 At
this stop, you can look across the bridge and upstream to the
site of what was once the center of Bullion City. During
it's heyday, the camp had dozens of buildings and over a
thousand inhabitants on both sides of the creek. The 1881
census shows the pop. of the town as 1,651 souls but 10 years
later, this figure had declined to 259.
Life in gold camps like Bullion City
was hard. Health conditions were poor and often there was
no medicine. Lodgings were primitive, most miners lived in
tents or crude shelters with walls of canvas, hides or
rough-hewn planks. Mining for gold was hard, monotonous
labor. It was frequently necessary to work long hours
while knee-deep in mud or icy water. Mining laborers
generally worked 10 hour shifts, 6 days a week with Saturdays
off.
Mining camps could also be dangerous
places. Consider this account from a nearby mining camp by
Merril Utley in The Ghosts of Gold Mountain 1992:
[Two miners by the names of R.J. Gibson and J. Jacobs] had
been imbibing rather freely of the flowering bowl and got into a
dispute over a gold claim... they mutually agreed to retire to
the street and settle their differences... As they got into the
street, they began pumping away at each other [with pistols]
only a few feet apart. (They both missed).
Fire was another danger and could easily
devastate a town made of wood and canvas. It is said that
a fire storm raged up the dirt road by the bridge on the right
side of the creek (north) destroying a number of shacks and
cabins. Look across the bridge and up the north-facing slopes of
the canyon. As you drive up the road beneath these slopes,
look for islands of aspen surrounded by spruce and fir
trees. These aspen trees, recognized by their light green
leaves in summer, are what grew back after a 1923 fire that
started at a mine. |
