SHOSHONE, Calif., May 5 – Death Valley has again become the stamping grounds for the remnants of Charles Manson’s cult.

In 1969, the Family had moved to the valley’s Barker Ranch in preparation for Manson’s helter-skelter racial war. That’s where many of the Family clan were arrested the same year as suspects in a stolen car ring.

While they were in custody, Los Angeles investigators unearthed evidence linking them to the Tate murders.

And now — seven years and countless murders later — the remnants of the Family have again returned to Death Valley, leaderless, disorganized and, in some instances, attempting to exorcise themselves of those cultish days.

In the small town of Shoshone, on the eastern rim of the valley, two former Family associates strum the guitar and warble country tunes in a small saloon. They remember the days with Charlie.

“He was a genius with so much potential,” said Brooks Poston, one of the early Family clan who managed to leave the group just before its Los Angeles murder spree.

“But he got power-hungry. And he saw that it worked. He went crazy with power.”

Partner Paul Watkins also left the Family before those bloodstained days.

“I wasn’t blown off my tracks by the experience,” said Watkins. “I had experienced the LSD-hippie way of life even before I hooked up with Charlie.

“But when I saw the whole trip turning violent — you could see murder on the way — I skated from the scene.”

Poston and Watkins were in the valley last March when Lynette Fromme, Sandra Good and a fresh band of Mansonites returned to the Barker Ranch in an attempt to regroup.

But this time the boys stayed with their music.

Miss Fromme and Miss Good were playing another tune.

Inyo County, Calif., Sheriff’s Detective John Little remembers the Family’s intense activity last year, in the months before Lyn Fromme’s aborted attempt on the President’s life.

“They were in and out of here,” said Little. “We kept track of their whereabouts because some of them are on parole and it’s a violation of parole for them to come back here.”

But Little said it was mostly “new” Family members who turned up in the valley — and no arrests were made.

But the Family was watched through informants whom law enforcement agencies have cultivated in the valley.

What happened in those sojourns to the Barker Ranch and elsewhere is unclear.

But it is known some of the new Family members were put through initiation rites by Miss Fromme and Miss Good, who were forming an “ecology unit” to fight a war on the people they say are harming the environment.

“Family activity still centers at the Barker Ranch,” said Little. “That’s where Cathy Gilles, a member, lives with her grandmother.”

Using the desolate valley near the Barker and Myers ranches as a base, the Manson girls attempted to resurrect the Family, recruiting fresh talent as football scouts might, writing to Family sympathizers and others in pleas for support and help.

Letters written by Miss Fromme last summer show an almost desperate, violent approach for that help.

“You could tell something was building inside her, something terrible,” said one of the recipients of those letters. “She wanted people who could write to Family members in prison to attempt to get them to write Lyn. She is not permitted to write to most of them.”

It was from this valley gathering that the new Manson clan arose last summer. More than 7,000 letters were written to persons across the country, asking, in essence, for a massive Family membership drive to might polluters.

Inyo County sheriff’s officers and California Highway Patrol officials believe at least 100 new followers joined up from that drive. Of late, however, they have faltered without a leader.

“We know who they are and we are watching them,” said one Inyo County official. “But they haven’t broken any laws — yet.”

That was last August — a month before Lyn Fromme pointed a loaded Colt .45 at President Ford’s stomach.

In June, 1975, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Raymond Choate received one of those death-threat letters from Miss Fromme, followed by a telephone call.

“She said she wanted to talk to me because she was going to do something desperate,” said Choate. “At first I thought she meant she was going to kill herself, but she specifically said she didn’t mean suicide.

“I felt she was capable of violent activity but she was so unpredictable that it’s impossible to imagine (at that time) what that activity might be.”

Choate presided over Manson’s second murder trial.

Edward Vandervort, another pen pal of Miss Fromme, received similar letters around the same time.

Vandervort is a former mental patient and did not testify at the Fromme trial.

But the letters between Fromme and Vandervort have been obtained by federal authorities.

In one of the letters, Miss Fromme is alleged to have instructed Vandervort to murder a man identified as William Roesch, president of “Kaiser,” which manufactures aerosol cans.

In a June 17, 1975, letter, Miss Fromme allegedly describes Roesch as “the maker of more forms of pollution than I can count.”

She allegedly wrote Vandervort, “Do not threaten him first. Kill him. Destroy him.

“When the bodies are dead, paint as much of them as you can with pink paint. Put an aerosol can of Ban in his mouth.”

Miss Fromme also allegedly telephoned Vandervort on June 21, 1975, and told him she had to murder the President.

Because of Vandervort’s mental state, his testimony was ruled inadmissible at the Fromme trial last November.

All of these actions — the letters, the phone calls, the death threats — failed to bring the Family back together.

By JOE HUGHES