In the summer of 1904, Harris partnered with a man named Ernest "Ed" Cross and on August 9th, they discovered the Bullfrog Mining District. According to the tale, as the two were preparing to head out for the day, Ed was cooking breakfast when one of Shorty's mules took off. Chasing after the mule, he stubbed his toe on a rock and fell down. As he was getting up, he looked around before letting out a yell: "There it is, the strike of the century! Forget the breakfast Eddie, let’s get ta Goldfield and get this assayed!"  Incredibly, the ore samples came back to be worth $3,000 per ton and Shorty wasted no time going to the saloon to celebrate. While Shorty is on a binge for almost a week, Ed was working on lining up a sale for the mining rights. Unfortunately, Shorty would come out on the "short-end" of this great find as while he was "celebrating," he gambled away his share for $1,000 and a mule, to a man named J.W. McGaliard. His partner, Cross; however, joined with McGaliard and formed the Original Bullfrog Mine. Later, Ed sold his share for $25,000 and he and his wife bought a big ranch in Escondido, California.

Shorty continued to search for the all elusive glittering gold and in the fall of 1904, he hustled another grubstake from Leonard McGarry, the Bullfrog postmaster. He and a man named George Pegot then headed for the Panamint Mountains in December.  There, they found free gold pockets on the north side of Hunter Mountain. While Shorty rushed the sacks of gold to be assayed at Goldfield. Coming in at $250 a ton, the find began the rush of the Gold Belt Spring Mining District. However, Shorty drank through most of the rush, not profiting from his find.

The next year, he obtained another grubstake and partnered with Jean Pierre "Pete" Aguereberry, who had just been swindled out of Echo Canyon by Chet Leavitt. The pair soon headed to Ballarat, California, taking the trail across the valley floor and heading up Blackwater Canyon to Wildrose Spring. Along the way, Aguereberry spotted flecks of gold in a rock and they both soon staked out several claims, with Pete talking the north half, which he called Eureka and Shorty claiming the south half, calling it Providence. The town of Harrisburg is soon founded and Shorty's two grubstakers hustled him off to San Francisco to find backers for the Cashier Gold Mining Company. This time, Shorty didn't gamble away his interest and ended up with 50,000 shares of stock and $10,000 in cash.

Shorty continued to prospect for the rest of his life, though he never had a mine he could call his own. At the age of 78, having been ill for a time, he died in 1934 at his cabin at Big Pine, California.  Before he died he had requested to be buried at the “bottom of Death Valley,” beside an old friend named James Dayton. He requested that the following epitaph be placed on his headstone: Here lies Shorty Harris, a single blanket jackass prospector - 1856-1934

© Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, October,  2010.

In 1930, Shorty told his story to the Magazine of the American Automobile Association of Southern California. Here is an excerpt from  Half a Century Chasing Rainbows by Frank "Shorty" Harris as as told to Phillip Johnston.