According to friends and relatives, Walter Edward was born in Cynthiana, Kentucky, United States, about 1870, the youngest son of George E. Scott (or George A. Scott according to his IGI record) and his wife, Anna (Calhoun) Scott. The 1870 manuscript census records for Harrison County, Kentucky, however, include no family readily identifiable as Scott's. As a child Scott supposedly ran away from home to become a cowboy, finding employment with a prominent Nevada rancher.
At the age of twelve, while on a cattle drive, Walter Edward Scott first saw California's Death Valley and returned soon afterward as water boy with a government survey party; in 1885 he was a teamster for the Harmony Borax Works there. Probably in 1888 or 1889 he was hired as a performing rider with "Buffalo Bill's Wild West, " the William F. Cody rodeo.
The discovery of gold in southwestern Nevada in 1900 touched off the last great rush of prospectors into the Death Valley area. Scott quit or was fired from Cody's show and joined the rush. He soon ran out of money, but in 1902, by presenting himself as on the verge of a priceless discovery, he convinced Julian Gerard, a New York banker, to advance him a $20, 000 grubstake. In 1905, financed by a speculator in mining lands who presumably hoped that publicity would enhance prices for his properties in or near Death Valley, Scott appeared in Los Angeles, claiming to have discovered a fabulously rich gold mine - and spending money lavishly to prove it.
He chartered a special three-car express train to Chicago in order to try for a new speed record, an expensive escapade widely reported in the national press. For the next several years Scott's favorite yarn was that men desperate to learn the location of his mine were constantly on his trail, forcing him to go heavily armed. But in 1912 a Los Angeles grand jury compelled him to admit that his gold mine was a hoax.
In 1904 Scott had met a millionaire, Albert M. Johnson, an insurance-company executive from Chicago. Johnson soon became Scott's close friend and, entirely as a lark, his source of funds. In the 1920's Johnson returned Scott to national prominence by financing the construction, on land purportedly owned by Scott in Death Valley, of Scotty's Castle, an elaborate mansion in freely adapted Spanish provincial style. The project took five years to build and cost Johnson perhaps $2 million before the stock market crash forced him to cancel work in 1929.
When the federal government moved to establish Death Valley as a national monument Johnson discovered that Scott held no title to the land on which the mansion stood. Congress obligingly conveyed the title to Johnson in 1935. Renewed notoriety about Scott's supposed wealth led to two well-publicized court trials.
In 1937 Scott's wife sued him for separate maintainence and a division of community property, requiring Johnson to testify that Scott actually had no wealth of his own. Three years later Julian Gerard brought an action based on his 1902 contract with Scott, demanding 22. 5 percent of Scott's wealth. He thereby became owner of seventeen worthless mining claims, the defendant's only tangible assets.
Johnson died in 1948, bequeathing Scotty's Castle to a charitable foundation. Scott continued to direct tourists around the estate, and after his death at nearby Stovepipe Wells, California, he was interred there.
Walter Edward Scott became famous by his many scams. Despite ample evidence to the contrary, he managed to keep America half-convinced that there actually was a secret gold mine to which he mysteriously retired from time to time to replenish his purse. Besides, he constructed iconic mansion in Death Valley popularly known as Scotty's Castle. It became a tourist attraction and remains one today.
In New York City, Scott met Ella Josephine Millius, a store clerk, whom he married in 1900. They had one son. Scott's wife and child, Walter Perry Scott, who was born in 1914, remained separated from Scott for the most part.
