Goldfield — the boomtown at the foot of the Superstitions that found REAL gold in the 1890s, roared to life, and died just as fast when the vein gave out. The true gold, before the legend.
I'm Ranger Boone Merrick, and before we go chasing legends up this mountain, let me tell you about the gold that was real — right back there where we started, at Goldfield. Because while men have hunted a phantom mine up in these peaks for a century and never found it, down here at the foot, in the 1890s, somebody actually struck it.
Picture the desert here, empty and quiet, and then — a strike. Real gold, good gold, in the ground right at the edge of the Superstitions. And you know what happens next in the West: the word gets out, and the world comes running. Almost overnight a town threw itself up out of the bare desert — Goldfield. Within a couple of years it had a few thousand people, and everything a booming gold town needs: saloons doing a roaring trade, a general store, a boarding house, a school for the children, a blacksmith, even a brewery to cut the desert dust. Miners worked the shafts around the clock; wagons hauled the ore; money and whiskey flowed. For a few wild years, Goldfield was the real thing — a genuine, gold-fueled boomtown in the shadow of the mountains.
And then, just as fast, it was over. Because the gold down here played a cruel trick. The rich vein they were chasing ran down into the ground and — they hit a fault, a great crack where the earth had shifted long ago and snapped the ore body off clean. The gold just... stopped. They dug, and searched, and tried to pick up the vein on the far side of the break, and couldn't make it pay. The mines flooded, the ore ran thin, the price of gold sagged — and one by one the miners packed up and drifted off to the next strike. Within a few short years the saloons went quiet, the school emptied, and the desert began taking Goldfield back board by board. A ghost town, in the shadow of the range.
So there's your bookend, friend, and I want you to hold both halves of it as you drive up: down here, real gold — found, mined, and lost to a crack in the earth, the boomtown gone to dust. And up there, in the peaks ahead — gold that maybe never existed at all, that men are still hunting to this day. The real fortune played out and died in a decade. The imaginary one is immortal. That's gold country for you. Roll on up, and let's go hunt the Dutchman.
Photo: dconvertini · CC BY-SA 2.0
