Ghosts of the Wild West: American bought 'haunted city' for $ 1,4 million and got stuck in it
'25.07.2020'
Source: Lenta.ru report
Two years ago, a young American entrepreneur, Brent Underwood, bought a ghost town. Once there was a silver mine, shots sounded every day and famous bandits from the Wild West met. And now - almost no one, and the nearest store is a few hours away. Underwood arrived in his city in early March and after two months of complete loneliness decided to stay there for a long time, says Lenta.ru report.
In the summer of 2018, Brent Underwood received an offer that was difficult to refuse.
"Want to buy a ghost town?" - asked a friend.
Attached to the message was a link to a note about the sale of Cerro Gordo, an abandoned Wild West town.
“At first I took it for a stupid joke, but I clicked on the link and started reading,” says Underwood.
It turned out that Cerro Gordo is located in the mountains at the edge of the Valley of Death. The city appeared in 1865, when silver was found in those places. Enterprising people from all over California immediately rushed there.
Three years later, businessman Mortimer Belshaw settled in Cerro Gordo. He quickly set up the mining of the precious metal on a grand scale and soon sent the first wagonload of silver bars to Los Angeles. Each bar was 45 centimeters long and weighed 36 kilograms.
Others followed the first cart. One year later, the town was producing more silver and lead than other mines in California. In just a few years, thousands of miners who gathered in Cerro Gordo have dug tunnels almost 60 kilometers long underground.
A church, five inns, seven saloons and two brothels, one on each side of the city, appeared near the mine. A fort was built nearby to protect the locals from the Indians.
There was little entertainment: the miners gambled, drank a lot, and visited prostitutes. Any quarrel ended in a shootout. Every week someone was killed, and it was even possible to die by accident. To avoid being hit by a stray bullet, workers had to sleep behind sandbags.
It was the real Wild West from Westerns. It was rumored that Butch Cassidy, the famous bank and train robber, was hiding in Cerro Gordo. In the walls of the Belshaw mansion, which still stands today, 156 bullet holes have been preserved, and a blood stain in the hotel's gambling room.
Ten years later, the reserves of the precious metal were noticeably depleted, and the fall in silver prices, which began at the end of the 1930th century, signed a death sentence to the city. The miners dispersed in all directions, and Cerro Gordo was empty. At the beginning of the 1957th century, it experienced a revival when zinc began to be mined there, but this boom was short-lived. In the XNUMXs, the mine was finally closed, and only its owner lived in the city until XNUMX. After his death, no one remained in Cerro Gordo.
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People returned to the city only in 1985. One of the surviving houses was occupied by a distant relative of the former owner of Cerro Gordo, Jody Patterson, along with her husband Mike. Since 1973, Jody bought the city in parts from her uncle's wife, who inherited it, and by 1984 became its full-fledged mistress. She lived there until her death and is buried in the Cerro Gordo cemetery.
Mike Patterson did not leave Cerro Gordo when Jody died and turned it into a tourist attraction. Wild West lovers could rent a bedroom at Belshaw's house for $ 150 a night, or spend the night in a former workers' dorm for $ 300. The toilet, like in the XNUMXth century, was in the courtyard, but the guests did not complain.
“One woman wrote me a thank you letter and praised me for having talcum powder in the outside toilet. It took me a while to realize that she was referring to quicklime to be thrown into a sump, ”recalls Mike Patterson, former owner of Cerro Gordo.
The city was put up for sale by Patterson's relatives. By that time, the only inhabitant remained in Cerro Gordo - the volunteer caretaker Robert Demare. The former schoolteacher moved there in the late 1990s in hopes of finding silver.
“In 22 years I've found the equivalent of a full wheelbarrow of silver,” he argued in 2019.
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In Cerro Gordo, 22 buildings survived: several houses where miners lived, a working hostel, a hotel, a church and a former store in which Mike Patterson set up something like a museum. The city had an electric generator and running water (albeit only in three buildings), and to get to the nearest store, it was required to drive more than 40 kilometers. The real city where people live is twice as much.
But Demare got used to the life of a hermit. Year after year, he repaired broken windows, cleaned up the rubbish that "bad people" dumped, once a month covered potholes on a country road, and shot snakes and rats. The caretaker never touched the coyotes: he considered these animals "important and wonderful creatures."
Own city
Underwood got the idea to buy Cerro Gordo. He already had a small travel business: a small hostel with five employees in Austin. But a real city from the time of the Wild West is a completely different matter. He believed it was the perfect destination for modern tourism, where a beautiful Instagram picture is more important than anything else. Moreover, such a picturesque wilderness can attract creative people.
The sellers expected to receive 925 thousand dollars (65 million rubles) for Cerro Gordo. Underwood and his acquaintance were ready to give up all their savings for him, but still there was not enough money. To collect the required amount, they had to look for investors. Somehow, Underwood managed to interest the former marketing director of American Apparel, one of the Hulu executives, and several other big businessmen. This made it possible to scrape together $ 1,4 million (about 100 million rubles).
Cerro Gordo was claimed by several other buyers, and some of them offered larger sums for it, but the sellers liked Underwood's idea. So he and his friend became the owners of their own city.
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The first time in Cerro Gordo, everything remained the same. Underwood paid the caretaker's salary and visited him once a month. He planned to run the Internet, build an observation deck and equip a music studio in a former dormitory, but soon found it was not easy at all.
“For the next year or so, things went very slowly,” he recalls. “We waited for permits and tried to start the renovation, but everything took a lot of time, because it is very difficult to bring materials and people there.”
The ghost town turned out to be an expensive pleasure. It took about 10 thousand dollars (about 700 thousand rubles) every month to repay loans, salaries, utilities and satellite Internet. And this does not include repairs: as it turned out, even replacing a broken water pump costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When the epidemic began, Underwood received a call from the caretaker.
“His wife lives in Arizona, and he wanted to return to her before the quarantine measures were introduced,” he says. - He asked me to look out for the city so that he would not be plundered. I thought that I would do some renovation and maybe start renting out houses to guests. "
Insulation in the snow
The entrepreneur arrived in Cerro Gordo in the midst of a heavy snowfall. The car got stuck in snowdrifts when the city was half a kilometer away.
“I left him in the middle of a single lane road and walked the rest of the way,” Underwood said. - It snowed almost daily for another ten days. It got to the point where I could barely open the front door. "
By March 19, when self-isolation was introduced in California, it was perfectly isolated by nature itself. It was almost impossible to get out of Cerro Gordo before the snow melted.
"In the worst case, there are snowshoes, but they will have to cover 11 kilometers on a steep slope," says Underwood. He tried them on and was out of breath after just a few meters.
The food they had taken with them quickly dried up, but the caretaker left a large supply of rice and canned food. To get water, Underwood melted snow. You can't watch Netflix on a slow satellite internet, so he had to look for other entertainment.
At dawn, he went for a walk, during the day he studied his possessions, and at night he took pictures of the starry sky.
Underwood walked around the mine and found graffiti on the wall of the mine, made in 1938. He had extra furniture, so he moved there a sofa, a carpet and a floor lamp - he made something like an underground shelter. In the house where the former owner lived, a huge collection of old videotapes was discovered, including a copy of Kubrick's "Shining". His characters were also stuck in a snow-covered mountain hotel, and it ended badly. Underwood decided not to watch this movie.
Locals believed that real ghosts inhabited Cerro Gordo. Several years ago, a documentary was filmed in the city about the ghosts of dead children in one of the mansions, and the former owner of Cerro Gordo, Mike Patterson, kept a snapshot of a man's face emerging from the window net. He believed that this was the ghost of Alphonse Benoit, who was killed more than a century ago in a nearby lumberjack camp.
Underwood lived in the same room where ghosts of children were seen. He did not wait for their visit, but still noticed something strange. Most of all, he was embarrassed by the fact that in the working hostel from time to time the curtains were opened and the lights turned on. Just in case, he decided to bypass this place.
“The longer I live here, the more I come across things that I cannot explain. Until I bought the city, I didn’t believe in this at all, ”admitted Brent Underwood.
Far more underwood was occupied with ghosts of a different kind. In one of the houses he came across a suitcase with the belongings of a miner who worked in Cerro Gordo during the zinc boom. Inside was his whole life: bank statements, land plots, unpaid checks, lawsuits, love letters and divorce papers.
“This man had hopes and dreams, ups and downs, and all that was left was a suitcase of papers,” says Underwood. Willy-nilly, you will wonder what will remain after you.
With the help of connoisseurs on Reddit, the entrepreneur learned to understand the footprints of animals in the snow. It turned out that a lynx regularly visits his porch. Other paw prints were left by coyotes and, it seems, a bear. Underwood learned to loop floors and was used to talking to a couple of local crows named Hekil and Jekyll. He enjoyed life in the ghost town more and more.
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The problems started when the snow melted. First, Underwood was admitted to the hospital with appendicitis. And in early June, a fire broke out in Cerro Gordo. At three o'clock in the morning an old hotel broke out, then the fire spread to the glacier cellar and the house where in the days of the Wild West lived a man named William Crapo, who once shot a postman.
“All I could do was call 911,” recalls Underwood. "And then, with the help of the caretaker, desperately drag buckets of water from the tanks and try to fill the flame."
“We may never know how the ignition started. The firefighters told me there are a thousand different reasons. Anything could have happened in such old buildings, ”the owner of the city concludes.
The fire destroyed three buildings, but Underwood still expects the city to be rebuilt. Even before the caretaker returned, he decided that he would stay in Cerro Gordo for a long time.
“I’m already planning what I’ll do next winter,” he told a New York Times reporter who spoke to him before the fire. "Until then, I'm not going to go anywhere, so I need to prepare."
