It’s The Pitts: Ghost Towns of Tomorrow
As a kid, my grandparents took my brother and I fishing every summer, and the days we didn’t fish were reserved for going to ghost towns.
Even though it was considered bad luck to steal anything from a ghost town, my grandparents had a five-gallon bucket full of square nails filched from ghost towns all over the West. They had a rotten beam of termite-infested wood liberated from a county courthouse built in the wrong county and a wide assortment of bottles which were usually found in the ground below an outhouse. They even had a red light taken from what had once been a whorehouse.
I inherited these treasures and attribute all of the bad luck I’ve had in my life to them being in my possession.
Ghost towns can be found all over the West. They were usually created when mining towns went bust and the population moved on to the next boomtown. They were also created when a town sprang up in anticipation of the railroad coming through town, but when another town won the rails because they paid off the railroad, the tracks were rerouted.
This explains why the path our railroad tracks take are often crooked – in more ways than one.
I’ve always been mystified by the creativity of the early western settlers who gave their towns monikers like Turkey Buzzard, Bummerville, Timbuctoo, Hangtown, Jackass Flat, Rough and Ready, Dutch Flat, Liar’s Flat, Virgin Flat and Sucker Flat.
Wouldn’t you like to know the story behind places like Punch Me Tight, You Be Damed, Shirtail, Sore Finger, Four Ministers, Chicken Thief Flat, One Horse Town, Cut Throat, Dogtown, Milk Punch Bar and Henpeck City?
Some ghost towns have been reborn as tourist traps like Tombstone, Ariz., where I have actually stood unarmed in the OK Corral.
This silver mining town that went bust had a rebirth as a tourist trap through “commercialized restoration.”
Calico, Calif. is another ghost town that rose from the ashes, but my favorite is Virginia City, Nev., where Mark Twain got his start as a writer on the Territorial Enterprise where he lasted two years before he was run out of town.
Today in Virginia City, Nev., one can still get a drink at the Bucket of Blood Saloon, visit the Opera House which featured some of the world’s greatest entertainers and stare in amazement at the restored mansions of the silver barons who got filthy rich on the Comstock Lode.
Some of these 19th century millionaires ended up buried amongst their fellow paupers on Boot Hill when the mining stock certificates they traded in ended up only being good for toilet paper.
I wonder what the ghost towns of our generation will be as I watch agricultural-based small towns dry up and small farmers edged out by huge corporations and multi-billionaires like Bill Gates, the largest owner of farmland in the country.
In some Midwestern towns, one can see empty homes of farmers who have gone broke through no fault of their own. They worked so hard to build up an international market for their soybeans and other foodstuffs, only to have it pulled out from under them.
And the ghost towns of the future will surely include the timber towns in the great Northwest which are slowly dying all because of an owl.
I notice nuclear power is now being praised as “clean and environmentally-friendly energy” and I wonder how many ghost towns will be created when the meltdowns come.
Will they be giving tours of these ghost towns 50 years from now like they are now doing at Chernobyl?
I think the greatest number of future ghost towns will be created because of water or lack thereof.
One day, will tourists be digging for old poker chips and dice in Las Vegas when they turn on the golden tap at the Mirage and nothing comes out of the faucet?
When California finishes the job of driving out its computer barons with their “billionaire taxes,” will tourists be paying to visit their empty mansions some day?
Will farmers who are drilling over 1,000 feet deep to reach water in receding aquifers move on to the next boomtown just like the miners who left when the gold and silver dried up?
