The Moapa Valley Connection to Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart, the American aviation pioneer, and writer once had some significant business connections in the Moapa Valley. She visited the community occasionally to look after these interest during the 1920s.

The following story is an excerpt from “Muddy Valley Reflections,” by Beezy Tobiasson and Georgia Hall. Copies of this book are still available for purchase at the Old Logandale School.

At one time, Amelia Earhart owned a gypsum mine just west of the Moapa Valley. A local resident at the time, Clinton Averett worked there. The Averett family all met Earhardt and often spoke of her with respect and admiration.

The mine was purchased from one of Amelia’s friends in 1921. By 1922, she had given up on her dream of becoming a doctor and joined her parents in California to help them try to stay financially afloat.

They invested much of her mother’s inheritance into the mine, but it was not a financial success.
At one time, Amelia and her father came to Nevada to inspect the mine. When they got to the site, they were nearly engulfed in a flash flood.

They had to stand by helplessly and watch as their friend drowned in the flood. His truck, which was loaded with gypsum, overturned in the water and he was killed.
The mine flooded in the incident. With that, the family’s security washed away too.

During this time, Earhart had been discovering airplanes and she had developed a passion for flying. She earned her wings, bought her own airplane, and was accepted into the California flying fraternity.
But as a result of the mine disaster, Earhart had to sell her plane and look for other employment to pay the bills. It took her several years of odd jobs to regain her footing. One of these jobs was driving a sand and gravel truck.

Earhart kept up communications with Clinton Averett in Moapa Valley, writing him often during this time. Most of her letters, both to Clinton and others, were short scrawls hastily written and not more than a page or two. But at least one of her letters written to Clinton was a long epistle of eight pages, and quite legible, too.

In it, she talks about the mine and asks Clinton to ride around the property to see if there are any “discovery monuments or anything to mark the place” that would have been put up by her friend. She also talks about a suit against her mother and an accident that her friend, P.D. Barnes was in.

Other letters, some of them from her sister, Muriel, talk about the mine, Peter Barnes, her family, and other business concerns. One of them tells of the hit-and-run accident that killed Peter Barnes.

One letter dated December 6, 1922, says that she and another “wild woman who flies” had intended to fly into the Thanksgiving races and land on the race track, even though threatened with arrest and jail. But the whole show was canceled due to the weather. She mentions that she wanted to see if they would really arrest them!