Let me give you a quick rundown of Goldfield. In 1902 miners struck upon the richest site for gold in the United States. With a few years this place had a whopping 20,000 people, consisting of miners and the people who catered to them. A town sprung up, complete with courthouse, jail, hotel, post office, telephone office, high school, and the inevitable string of saloons. In those days, tens of thousands of dollars of gold ore were being dug up daily. With any boomtown though, the mines eventually went cold. Only a couple are still in operation today, and its nothing compared to its past. Today’s surface of Goldfield is a quaint tourist town relying heavily on its boomtown past to bring people into its rock shops, antique stores, general store, and again with the saloons.
Looking through the town cemetery is a good place to look into the past, of the people who lived and died here, leaving behind some rocks and sometimes an intriguing epitaph. There’s very little that could be classified as stately and elegant in the gravestones. Most graves are marked only with a white wooden cross, unmarked and unknown. Others are piles of stones or artfully broken bottles, or bare bits of earth with crudely etched headstones. But many of them tell snippets of stories. Instead of beloved father or grandmother, many list arresting details. For occupations you have miners, bootblacks, saloon owners, bartenders, laundresses, housewives, waitresses, section chiefs, messengers, printers, cobblers, gamblers. Many remembered their country of birth: of Ireland, Scotland, Finland, Germany, Austria, Russia, Canada. And the hard and violent past of the town can be found on the headstones. Mine explosions, gunshot wounds, pneumonia, diphtheria, cholera, eating too much library paste. Yes: eating library paste. I’m not making this up. What the heck is the story behind that.
Electrocution?
This has got Clint Eastwood western written all over it
Rock and broken bottle landscaping
I told you!
I drove around the mining district a little, which is pretty much as imagined. The landscape is pockmarked with tailings and shaft entrances, fenced off with barbed wire and warnings. In some places the old timbers stick out of the earth, further down the road are clusters of spider-framed winches and clapboard outbuildings. Sands are banded yellow and rust-red, rims of rock jut upward, Joshua trees and low shrubs dot the hills. A feral band of burros plod around, curiously pitching their long ears to and fro.
Wide shot of the minind district
An abandoned shaft with some kind of winch
A herd of wild burros (if you squint)
And
down in an out-of-the-way spot: the Car Forest. I sense this is what passes for
the Goldfield art gallery. Inexplicably, there is a collection of cars and
busses upended, buried nose- or trunk-first into the sand. There’s no apparent
pattern or purpose. Some artists have painted imaginative owls, angels,
presidents, and skulls, or simply scribed open-ended questions or nonsensical
phrases. In
town it seems more normal, but that’s a mistake. Every jewelry parlor, rock
shop, antique store, and trading post has about what you’d expect. Except,
without fail, each of these places has their resident flake. That’s not meant
to be negative. They’re just quirky and talkative and happy to see you and show
you around. These are the cool sites you should see. Try the place next store,
the guy there can tell some wild yarns about the old saloon. So-and-so own the
radio station down the way, you should pop in! I suppose if you’re going to
live here, you gotta embrace the friendly flakiness. But, even briefly, it
makes you wonder if there’s something in the water.
Anyway,
that’s a full afternoon of Goldfield. More anecdotes forthcoming.
