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    Ghost Towns: Lost Cities of the Old West
    Ghost Towns: Lost Cities of the Old West
    Ghost Towns: Lost Cities of the Old West
    Ebook99 pages34 minutes

    Ghost Towns: Lost Cities of the Old West

    By Clint Thomsen

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Tombstone, Bodie, St. Elmo, Silver City: these are some of the most famous of the Old West ghost towns and mining camps that dot America's landscape and provide hints to the country's history. But literally thousands more are scattered throughout the West, with some states boasting hundreds of abandoned boomtowns. Attracting thousands of visitors every year, many of these are protected by public and private parties alike, and visits are carefully regulated in order to preserve these valuable historical relics. Clint Thomsen describes various types of ghost town, explains their histories, and outlines ongoing research and archaeological study into decaying towns and mining camps.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJul 20, 2012
    ISBN9781782001072
    Ghost Towns: Lost Cities of the Old West

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    Reviews for Ghost Towns

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      Nice, simple introduction to 'ghost towns'. The photos are lovely, the text reveals some of the history, as well as contemporary, relevances.

    Book preview

    Ghost Towns - Clint Thomsen

    /www.ghosttowngallery.com)

    INTRODUCTION

    Here is only silence now gone the hopeful, thronging host that left these walls, in haste to go, left these streets to wind and ghosts.

    –Author unknown

    IT WAS LONG PAST SUNSET when my friend, John, pointed his four-wheel drive toward the San Francisco Mountains and rolled onto the rutted dirt road. After five hours on the road, we had finally reached the land of the Silver Horn Mine. Somewhere in the darkened hills ahead were the remains of old Frisco, the long-deserted commercial center of the San Francisco Mining District and southwestern Utah’s most notorious boomtown.

    My friend Tyler sat next to me while we analyzed our maps by flashlight. I combed through my packet of compiled information on Frisco, reading aloud for dramatic effect the comparisons of the town to the raucous Dodge City, Kansas, and the biblical city of Gomorrah. Frisco wouldn’t be our first ghost town, but it was the best-documented, most-storied town we had sought out thus far. We could hardly contain our excitement as John’s headlights finally caught the tips of several wooden crosses in the town’s cemetery.

    These modest posts marked many of the cemetery’s forty-two internments. Some graves were evidenced only by an oval ring of rocks—a hallmark of mythic western imagery. More prominent plots were neatly fenced with barely legible headstones. Further down the road were the crumbling relics of the town that by the mid-1880s supported a population of more than six thousand silver miners, gamblers, gunslingers, and other characters. We spent hours studying rock walls and tracing foundation lines before rolling out sleeping bags on the alkali ground and drifting into dreams of the past.

    Abandoned places have always occupied a special spot in the human psyche. From the religious to the recreational, our compulsion to commune with the past is deeply intrinsic.The concept of heritage colors most visited on earth. In the New World, few symbols are as iconic as the American ghost town.

    Street scene in Frisco, Utah, date unknown. (Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.)

    An estimated forty thousand ghost towns pepper the American landscape in various states of decay. A sampling of their names connotes a colorful, frank era: Toadsuck, Big Bug, Two Guns, Deadwood, and Tombstone. There was Virginia City, Nevada; Virginia City, Montana; and Virginia City, Arizona. Naturally, the words gold and silver found their way into thousands of boomtown names.

    S. N. Slaughter General Merchandise store with women standing on the raised plank porch, circa 1884. (Used by permission, Utah State Historical Society, all rights reserved.)

    Some ghost towns, like Frisco, are legendary. Most, like Cloud Chief, Oklahoma, are not. Many have all but returned to the dust—the inevitable victims of time, looting, or development. Some remain partially alive, existing in an odd, yet charming postbust limbo. A precious few have been preserved as open-air museums. Parts of others still stand in near pristine condition due to their extremely remote locations.

    Ghost towns span such a broad spectrum of time and geography that a comprehensive approach here would dilute the various types. For most people, the term ghost town evokes images of mining camps and wooden false-front buildings typical of the American West. Thus, this book focuses on the ghost towns of the western United States, with particular emphasis on those with roots in the Old West era.

    What exactly is a ghost town? How did they rise? Why did they fall? What can their remains tell us about the people that once called them home? And how can they be experienced today?

    Many publications on the topic fit one of two molds: art-driven photo books and statistic-heavy travel guides. The former inspires visually but tends to be short on information. The latter is sufficiently informative, but is naturally date-sensitive. Over time, sites are

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