My sons and I chose
the weekend of the summer solstice for our trip to the ghost town
of Aurora, Nevada, in the high desert east of the Sierra Mountains.
We had long talked of making the pilgrimage, and perfect weather
favored our venture. Late June in California offers the traveler
an ideal mix of long days, mild temperatures, and lush vegetation
still tinged with the green of winter rains.
We set out on a Friday
evening, glad to leave the congested Bay Area behind as we drove
through the small towns of the Sacramento valley farmland. The
setting sun cast a golden tone over the landscape, making the
foothills that lay before us glow.
The purpose of our
trip was both historical and personal. Throughout my childhood
I had heard stories about an ancestor, Nathaniel Gebhart, from
my mother's maternal line who came to California during the Gold
Rush, leaving wife and five children in Ottumwa, Iowa. From my
mother's view, all that remained of his endeavor were three gold
spoons and the enmity of her forebears, all women who lived their
entire lives in Iowa. They
couldn't forgive a quest for adventure and fortune above duty
to family.
Among his male descendants,
Nathaniel enjoyed a more favorable reputation. His youngest son
and grandson admired the prospector's
adventuresome spirit and in 1882 attempted to recover his silver
mine and the money they believed had been owed to him. Instead
of gold spoons, they had inherited letters and journals written
during the ten years Nathaniel prospected in the west. The daughter
of the youngest son, born after the adventurer's only visit back
to his wife in Iowa, grew up thinking him a hero and wrote a history
of his life after visiting Aurora in 1962. Her account was the
only guide we had as we began our own search.
Nathaniel Gebhart left
by wagon train to join the gold rush in April of 1852. First he
searched for gold around Placerville, California, but that area
had become over crowded and rumor suggested that the gold was
already mined out. He heard talk of larger gold and silver lodes
to the east. By 1860, he decided to move on to Bodie and Aurora,
nascent boomtowns along the California and Nevada border. Near
Aurora, he staked a claim on a mine in a vein of silver believed
to be fabulously rich. Claim jumpers shot him in the stomach as
he defended his mine, stubbornly refusing to be bullied by them.
He lingered for a few days before dying around April 15, 1862,
at the age of fifty-two.
We could only imagine
the ordeal of his journey on foot with a pack mule. Our comparable
trip took about five hours in the insulated comfort of a four-wheel
drive vehicle but we felt anticipation as the dark road crested
the Sierras, and we began the long, winding descent into Bridgeport,
CA. We arrived around midnight, tired but assured that the adventure
we'd talked about lay just ahead.
Saturday morning dawned
sunny, cool, but with a promise of warmth. After breakfast we
stopped to buy water, food, and ice for our cooler. Signs at the
road entrance to Bodie warned that no grocery stores and gas stations
could be found in the interior. We went back to fill the car with
gas before heading into the sagebrush-covered hills. The last
three miles of the road are unpaved to give tourists an idea of
how formidable the frontier trek used to be.
The town of Bodie lies
three miles from the Nevada border, a ghost town preserved in
a fragile state of decay by the State of California. Nothing has
been done to restore the town to its 1880s prime, but the walls
of the five percent of buildings which are still standing have
been discreetly shored up and their windows and roofs reinforced
against the severe high desert weather. We went to Bodie first
because both Nathaniel and his granddaughter took that route to
reach Aurora. The park rangers did not encourage us to continue.
One said the road was nearly impassable and another said she'd
never been able to find Aurora.
Bodie gave us a good
idea what Nathaniel saw as he passed through town. The people
who had the fortitude to settle there faced isolation from civilization
in the midst of frenzied activity, below zero winters and blistering
hot summers, the joy of sudden wealth and the sorrow of early
death. It was a tough life for a hardy but vulnerable people.
We completed our tour at a museum housed in the old miners' union
hall. In a corner of the museum was a small bookstore featuring
books about frontier life. I noticed one about Mark Twain's experiences
as a prospector but decided not to take the time to look at it.
We were about to leave when something drew me back to that book,
"Mark Twain, His Adventures at Aurora and Mono Lake" by George
Williams III. I picked it up and started to skim through the pages.
Almost immediately
my eye caught the sentence, "Man named Gebhart was shot here yesterday
trying to defend a claim on Last Chance Hill. Expect he will die."
Twain had dreams of striking it rich too, and he had come to Aurora
in April of 1862. He wrote frequent letters to his brother, Orion,
whose money supported Twain's venture. I could hardly believe
the coincidence of Mark Twain arriving in Aurora just in time
to write about my ancestor's sad fate and my chance discovery
of that fact over a century later.
Williams' book served
us in a more practical way, because it described clearly how to
find Aurora and included both old and present day pictures of
the site. We left Bodie with increased enthusiasm for our quest
and seventeen miles left to travel.
The Bodie Canyon road
resembles a dried up creek bed strewn with boulders and scarred
by deep ruts. We left behind all signs of modern day as we made
our way through the dry and barren canyon. Our book identified
a crumbling brick structure we passed as the old toll station
that marked the border between California and Nevada. Nearby we
stopped in a grove of quaking aspens and made lunch from the provisions
in our cooler. A gentle breeze stirred the aspen leaves, the only
sound except for the tapping of a woodpecker further up the canyon
slope.
Once out of the canyon
we turned onto a graded dirt road that skirted the hills and looked
out onto a wide plain. The Williams book said we had only four
miles to go. We passed the remains of a mill pictured in the book,
and I wondered if the bricks of the mill's foundation had been
made in Nathaniel's kiln. Arriving in Aurora in 1860, the year
the town began, he knew that bricks would be needed for the new
buildings and so he started a kiln. This kiln provided income
for him while he searched for more elusive wealth. In the late
1940s, scavengers carried off the bricks from the deserted buildings
in Aurora and sold them to profit from the postwar building boom
and the public's passion for old brick.
The road narrowed and
wound deeper into the hills, up and down the steep slopes. On
our right we saw a sign pointing to the Aurora cemetery but decided
to make that stop on the way out. We kept our eyes on the landscape
ahead of us, alert for clues that would lead us in our search.
The road opened to a valley surrounded by rolling hills, dense
with sagebrush. Below us lay the remains of Aurora. The valley
has reverted almost completely to the wilderness those first settlers
must have seen and we understood why they called their little
town "City of the Dawn."
Aurora has deteriorated
far beyond Bodie's managed state of decay. Scattered piles of
wood where buildings had stood and a single concrete wall, the
last remnant of the Esmeralda Hotel, are all that remain. What
hasn't been looted, vandalized, or rotted away will be gone in
a few more years. Over
six thousand people once lived in Aurora, and now only crumbling
concrete and aging wood mark their efforts.
We turned away without
going down into the town. Better not to tread on the remnants
of that lost dream. We got back into the car and took the cemetery
trail into a forest of pine nut trees. The processions of mourners
bearing coffins up the steep road from Aurora to that quiet place
must have been numerous and frequent.
The cemetery has survived
in better condition than the town and recent attempts to restore
it made our walk easier among the headstones of Aurora's former
inhabitants. Nathaniel's granddaughter thought she found his grave,
marked by a faded wooden cross when she was there in 1962. We
felt certain the marker had disappeared entirely by the time we
paid our visit. Identifying his grave seemed unimportant to us
for we knew that his bones rested somewhere in that ground, far
from the rich Iowa soil of his family's home.
Returning to our car,
we sat on the tailgate and watched the late afternoon sun glimmering
through the pinyon trees. Even though Nathaniel's life was long
over, he had caught the imagination of his descendants, giving
him an immortality of remembrance. We had gained a sense of knowing
him and the brief life he led six generations before us, hoping
that learning about his life would help us understand the purpose
of our own lives.
We felt content that
we had succeeded in tracing his footsteps with our own.
