It was our second day on the road. The first had found a lone stone miner's-shack still intact, and the remains of rock-shrines to water and minerals at the flowing spring below the San Francisco Mine. We'd made camp at the remains of a quicksilver-still another cañon over - a lovely verdant creek-bed - and had discovered a small mine and an intact, albeit abandoned, miner's cabin there.
Athena had found the most beautiful spot to shave her legs that morning, and was ecstatic for hours, but by midday we were getting hot and tired. We had actually been searching for a mountain-pass road through the range, which after many tires we could only find traces of at best, and then we came through another pass, and down a steep grade, and there it was below us!
(The spots on the print are because some of the prints are still wet, and stuck to the glass on the scanner, and for speed's sake, the quality is poor too, but soon I'll make better scans and replace 'em, like when the prints have dried, 'K? ... sorry there) A town at once of perhaps 40 people, about 4 buildings still standing, and the remains of perhaps 6 or 7 more are laying about. The ghosts were still there, no doubt, though the floatation-plant, and most of the rest of the hardware, had been largely dismantled. Tired and hot, perhaps, but we were unstoppable now.
The plant remains were rich in tailings and processing minerals - in fact we could see the yellow sulfur deposits from upon the ridge beyond, long before we saw the site - and if you look closely you can see an arrastra-like circle, somewhat-still wood-enclosed, in the lower pond-area, lower right. Also, left of the plant, and another left and above, you can barely make out the ruins of several wooden structures.
One of them is this. The wood flooring and some of the roofing remain, but the sides have long-since disappeared. The site's characteristic rock-foundation is clear in this print. Athena and Sisyphus are actually inside the concrete shed in the washbed in the valley (left hand center) as we speak - exploring ... I suppose - and its roof is wooden and mostly still intact!
Above one of the highest roads in the townsite the rock foundations of more homes are visible. This one had some sort of plumbing, though outhouses seemed to be the norm here for privatized peeing: you never know ...
Another tip-house: now I'm quite sure that outhouse-tipping is as popular as that of cows. This one must have been tipped in the '40's or '50's as its been there a while. Other common items of civilization were left too: a wood stove; the usual bottles and cans; some of the hardware of mining.
High upon one of the hills above town were more stone foundations, some round, and despite some knowledge about how these sites functioned in their heyday, there is always some mystery to me, it seems, about what this or that could possibly have been used for.
These places have eyes. Sisyphus was fighting wasps and looking for free-gold in a visible vein nearby. Athena was looking for the buried bags of gold near each home. I was just looking, certainly in awe, but knew I was being watched even though the roads into here had no recent-prior tyre-tracks.
Some of the homes were almost completely gone, but unlike my contention elsewhere on this website, the damage was almost all natural here. Some wood was clearly missing, perhaps used for firewood, or as Sisyphus suggested, hauled to other concurrent sites to be used: he rolls rocks uphill in his spare time, so I guess hauling used lumber over mountains for reuse doesn't seem a very big deal to him. And true it is that lumber was a rarity in this town's day. It had to be imported from as far as a hundred miles away.
No bullet holes - no graffiti - no commercial/government cleanup - no real access. The collapsed headframe over the shaft in the background was not dismantled, the shaft was not fitted with a grate, and the rusted-out loader is totally enshrouded in overgrowth. A new optimism burns in me: perhaps the SUV/ATV crowd is lazier than I ever thought.
While a hundred years takes its toll, and some would consider this debris to be just pollution, these remains are living history to me, I'm amazed each time I find that they've faired even so well. The publicized sites of the same age are entirely gone - nary a trace - but rural Arizona is too big a place for even modern folks to have ruined it all for those of us who love to see how it really was back then.
.
This fine home is a good example: tongue-and-groove ceiling, 3-layer wood flooring, screened "windows," and in this one (post 1900) papered drywall interior walls. The pantry was a screened-in separate room built into the hillside, and the entire home, far more than just a "cabin," was originally perhaps 750 square feet large. This puppy, in so remote a region, in its day was rather a costly place.
We went on that day. The next we met a recluse living deep within the other side of the range. I think he found the travelers in the Rover so interesting as we found this site, and he basically begged us to stay, "take out your guitars and play," he said, seeing them in the back of the truck. But just as we approached this town, its not for keeps, just a passing fancy. The ghosts of such fancy can live in daydreams of people forever, not to mention those of old Greek icons, and are hence every bit as real as were the lives of those who once inhabited this lovely place.