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Do you like to do something different when you travel? I have a suggestion. If you fly THAI to Los Angeles then sign up for a Royal Orchid Holidays tour. You will have some free time and can rent a car (or have ROH make the arrangements), get behind the driver’s wheel and head out to a ghost town. I mean a real—I almost said alive—honest-to-goodness ghost town.
But I should qualify myself when I say ghost town. That doesn’t mean there are ghosts there, although there might be. The implication is that a ghost town is a town that, for some reason or another, has been abandoned and doesn’t have people living in it.
Such ghost towns in America do exist, and these are not a few isolated cases but literally hundreds upon hundreds of them, from the far north in Montana down through Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and as far south as the Baja Peninsula in Mexico. They are as much of the American west as cowboy and Indians, not to forget the Gold Rush.
Although ghosts towns are dead towns, they do have something to tell us. Here one can discover the essence of the American character, what it was that molded these first Americans who came west, leaving law and order behind to embark on a desperate quest against unbelievable obstacles.
Visiting these western ghosts towns does leaves a lot to the imagination, but with a little background provided in guidebooks and government office brochures, self-guided tours can be rewarding. You find that aside from wooden dilapidated frame buildings, with swinging doors sagging on hinges and sage brush that blows down the empty streets, there is a collection of anecdotes, tales and stories that keeps these places alive.
A point to remember is that not all Gold Rush communities have become ghost towns. Many towns that have survived the gold rush have stayed alive and may even be well populated. In fact, they often contain more old structures than most ghost towns. Occupied for generation upon generation, they were not allowed to fall into disrepair. These buildings, however, were preserved with an eye to the practical rather than the picturesque.
Those looking for the spirit of the Wild West will want to seek the lonely ruins of towns that have died years ago. These you find on narrow and often dirt roads heading away major highways. All you need is the spirit of adventure and a good map. The fun is searching out and finding your own town. The best areas are along the California/Nevada border, only a short drive from LA.
Ghosts tows are really the mortal remains of western mining camps. Gold (and in some cases silver) is what brought people to the deserts and high Sierras. The oldest remaining structures in these towns, dead or alive, date from the middle and late 1850s at the earliest.
A few of these mining camps stand out beyond all others: In the Death Valley area alone are Panamint, Ballarat, Deadwood, Tombstone, and Bodie, to name but a few. Books have been written about them, and movies made, and they have become part of the American West legend.
Tales of the Wild West begin in places like the Panamint. How's this for a beginning? In January, 1873, three prospectors poking through the canyons of the Mojave Desert struck silver in the Panamint Range, at Surprise Canyon along the western wall of Death Valley. Rock samples showed astounding values ranging up to $3000 per ton.
The stampede to Panamint was on. Through the summer and fall of 1874 desert roads were choked with silver seekers bound for the valley. By November no less than seven stages a week were carrying the crowds into Panamint from San Francisco and Los Angeles.
In the bottom of Surprise Canyon a rude town was rising from the handiest materials—stone shanties and log cabins. The sides of the canyon were dotted with the cabins, tents and caves of the miners, but were too steep to permit wheeled traffic. The mule teams, ox trains and stages kept to the main street.
Panamint was just about as far from law and order as a California town could get, and so were her citizens. Among them was Ned Reddy, proprietor of the Independent Saloon, who had already killed two men in Owens Valley, supposedly in self-defense. Owner of the Oriental Saloon was Dave Neagle, who had arrived after a shooting scrape in Pioche, Nevada.
But Panamint's quickest gunman was Jim Bruce, professional gambler. The claim that Panamint's Boot Hill was his private cemetery could have some truth to it. The story told is that one of his victims who "bit the dust" had burst in on him while he was in the boudoir of one of the ladies of the town, and was promptly chastened with lead.
Two notorious Nevada stage robbers, John Small and John McDonald, found Panamint to their liking. They rode in and out of Panamint unhampered by the law. On one occasion they journeyed to Nevada, robbed the Eureka stage and wounded the messenger, then returned to their Panamint hideout with the loot. The whole town celebrated.
Then almost overnight the Panamint mines started running out of ore. Nights in Panamint's roaring saloons suddenly went still. Town lots that had sold as high as $1000 could not be given away. By May, 1877, the last company mines were closed and Panamint was a dead camp.
Little of Panamint remains and the only reminder of that rambunctious past are some stone walls, a frame house, the brick mill, and a bucket tramway which furnished the town ore from a leading mine. The rest is left to your imagination.
On the road to Panamint are more towns--Deadwood, Tombstone and Ballarat. Ballarat dates from the 1890s and was founded when gold was discovered in the canyons south of Panamint. Named for the famed Australian gold centre, this camp served for several decades as a hell-roaring oasis for Mojave Desert prospectors. Today it is marked by a some crumbling adobe walls and little else.
A ghost town that I like, also near Death Valley, is Bodie. It's exactly what you expect a ghost town to be. I stood in the shadow of the town, with not a soul in sights for miles, and I could almost hear the voices of the past calling out. It was especially eerie to sit with a flickering gas lantern overhead and read the history of wild, untamed Bodie.
No doubt about it, Bodie was a bad town. It was gloriously rich; it was remote; and its boom in the late '70s was timed to draw a horde of adventurers from Virginia City and other fading Nevada camps. This combination gave meaning to the standard Western phrase, "Bad man from Bodie"
One arrival of 1879 noted six fatal shooting scrapes during his first week in town. The daily Bodie Standard of September 5, 1880, mentioned three shootings and two stage holdups—apparently an ordinary day's work.
And according to legend, Bodie owes its discovery to a wounded rabbit and its name to a sign painter's mistake. In 1858 Waterman "Bill" Body, an adventurous Dutchman crossed the Sierras and while riding past the site which was to become Bodie, he shot and wounded a rabbit. In trying to dig it out of a hole, he discovered something else—gold.
Body never lived to reap the rewards, for he died in a snowstorm while trying to reach his cabin a few months later. And it was a sign painter who is said to have changed Body's name in putting up the sign "Bodie Public Stables". At any rate, it has been Bodie since the early 1860s.
Bodie slumbered during the Civil War and in 1864 one visitor found less than twenty frame and adobe houses in town. Then in the middle1970s two prospectors paid $950 for what everyone thought was a worthless claim, the Standard Mine. They barely grubbed out an existence until another accident gave Bodie its tumultuous rebirth. A sudden cave-in exposed a fabulous vein of rich ore. The pair took out $37,000 in gold and silver before they sold the mine in1876 for $65,000.
By the fall of 1877, Bodie had over a hundred buildings with their classical false fronts and wooden awnings, and some three thousand people living within the town. Through her bustling streets moved horsemen and pack burros; twenty-mule freight wagons from as far the Mojave rail head; and daily and weekly stagecoaches from Carson City, Sonora, Mammoth City and Owens Valley.
In its heyday between 1878 and 1881, Bodie ran full blast round the clock, both above and below ground. Underneath, in the shafts of the Standard Mine, and nearly thirty other mines, some $25,000,000 was recovered in gold and silver ore. Above ground, fortunes were passed across the bars and gaming tables in the dozen or so saloons which graced the main street. At its height, Bodie boasted two banks, three breweries, half-a-dozen hotels, a sizable red light district, four daily newspapers, a well-populated Boot Hill, a volunteer fire brigade, and what was claimed as the West's biggest Chinatown after San Francisco's.
By 1882 Bodie's heyday had passed; the mines were drying up. Bodie's mining stocks crashed and the town faded fast. Today it is the best preserved wooden ghost town in the West. Enough buildings remain, including the Miners Union Hall, the Protestant Church, the Fire House, and several former saloons, to make Bodie well worth the trip.
The State Division of Beaches and Parks now maintains the town site as a State Historical Monument, and rangers are available to answer questions about ghost towns. I did meet one old timer who had a bit of information to pass on to me. “You know,” he said, “people living in Bodie can’ be buried there”.
“Why not?” I asked.
He was chewing tobacco and stopped to spit in the dust. “Cause they’re still alive ‘an ain’t dead yet,” he said.
That’s Bodie. Just don't try to find a hotel room in town. It's a ghost town, remember!
Next week I would like to take readers to a couple small, unknown museums in and around Bangkok.
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The author and his wife pose for a photo
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