Major production funding for Wild Nevada is made possible by the Nevada Commission on Tourism, who encourages everyone to explore the Silver State's hidden treasures.

MUSIC >>Dave Santina: Hi, welcome to Wild Nevada.

I'm Dave Santina.

>>Chris Orr:And, I'm Chris Orr.

This trip we're going to be visiting some of the ghost towns along the Ghost Trail of White Pine Mining District.

We're beginning about 40 miles away in Eureka and it's a little cold this morning.

>>Chris: [Laughs] >>Dave: It's a lot cold this morning.

>>Dave: [Laughs] >>Chris: Well, once we get moving we'll warm up.

>>Dave: Yeah.

Now, this area we're gonna go see has been described as being the largest, the shortest, and the most intense mining boom in North American history, which means that a lot of stuff happened there in a brief period of time.

And, there are some great stories that come out of it.

>>Chris: There'll be a lot to see, so we should probably get going.

>>Dave: Yeah.

>>Chris: As we head out of Eureka, the brisk morning temperature's in the mid-30's.

To get to our destination, we drive 40 miles east on Highway 50 to the Illapah Reservoir turnoff.

Just off the highway we meet Fred Frampton and Tom Flanagan from the Forest Service.

>>Chris: Fred, tell us a little bit about what we're doin' this trip.

>>Fred Frampton: We're going to visit the White Pine Mining District, which was an historic mining boom that began in 1868 and lasted just a couple of years, and began a decline in 1870.

But, in that short period of time, roughly 10 towns developed, 3/4's of Nevada's population lived there and, um, it, it's really a time capsule of Nevada history sitting out in the middle of the Nevada desert.

>>Dave: Wow, that sounds interesting.

So, shall we just follow you guys?

>>Fred: You bet.

>>Dave: Okay.

>>Dave: The winding and very dusty road is graded and accessible to most any vehicle.

About 9 miles in we make a left turn up a small rise which brings us to the first evidence of Hamilton's existence.

>>Fred: Hamilton and the White Pine Mining District ended up an extremely big boom.

It, it started probably in 1868 and, uh, was booming through '68 and then by the middle of 1869 the mines were already on a decline.

So, this enormous population growth occurred in less than two years.

The Comstock mines in, in Virginia City were on a decline, the mines in Colorado were, were doing poorly, had been played out, so everybody was betting on, on the White Pine Mining District to be the next big, big mining boom in, in North America.

And, so thousands upon thousands of people were coming here.

>>Chris: So, there was a stage line that came into Hamilton?

>>Fred: There were nine stage lines into Hamilton daily in 1869.

It's a 115-mile trip from Elko, um, where people got off the, uh, Central Pacific Railroad, which had newly been constructed, and, uh, starting off at first it was about a 25, 25-hour trip for the 115 miles.

And, they kept whittling it down and this and that, and before you knew it 15-and-a-half, 16 hours, uh, was common.

The economy started crashing by 18, middle of 1869 and people were unemployed, had nothing to do and frequently were milling on the streets, so it wasn't long until they started betting on which stage would hit Hamilton first from Elko.

>>Chris: [Laughs] >>Fred: And, of course, the stage drivers had to be on the take or it didn't work.

>>Dave: Oh, okay.

>>Fred: So, the, the stage drivers are trying to get there first and they're racing, which is why they were doing it in 15-and-a-half hours and, and these are not the beautiful Concord coaches.

Many of them were in what's called a 'mud wagon' with big heavy, um, leather springs and rough springs.

>>Chris: [Laughs] >>Fred: And, by the time the passengers arrived in Hamilton, many of them had, were bruised and battered.

>>Chris: [Laughs] >>Fred: And, they had to climb off the stage and spent days recuperating in the Withington Hotel and other hotels before they could venture back out onto the streets.

>>Dave:[laughs] MUSIC >>Chris: The limited number of ruins and overwhelming silence seem to be in conflict with the idea of a bustling town full of restless miners and racing wagons.

It takes a little imagination to envision when now there's mainly only sagebrush left.

>>Fred: Here we are at, at, uh, the Wells Fargo office.

Very few of the buildings do we actually know what they were at this point.

I was able to get a Xerox photo of a 1915 photograph that still had Wells Fargo written across the top of the building and there was a woman out front, it was January of I believe 1914 or 15, and she was shoveling snow.

>>Dave: [Chuckles] >>Fred: It was way over her head... >>Dave: Huh.

>>Fred: ...but, you could see the building with Wells Fargo on top behind her.

My understanding is this is Governor Blaisdell's uh, mill.

Uh, the Governor abandoned the mansion, his mansion in, uh, Carson City, he moved here for about six months to watch over his enterprises and, uh, you know, obviously he didn't do very well.

>>Dave: [chuckles] >>Fred: All of the mines started to collapse, crash in the late 1869.

Uh, he was probably happy to see it burn down in the fire of 1873.

The remains of about six beehive, well, I guess we'd call 'em beehive ovens, uh, but they were part of the smelting where the charcoal would be superheated to get the, uh, ore hot enough that it would be extracted, melted down from, from the rock.

And, uh, there's six of these.

At one time, they were completely cone-shaped and closed in with a small hole in the, in the top.

And, uh, now they've, you know, collapsed down to what you see here now.

Well, the red brick building, as we've been told, is the remnants of the Withington Hotel... >>Dave: Ah.

>>Fred:... which was one of the largest and, and most grand hotels, um, in, in the entire Great Basin and maybe other than the West Coast.

>>Dave: Hmm.

>>Fred: And, it was built in 1869.

There are a couple of photographs of it.

And, it survived the big fire of 1873, and it survived the fires in 1880, '82.

And, uh, was still used as a hotel through the 1920's.

>>Dave: What happened to it?

>>Fred: Well, after people moved out it was carted away.

>>Chris: The drive up to Treasure City isn't long, but it is tough.

The road is for high clearance 4-wheel drive vehicles only.

The views on the way up become increasingly spectacular.

We're at nearly 9,000-feet, so we can see for miles in all directions.

>>Tom Flanagan: Well, now we've arrived here at Treasure City and we're at an elevation of just over 9,000-feet.

>>Dave: Is this, is this what it, would've been the main drag when we, uh, we came up on a coach?

>>Tom: Right.

Treasure City pretty much had one main road and, uh, as you were, be first coming into Treasure City from Hamilton, which was one of the main supply points for the White Pine Mining District, this is, this is pretty much where the visitors would've first arrived at.

And, here you can see some of the stonework that the, that's sort of the hallmark of most of our towns in the White Pine Mining District and most of these, most of these buildings were made out of the native rock by different stone masons.

Had a lot of different ethnic groups that specialized in stone masonry, Italians were, were one of the mainstays.

And, uh, as you can tell just from our trip up here that, uh, climbing so high in the mountain it's pretty hard to get building material up here.

>>Dave: Yeah.

>>Tom: So, as, although the, the stone itself is fairly esthetic, it's really your main building material that you have available because, as you can see, there's not a whole lot of, uh, tree growth around.

>>Chris: Do you have any idea what this structure here is?

>>Tom: This is one of the few buildings that we may know the function of and we think that that could possibly be the Wells Fargo building.

And, one of the things to notice, and this is a, a good example of when, what we see is not the finished product and, you know, you might say, well, geez, for a Wells Fargo building, you know, there's not, doesn't need to be a lot of windows or anything else in it and, uh, what we're missing here, because of the preservation, is there was probably a wood component to this that was maybe the second storey 'cause you can see how that stonework is flattened all around the top of that wall.

>>Dave: Oh, yeah.

>>Tom: You'd probably have a whole other storey made of wood and perhaps canvas.

>>Dave: Why would they make it out of wood or a different material than the first floor?

>>Tom: A lot of it, if they could get canvas and frame it with wood it would've been cheaper for 'em.

And, um, a lot of times these towns sort of kept gettin' cannibalized as they would go along, and we'll see that later on when we some of the other towns.

But, as some towns would burn or as a new strike would happen, they would pretty much tear down everything that they could and take it with 'em.

MUSIC >>Chris: It's tempting to walk off the road and explore, but we have to be careful.

There are so many old mine shafts around here that it would be easy to fall into one if you're not paying attention.

Some of them are marked, but not all.

So, you have to watch your step.

>>Chris: My understanding was that Treasure Hill was a real rich mining area.

So, richer than Hamilton, actually >>Tom: It was and mainly what you've got is that most of the other towns in the District were actually the service towns that provided the services for the mines at Treasure City.

So, one of the things that we have here and the reason that the strike was so quick, although it was really rich, most of what you had here was what they called 'horn silver' which actually was just like actual ingots of silver and you could just pick it right out of the rock.

And, the problem was it was, as opposed to maybe at the Comstock or places in Western Nevada where you actually had a vein of that silver that they kept mining, with this horn silver up here it was in these pockets.

And, once they scarfed out the pockets, there really wasn't any other place to go so, that's when they sorta went to a, uh, smelting process and started trying to refine the ore a little bit more, but with a two-year run up here it really, um, didn't pan out too much for 'em.

But, in the beginning there the strike was really rich, enormously rich.

>>Dave: The late morning has warmed up considerably, so it's easy to forget how tough life was for the people of Treasure City.

Some endured difficult winters with extremely low temperatures in little more than tents.

One story described an unfortunate man who spent much of a cold winter night in a Treasure City saloon getting "warm", if you know what I mean.

He then walked down the hill to Hamilton.

On his way down, nature called and, in answering that call, he contracted a nasty case of frostbite in a place better left unmentioned.

>>Dave: Whoa!

Wow, that's quite a little hole in the ground!

>>Chris: Oh, my gosh, look at that!

>>Tom: Yeah, you can imagine spending most of your work day down in there, huh?

>>Chris: Wow!

>>Dave: Oh, no, thank you.

>>Tom: This, this is one of the possibilities, a good possibility for the Hidden Treasure Mine, which would be our, the one that kinda started it all.

>>Chris: Yeah, I look at the size of this hole and it, it makes me ask how much silver was pulled out of this District?

>>Fred: They estimate about $3,000,000 in silver was recovered and they spent about $6,000,000 investing in taking that $3,000,000 out.

>>Dave: [laughs] Oh.

>>Fred: But, at one point, the big glory hole was 140' by 70' by 40 feet of solid silver and that was enough to bring miners and ten towns to this community.

>>Dave: Yeah.

>>Fred: To this mountaintop.

>>Dave: What a view!

>>Dave: Isn't this incredible?

>>Chris: Yeah.

>>Dave: That is gorgeous.

What are we lookin' at?

>>Fred: Okay, now we're, we're on the edge of Treasure City and we're looking down at the community of White Pine City, uh, where the Eberhardt Mine was and, uh, went down to, it had an aerial tram that was the world's largest aerial tram at the time and could carry 300 tons of ore per day from right here below us all the way down to the valley floor.

You know, there's one more amazing aspect, when you look at the 1869-1870 maps at Eberhardt, and you look up on this hill, you see absolutely no trees and no vegetation.

They had completely denuded the area for many, many miles around and all of that that you see here now has grown back since 1870.

>>Dave: That is incredible.

So, is this our path down here?

>>Fred: That's the road.

>>Dave: It doesn't look too bad.

Let's give it a shot, huh?

>>Chris: This road is even rougher than the one from Hamilton.

Those who choose to drive it should expect a few brush scratches on their vehicle.

On the way down, Fred stops to show us a log cabin which has been on this slope for many years.

>>Fred: You can see all the axe cuts, the original axe cuts in the logs.

>>Dave: A couple of miles further down the road we stop at the remains of Eberhardt.

>>Fred: Now, we're at Eberhardt.

>>Chris: How far are we from Treasure City?

>>Fred: Well, I think we drove about 3 miles the way the road runs, but probably only about a mile-and-a-half and we dropped about 1,500 feet in elevation.

>>Dave: That's it up there, right?

>>Fred: Right.

Way up on the mountain top.

>>Chris: What are we lookin' at down here?

>>Fred: Well, this is the Stanford Mill.

Uh, Leland Stanford and his brother developed this mill in 1870.

Um, it was a 60 stamp mill, a very, very large mill.

>>Dave: This is the Leland Stanford who we know of because of Stanford University?

>>Fred: Stanford University.

Leland Stanford was one of the Big Four in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and Stanford University is named after him, and he was governor of California.

>>Dave: So, we shouldn't feel too badly for him that his mill didn't, didn't work out too well.

>>Fred: I think he still did okay.

>>Dave: [chuckles] Alright.

>>Chris: Are there still remains for the International?

>>Fred: Yeah, let's go over and look.

>>Chris: Okay.

>>Dave: I don't see anything else, any, any, uh, foundations for houses or businesses.

Was this just mills here?

>>Fred: Well, if you look there's, there's a building foundation down there and there's another one over here.

Um, there were a lot of buildings next to the mill and there's a cemetery down and around the bend.

The International here had no purpose other than milling ore.

>>Dave: So, they did that.

Uh, Hamilton was what, a supply center?

>>Fred: Government, supply, um, theater, the arts, that sorta thing.

Treasure City, uh, were the mines, um, with a few banks and other things to go with it.

And, then Eberhardt and Sherman Town were the milling centers.

>>Dave: Okay.

>>Chris: So, which one was more successful?

Eberhardt or Sherman Town?

>>Fred: Uh, well, neither one are there today, so I guess neither one.

>>Chris: [chuckles] >>Dave: It's a tie!

[laughs] >>Fred: In actuality, when, when the International and the Stanford Mill were built, Sherman Town dwindled and within a year it was gone.

>>Dave: Put out of business.

>>Fred: Completely put out of business, so 2,000 people there in 1869, in early 1869, and within a year there were fewer than 200, and within a few years, I think about 25 people.

>>Dave: Wow!

>>Fred: So, it just collapsed.

>>Dave: Well, I hope there's enough left for us to see.

>>Fred: Oh, it'll be fun.

>>Chris: The sun is gettin low and it will soon be dark in the canyon, so we decide to return to Eureka for the night.

We'll be back early tomorrow to pick up where we left off.

>>Chris: Well, good morning.

Day Number Two of the trip and we're back in Eberhardt where we ended yesterday, and we're ready to continue down the Ghost Trail.

>>Dave: Yeah, we're about 2,000 vertical feet from Treasure City, and we're gonna head down the canyon a little bit more and meet up with Tom and Fred.

>>Chris: About a mile-and-a-half south of Eberhardt we turn right and head up a canyon toward Sherman Town.

Before we get there, however, Tom and Fred want to show us an important relic.

>>Tom: One of the really neat things about this building, too, is it's a stone structure like we've been seeing, but you've got some composite materials in there and you've got different kinds of stone.

And, you'll notice some of the windows, especially on the other side on the inside of the building, it's actually got some really nice sandstone blocks that are, are going around the windows.

>>Dave: Yeah.

>>Dave: We return the vehicles and follow the canyon for another mile or so into Sherman Town.

The sagebrush here has grown very high and it sure doesn't look like there was ever a community of thousands here.

But, there was.

The town was probably named for Edwin A. Sherman, a land developer who sold many lots here to anxious businessmen rushing to cash in on the excitement of the boom town.

Sherman was the one who cashed in, though.

>>Tom: This is Sherman Town.

And, Sherman Town, it's big boom years were from about 1868 to 1870.

Like most of the Mining District, it was pretty short lived and, and that's about all we have left now is some of the stone masonry buildings that we've been seeing in some of the other towns.

>>Dave: And, was there a lot here at the time?

Because there's not much now, obviously.

>>Tom: There was, and Sherman Town was one of the larger places as far as more of a community, a real town as opposed to, they were trying to do a lot of the service industry for the Treasure City mines ... >>Dave: Mm, hmm.

>>Tom:... as opposed to Treasure City where you had a lot of bachelor communities even though there was a few other people up there.

This was really more of what we would think of as like a community or town today.

>>Dave: Okay.

>>Tom: They were really trying to set it up.

>>Dave: What kind of things were here?

>>Tom: Um, they had all sorts of things from breweries and saloons, to, uh... >>Dave: Alright!

>>Tom:... to, uh, dressmaker shops and, and a newspaper, briefly, before it migrated around to some of the other towns.

>>Dave: [laughs] >>Chris: You mentioned a lot of different buildings and services and stores, what happened to them all?

Why did they go so quickly?

>>Tom: Well, the, you know, the mining district itself ran its course very quickly.

>>Chris: Right.

>>Tom: But, then also, you know, especially in a service town, if, these guys weren't actually the ones who were making the money, you know, they were more in the service industry, but the life here wasn't all that, as good as newspapers and the people trying to draw people here might have you believe.

>>Dave: Right.

>>Tom: You know, a lot of these stone structures, and what's really interesting about this one, there's a lot of features that we can look at on here, but a lot of these towns sorta give you the sense of permanence 'cause you have all these stone edifices and all this, all these things and then the newspapers, you know, all these businesses, 165 businesses in Sherman Town, the reality of life here was a lot harder and there's actually a book that's now out of print called "Martha and the Doctor" about a dentist, Dr.

Galley, and his wife Martha, and their two children, who lived here for a couple of years and a pretty miserable existence.

>>Dave: [laughs] >>Tom: This is one of the buildings that we think we may have an idea of, of what it was, and we think it could be the collier building, which would've housed a few different businesses like perhaps the Wells Fargo, maybe, uh, like a newsstand type of a deal.

There's a lot of architectural elements that we can, we can archeologically look at and you can learn a lot more about it and it's kind of a neat thing that when folks come to the District, not just to see a building, but if you look a little bit closer and think about it, you can try to, you know, reconstruct a little bit more of what you might be seeing.

>>Dave: What kind of stuff do you see here?

>>Tom: Well, one of the things that we can see is mason stone that's, that's actually creating the corner of a sidewalk.

And, one of the hardest things that we have to do with Sherman Town, since we don't have any pictures, it's really difficult to try to reconstruct the town.

But, what we can do is we have newspapers from the time frame and through newspaper advertisements a lot of times you can tell like, so and so's butcher shop is on the corner of this street and that intersection.

>>Dave: Okay.

>>Tom: And, by, this is the only place in this town that we know that we've got a definite intersection and we know that this is the corner of a street so if we can somehow hopefully in the future deduce what this building really is then by by default you can then say you know we know that the butcher shop is across from the collier building if indeed that's what this is then you can start reconstructing the whole street pattern and try figure out where the different businesses were and remap the town.

>>Dave: Wow.

>>Chris: So this can be the first part of a big puzzle for you.

>>Tom: Right >>Dave: A clear area provides us with a lesson in archaeology.

This collection of broken bottles for example it might look like the remnants of a weekend party, but on closer inspection it becomes apparent that this was a saloon.

The fragment of a plate found with a glass tells us that they served food at the saloon and the discovery of a particular English brick lets us imagine how the saloon may have been constructed.

>>Chris: This community's China Town is on the east side of the canyon.

It's another chance for us to learn a bit about the Chinese people who suffered unfair treatment despite being so important to the West's development.

>>Fred: We're standing in the middle of the Sherman Town Chinese community and one of the fascinating things about it is that they do not show up in the 1870 census and yet we know they were here and we have an entire block of Chinese habitation sites so basically the history of the Chinese in this camp is completely lost except for what we find archaeologically.

Um, what I'm holding here are the piece of a Chinese imported soy sauce jar container, a small liquor cup, it was very small, the piece of a opium serving tray and a fragment of an opium pipe that has a symbol in Chinese written on the bottom of it.

>>Tom: Well I think now we're gonna head up to Sherman town canyon to the north and go over and see Belmont Mill.

>>Dave: From Sherman Town we follow the canyon for about 5 miles, much of which is extremely rocky, easily the worst road we've traveled yet.

Some of it doesn't even look like a road.

Again high clearance and 4-wheel drive is the only way to make it.

>>Fred: Now we're at the the Belmont mill which was built about 1925 or 26 and is probably one of the finest examples of a mill and mine dating to that time period in the state of Nevada.

The the mill and the mines worked lead a little bit of silver and gold and probably kept going at least until World War II.

The, the United States had, had a big need for, for lead in the 1920s and 40s.

It was another upswing in mining here in the White Pine mining district, a small upswing and it didn't last very long.

>>Chris: Visiting historic sights like the ghost trail can be a fun way of exploring our past.

But, as Fred and Tom have reminded us on this trip, it is so important to leave them intact and in good condition.

That way, others will be able to visit and appreciate them.

>>Fred: This building is, is really teetering on the brink of coming down any, any time now.

Uh, there are beams holding it up that hold up the seven storey part up on top that are really just hanging there and we don't understand why this building is still standing.

>>Chris: [laughs] >>Fred: These three big wooden buckets of rocks are the ballast that are holding the tension on the two-mile aerial tramway that goes all the way up to the mines.

>>Dave: Wow.

Cool.

>>Fred: And, one of them has been jammed and is hanging sideways, uh, there's no telling how long this building is going to stay up.

[laughs] >>Fred: It's very unnerving.

We, we really recommend that people do not go into this building.

It's very unsafe.

>>Dave: Yeah.

>>Fred: They have to have a means of keeping the tension up.

As the temperature gets hot and cold, those cables start to sag and then, and then when it gets cold they get taut again.

Uh, so they had to keep a way to keep the, the tension on the cables that are, are running for a long distance up.

MUSIC >>Chris: We had a lot of fun visiting some of the ghost towns in White Pine County.

They each had their own unique personality and their own stories.

>>Dave: And, what I liked best about it was the fact that we had Fred and Tom with us because they really brought it to life.

And, in explaining what went on there and who lived there, I got a sense of the community and the way the worked together rather than just a bunch of empty buildings, and so joined it really well.

>>Chris: If you want to learn more about the Ghost Trail you can visit our website at knpb.org.

And, while you're there, send us an e-mail and tell us about some of your Nevada trips.

>>Dave: And, until our next Wild Nevada adventure, you get out there and enjoy this beautiful state for yourself.

MUSIC Major production funding for Wild Nevada is made possible by the Nevada Commission on Tourism, who encourages everyone to explore the Silver State's hidden treasures.