Got another one........This is kinda fun.......just so I don't have to give away too much.
In 1958 I was 14 years old. Even though we had only a windmill with water tank, a wood stove, an outhouse and an old four room house with one wire coming off a main pole at the road, it was the best of times for a kid with a rifle and a fishing pole. My Dad had been a working coyboy his whole life and the country we were in let me indulge my love of ......screwing-off and ditching school.
We went out and got a deer any time we needed it. One day we drove up this old dirt road, about twenty miles from home. Four deer ran across the road and into the manzanita, out of site. We stopped and persued them.
The opening in the brush they disappeared in was a wide deer trail. We followed the tracks for about a hundred yards, then suddenly we were walking on what looked to be an old wagon trail. About a hundred yards farther it was again a deer trail. This continued, wagon trail-deer trail, alternately for about a mile. We had long since lost the deer to an offshoot trail but my Dad wanted to see where this old road went.
Pretty quickly we were in a canyon sand wash with a small stream of water running down it. AND everywhere you looked there was a tarantula under a rock outcrop (I don't do spiders well). We slogged around a curve in the wash and there on a big flat outcropping was a small cabin. Looking at it, we thought it was about to fall over. It was leaning about five inches out of plumb. On second look (after we entered it) it was clear the builder had started with an out-of-level foundation and just went up with it.
Anyhow....Inside, the one room had a huge pack-rat's nest in the middle of the floor. On the walls, on nails were hung various pieces of clothing. If you touched them they would crumble to dust and fall. There were various pots and stuff on a shelf built into the wall and on a home-made table was a plate and cup and a few utensils. Stuff on the plate was ridged up and hard as stone. There was what look to be a small bag that the rat had ripped up and aparently scattered the contents. A round tag on a drawstring showed it to be a tobacco sack. The big draw for my Dad was a....new condition, cook stove. Though there was no water piped to it, it was the type that has a water pipe running through the fire-box and supposed to go to a sink or tub for hot water.
We exited the cabin and walked toward the sand-wash. On the far side was a hole in the rock face. It was about five feet high and six feet wide. A stream of water was coming out of it and going down the wash before sinking into the sand, about a hundred yards away. We could see that rocks had fallen from the ceiling of the ....mine. Had to be a mine??? Dad did not want to enter it and I was glad.
We headed back to the truck and eventually did what I figured we would. Nothing would do my Dad but to take tools and dismantle that damn HEAVY stove and pack it out. It served well until we moved to a house with a 'gas' pipe running to it.
Here is the deal; Years later when I started thinking 'Lost Treasure', that old cabin haunted me. You have a cabin, in known gold country, that someone hauled lumber to build. Cooking utensils and a stove were hauled in. The nearest town the stove could have come from was forty miles away in the 1800's. A mine was dug by hand by one or two men. My thought is; sombody thought a lot of that hole in the wash wall.
It occured to me much later that we did not see a corral. Although the wash and flat canyon floor went on, behind the cabin, we didn't look. There had to be a corral of some sort. If we had found it, would we have also found an old wagon and a horse skeleton? If we had entered the mine, would we have found bones under a rock-fall? Did the miner go to town and get in a gunfight? It was definitely in the middle of Indian country. Did they get him? He certainly would not have just driven his wagon away and left everything as we found it. Everything would have been useful somewhere else.
This is a lot of 'food-for-thought' but I can't see it any other way. In this long interim I have found what I KNOW is the correct road and what I think is the canyon on a topo map. I have finally retired from a long life of providing for my family. My wife retires in a year. It is about time to do some looking around.
This is all true. Hope you enjoyed it.
Bud
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« Last Edit: April 03, 2009, 05:07:41 pm by Bud »
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