Of Mules and Men
By Liz Lank
In the eastern Sierra Nevada, Highway 395 runs through Mono and Inyo Counties, where one can turn off and encounter various ghost towns. There are true ghost towns of a century or more ago, those of more recent abandonment, and desolate or forbidding places that can feel like ghost towns. We begin down at Death Valley National Park, then continue northward along 395.
Death Valley
It is the hottest of places. It is the lowest of places. Life-defyingly dry, with salt-caked floors – so why would people have gone there? By mistake largely. Wannabe 49ers looking for a shortcut to the gold fields west of the Sierra. Many of them foreign to this fairly new country, they shared what was even then becoming two of our national driving forces: greed and speed.
No shade or potable water. Starvation, dehydration and heatstroke killed many of them. The place was named by survivors glad to have gotten out. An oven-heat that could hit 120 degrees, even hotter at 282 feet below sea level, at the salt flats called Badwater. And who knows how many mules perished there. Today wherever one sees old pictures of Death Valley, there are the mules, those taken-for-granted creatures that made it possible to attempt such journeys. And later on, for those who stayed to chase other treasures, the 20-mule teams were the engine of the drayage system that was lifeblood to the settlements that grew up with the mining booms of the Valley – gold, silver, copper and lead. The most profitable and longest-lasting of the mining activities came from the Borax deposits. Ultimately, the Valley saw the cycle of instant wealth, with instant towns become ghost towns soon enough.
Why would people go to Death Valley now? Blankets of wild flowers in spring, geology and topography as from another planet to explore, and sand dunes. Scotty’s Castle, Furnace Creek and Stovepipe Wells provide oases from the heat and dust. And it is a place where people come to test themselves – running, bicycling, trekking – but with the advantages of SUVs , cell phones and bottled water.
Skidoo
At the end of a winding 13 miles of unpaved, narrow road on Tucki Mountain (in the Panamint Range, along the west side of the Valley) is a ghost town. Originally named 23 Skidoo - after a popular slang of the time that spawned the song/dance of that name – it was shortened to Skidoo due to the Post Office’s refusal to allow numbers as town names! The name aptly describes what happened to any structures that might still have been standing. As a Park Ranger at Bodie remarked later, a lot of ghost towns had a way of ‘walking away’ when left unattended. There was “no there there,” anymore! Instead, after our goat-trail drive, there was a long placard with a panoramic photo of the town that used to surround the spot where this was installed. In the stillness, we tried to imagine the once-thriving gold-mining town of 700 inhabitants between 1906 and 1917.
Except for a sporadic breeze that sounded amplified, there was true stillness. A hike around the surrounding hills did reveal signs of previous habitation: a couple of colorfully-rusted mine structures hanging off the hillside; the front end of a rusted 30’s-era car nestled in the sage; and among numerous, spaced piles, hundreds of tin cans and larger oil or fuel containers. These over time had all rusted to the same color and potato chip thinness, but surprisingly could still reflect sunlight. So much for the notion that folks in the ‘olden days’ took better care of their environment.
After all the bones have bleached and blown away
And all the buildings decayed or ‘walked away,’
What’s left are mountains of rusted cans and broken bottles -
Our calling cards to the land we took from.
Manzanar
Out of the Valley, heading north on 395 is a more recent ghost town, which was until a few years ago largely ignored, overgrown with vegetation and still called a ‘relocation center.’ Now, as the Manzanar National Historic Site with some restorations, there would be more to experience than the self-drive ‘tour’ available previously. “Apple orchard” (in Spanish) was a lush area in the Owens Valley, until the late 1920s when Los Angeles took the water rights to the whole area and it dried up and tried to blow away. The Owens Valley Paiute Indians and other inhabitants of the area were forced to move on, and the increasingly barren acreage sat fairly abandoned until soon after Pearl Harbor. At that time, the US Government turned Manzanar into one of its forced-relocation centers, for 10,000 of our Japanese American citizens. Ironically, it is located just down the road from a town called Independence. Manzanar is our ghost town of shame.
Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
The oldest known trees in the world rise like rusty skeletons out of the dolomite whiteness above timberline on the White Mountains. Depending on the time of day and light, it can feel like a ghost town, albeit of living trees, some alive only by the slimmest strip. It is a place where trees named the Patriarch Tree and Methuselah thrive in an uninviting soil. The very alkaline Dolomite soil is lower-nutrient, higher-moisture, which means slow growth and denser wood that is resistant to insects, disease and rot.
The twisted trunks with beautiful grain patterns visible are marvelous to see. And, as it is expected that elders have wisdom to impart, these ancients have helped to further tree-ring research, with its radiocarbon-dating process, by enabling a needed re-calibration for more accurate dating of other ancient structures.
Bodie
Bodie is a couple of amazing things: there IS a there there, still; and it’s not a Disneyfied old mining town, a la Virginia City, thanks to the vigilance of locals and the California State Parks policy of maintenance in ‘arrested decay.’ Bodie is considered the best preserved ghost town in the state, and in its day, was a gold mining center. Its many extant wooden buildings, though only about 5% of the number in its hey-day, are the same rust color as all those tin cans at Skidoo and some of the ancient Bristlecones. At one time – for about two years around 1880 – Bodie’s population was second only to San Francisco’s in the West, and Bodie had the second largest Chinatown. As was typical of an isolated and largely-male frontier culture, there were an incredible number of saloons, and a red-light district at the ‘lower end’ of town – where Chinatown was also relegated. In its prime, Bodie had a 10,000 population, about 65 saloons, two churches, several newspapers, fine dining and elegant accommodations at its hotels for those who’d struck it rich, and a busy and growing cemetery.
Bodie was an island in the mountains – everything had to be imported. As with the settlements in Death Valley, mule teams played an essential role, and water had to be piped in from miles away. For Bodie, it was piped down from a higher peak to the water tower above town, with gravity providing the ‘hauling.’ Next to water, wood was probably the single most important product, needed not only for building, but for fuel in the long, frigid winters. At an altitude of 8,400 feet and an exposed plateau, the town was cold at nights and extremely cold and windy during the winters.
Bodie was a raucous and resourceful town once. Today it is an on-location museum and proof that remnants of our past can be preserved in their authenticity, while still operating as a visitor attraction. Death Valley and the Bristlecones were already there in their uniqueness, and remain, despite human encroachments. Skidoo was built, lived a while, then left behind to disappear, with only its trash remaining. Manzanar was a once-fruitful place with its life taken away by greed for water, later to become the place where so many lost their freedoms. These places give us a chance to reflect on the dreams, fortitude and fears of past times – and to wonder what has changed.
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Elizabeth Lank is an Oakland, CA-based writer.
Photograph appears courtesy and copyright of the author.
This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Non-Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
