservoir was completed in 1865, this cannot be correct.

Similarly shaky on certain points of fact may be Eddy’s recollections of his walks with Lovecraft. They can be found in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (Arkham House 1966) and reprinted in Lovecraft Remembered. The date of 1966 implies that Eddy was recalling events in the mid 1920s from the viewpoint of the mid 1960s? As I understand it some of these distant recollections of Lovecraft by Eddy, and especially by Eddy’s wife, should not be taken at face value.