He was a naval officer, military general, explorer, frontiersman, Indian affairs superintendent, California rancher, diplomat, and friend of Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill Cody and Ulysses S. Grant.

As California's first Superintendent of Indian Affairs, Beale helped charter a humanitarian policy towards Native Americans in the 1850s.

[1] "Beale successfully pursued a personal El Dorado of adventure, status, and wealth," wrote Gerald Thompson.

Ned was a student at Georgetown University when, at the solicitation of his widowed mother, President Andrew Jackson appointed him to the Philadelphia Naval School.

In 1845, he was assigned to the squadron of Captain Robert F. Stockton, a wealthy New Jersey businessman and inventor as well as a career naval officer, who was an intimate of presidents.

Back in Washington, D.C., in 1846, Beale reported his findings to President James Polk that the British had been making warlike preparations.

Beale and a small body of men under Lt. Archibald Gillespie joined General Stephen W. Kearny's column just before the Battle of San Pasqual on December 6, 1846.

After leaving the Navy, Beale returned to California as a manager for William Henry Aspinwall and Commodore Robert F. Stockton, who had acquired large properties there.

The survey also incorporated an experiment for the Army using camels, first proposed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis four years earlier.

Nevertheless, the wagon road Beale built became a popular immigrant trail during the 1860s and 1870s, and it was this survey which marked out for the first time a practicable highway along the 35th parallel that has been used from that day to this.

It is the most level, our wagons only double-teaming once in the entire distance, and that at a short hill, and over a surface heretofore unbroken by wheels or trail on any kind.

"[2] "In opening this highway," wrote Gerald Thompson, "Beale joined the small group of explorers who left an enduring mark on the American West during the nineteenth century.

The U.S. government rented Decatur House for its Secretaries of State, Henry Clay, Martin Van Buren and Judah P. Benjamin.

"[1] Decatur House also became the unofficial meeting place for the Republican Stalwarts, and Ulysses S. Grant frequently stayed there.

His lavish entertaining, tales of the American West, command of foreign languages, and warm personality made Beale and his wife popular figures in the Viennese court.

During his tenure, Beale sent frequent dispatches to the State Department on the war between Turkey and Serbia and the Eastern Question.

In his retirement, Beale lived at Decatur House in Washington, D.C., with yearly visits to Tejon Ranch and more frequent visits to his horse farm at Ash Hill in Hyattsville, Maryland, northeast of Washington, D.C. At Ash Hill he entertained friends such as Grant, who kept two Arabian horses stabled there, President Grover Cleveland and Buffalo Bill Cody.

In the former, Beale is instructed by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, played by Harry Fleer, to conduct an experiment with the use of camels in the deserts of the American Southwest.

In the second episode, Beale attempts to be the first to return East with a sample of newly discovered California gold, but he must escape Mexican bandits to do so.

[8] Another actor, Charles Bateman, played Beale in another Death Valley Days episode, "Stubborn Mule Hill," which aired in 1963.