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Death Valley deserves its name. It is a sunburnt land of salt flats, bad water, and scorching sand. It is an eerie place where people get lost and are never heard from again. The valley is the burning heart of a much larger desert called the Mojave.

This parched place is the hottest, driest spot in North America. Summer temperatures may rise to over 49 Celsius (120 Fahrenheit). The valley gets less than five centimeters (two inches) of rain a year. Some years, no rain falls on the valley at all.

It may seem that no one could ever survive here. Yet people have lived in this valley for thousands of years. Let's meet some of these people and explore their stories.

Death Valley has not always been a desert. It was once a lake. The climate was much wetter. The land nearby was rich with life.

The valley was still a lake when the first Native Americans arrived. That was about 10,000 years ago. About 1,000 years ago, the ancestors of today's Timbisha Shoshone people came to the valley. Over time, the climate changed. Temperatures rose. Less rain fell. The lake dried up. Only a few freshwater springs remained in the foothills, mountains, and valley.

The Timbisha adapted as Death Valley grew hotter and drier. They moved their villages close to the springs. They learned to survive on what they could find in the desert.

Jackrabbits, quail, and bighorn sheep provided meat. People learned to grind up pods from mesquite trees and make small cakes to eat. Branches and twigs became the walls and roofs of open, airy homes.

During the hottest season, the Timbisha moved into the mountains. There, the climate was cooler. The rest of the year, though, they lived in the valley. The Timbisha lived this unchanging life for centuries. They respected the desert and cared for it. Then, in 1849, pioneers arrived from the East.

This first group of pioneers was lost. They were trying to find a shortcut to the California gold fields. They had already spent two months crossing a desert in Nevada. Their wagons were breaking down. They were near starvation.

On Christmas Eve, they found a spring near the Shoshone settlements. There, they made camp and talked about what to do. One of the pioneers, William Lewis Manly, wrote about the experience.

"We all felt pretty much downhearted. Our civilized provisions were getting so scarce that all must be saved for the women and children, and the men must get along some way on ox meat alone. It was decided not a scrap of anything that would sustain life must go to waste. The blood, hide and intestines were all prepared in some way for food.

"This meeting lasted till late at night. If some of them had lost their minds I should not have been surprised, for hunger swallows all other feelings. A man in a starving condition is a savage."

The pioneers decided to split into several groups. Each had its own plan. Manly's group began a long walk toward the mountains.

The group faced new challenges. Since there was little for the oxen to eat, the animals grew weak. That meant they could no longer pull the pioneers' wagons.

The pioneers had no choice: They left the wagons behind. They killed several oxen for food. Finally, the pioneers crossed over the Panamint Range. They had made it through Death Valley.

The flat, dry plains of the Mojave were the worst part of their journey. Luckily, it had been a wet winter. Snow and icy rain puddles provided water. Without that, all of them would have died. "We were lucky in our misfortune," Manly wrote. Amazingly enough, the whole group survived the Mojave trek.

You might think the pioneers' experience would have kept other people from following. It didn't.. Newcomers came with only mules and pickaxes. They, too, were searching for gold.

Valuable ores lay hidden beneath Death Valley. These treasures included gold and silver. When miners gave up on the gold fields in other parts of California, many came to the desert.

Most mining settlements followed a predictable pattern. First came the prospectors. They searched for gold deposits. When they made a strike, they staked a claim. Then they either worked the claim themselves or sold it.

Word got out about the strike: Gold! Gold! More prospectors came. Miners poured into the area. They set up mining camps. Soon the camps became towns. More people came. They built banks, hospitals, restaurants, hotels, and a jail. The towns became cities.

Everything in a mining town depended on the local mine. Sooner or later, though, it dried up. No more gold. Everyone left. The place became a ghost town. It was all over.

This pattern repeated itself many times in Death Valley. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, mining towns sprouted up everywhere. They had colorful names like Bullfrog, Skidoo, Ballarat, and Rhyolite.

Miners came to Death Valley for more than gold. Some came to mine a kind of salt. People used the salt to make a substance called borax. It was used to make glass, ceramics, and cleaning products.

In the 1880s, mining borax salts became big business. It also became a big challenge. Carrying huge loads of borax out of the valley wasn't easy.

William T. Coleman solved the problem. He used 20-mule teams to carry borax from his factory in Death Valley to the railroad line. Actually, it was 18 mules and two horses. (People tend to forget about the horses.) Each team pulled two full wagons, plus a water tank. Imagine hauling that huge load across a burning desert!

Between 1883 and 1889, mule teams hauled more than 9 million kilograms (20 million pounds) of borax out of the valley. The route ran 265 kilometers (165 miles) out of Death Valley. One round-trip took 20 days. It was a hard journey for both the mules and the men who drove them.

Driving a 20-mule team took talent and courage. One bad step, and the team could run the wagons into a mountain or off a cliff. The driver cracked a long whip to get the mules' attention. But mostly, he used just his voice.

A good mule driver didn't shout, though. At least that's how Tex Ewell remembered it. Only bad drivers raised their voices. Ewell said that when a skilled driver spoke, "a mule knew he wasn't fooling, and obeyed."

Today, Death Valley is a national park. It is the largest U.S. national park outside Alaska. There is plenty for tourists to see.

Some of the favorite natural sites include Badwater Basin, the spectacular Eureka Dunes, and the rainbow-colored clay at Artists Palette. These places never change.

Well, almost never. At a place called the Racetrack, rocks move around mysteriously. They carve long tracks in the mud. No one has ever seen it happen, so exactly what takes place is a puzzle.

All that remains of the mining days are ghost towns and tombstones. Through it all, the Timbisha Shoshone have continued to live here. This valley is still their home forever. For them, it is a valley of life.

Article by Shirleyann Costigan. Top-of-page photograph © Khaled Kassem/Alamy. "Death Valley Days" appears on page 8 of the Nov.-Dec. 2008 issue.