Hamilton Has Now About One Hundred Inhabitants, Most Of
Whom Are Merely Waiting In Dreary Inaction For Something To Turn Up.
Treasure Hill has about half as many, Shermantown one family, and
Swansea none, while on the other hand the graveyards are far too full.
In one canyon of the Toyabe range, near Austin, I found no less than
five dead towns without a single inhabitant. The streets and blocks
of "real estate" graded on the hillsides are rapidly falling back into
the wilderness. Sagebrushes are growing up around the forges of the
blacksmith shops, and lizards bask on the crumbling walls.
While traveling southward from Austin down Big Smoky Valley, I noticed
a remarkably tall and imposing column, rising like a lone pine out of
the sagebrush on the edge of a dry gulch. This proved to be a
smokestack of solid masonry. It seemed strangely out of place in the
desert, as if it had been transported entire from the heart of some
noisy manufacturing town and left here by mistake. I learned
afterwards that it belonged to a set of furnaces that were build by a
New York company to smelt ore that never was found. The tools of the
workmen are still lying in place beside the furnaces, as if dropped in
some sudden Indian or earthquake panic and never afterwards handled.
These imposing ruins, together with the desolate town, lying a quarter
of a mile to the northward, present a most vivid picture of wasted
effort. Coyotes now wander unmolested through the brushy streets, and
of all the busy throng that so lavishly spent their time and money
here only one man remains - a lone bachelor with one suspender.
Mining discoveries and progress, retrogression and decay, seem to have
been crowded more closely against each other here than on any other
portion of the globe. Some one of the band of adventurous prospectors
who came from the exhausted placers of California would discover some
rich ore - how much or little mattered not at first. These specimens
fell among excited seekers after wealth like sparks in gunpowder, and
in a few days the wilderness was disturbed with the noisy clang of
miners and builders. A little town would then spring up, and before
anything like a careful survey of any particular lode would be made, a
company would be formed, and expensive mills built. Then, after all
the machinery was ready for the ore, perhaps little, or none at all,
was to be found. Meanwhile another discovery was reported, and the
young town was abandoned as completely as a camp made for a single
night; and so on, until some really valuable lode was found, such as
those of Eureka, Austin, Virginia, etc., which formed the substantial
groundwork for a thousand other excitements.
Passing through the dead town of Schellbourne last month, I asked one
of the few lingering inhabitants why the town was built. "For the
mines," he replied. "And where are the mines?" "On the mountains
back here." "And why were they abandoned?" I asked.
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