"A Murder A Week" - The History Of Cerro Gordo, California

[Music] greetings hello howdy my name is brent and we are at cerro gordo california and this week we are going to talk about something very near and dear to my heart sarah gordo this week is all about the history here so the people who built this town who lived here who died here who came here as dreamers and the history is why i bought this town that's why i love this town it's probably why you're watching this video and it's an important town you know this town was once the largest producer of silver for the state of california it was the reason that los angeles is what it is today and so there's a very rich history here so to put together the video this week i read a lot of books and luckily cerro gordo was pretty well documented through the years there's a number of books that at least mention them so if you're interested stick around to the end of this video i'm going to give an individual bibliography or recommendations about books related serogordo i have to thank roger and cecil vargo they wrote a book called cerro gordo's images of america they are the ones that provided the old images for this so thank you guys for everything including the images something to note about this video i have been working on it for a very long time so you're going gonna see me in various levels of beard different seasons i've been probably working on this thing since april so long in fact that i recorded some of this video in the american hotel which you know is part of cerro gore's history itself now so this video means a lot to me the history here at saragora means a lot to me it's a very heavy responsibility i feel to the history of this town and making sure that's preserved and that people know about it hope you like this video you're going to see various stages of of me in it without further ado hello from the chapel movie theater here at cerro gordo this is a building that has beautiful stained glass from a steve mcqueen movie these movie theater seats and this wasn't originally a chapel or movie theater it's a mechanics garage it's actually a pit underneath this floor where they used to service some of the vehicles up here and so i thought what i wanted to do is kind of give a little bit the history of sarah gordo to the best of my knowledge i think it's one of those places where myth and fact merged together and you sift through that and you get as close as you can to the facts but it's a mining town you know this is a american west it's not going to be perfect history but it's going to be the history to the best of my knowledge and so let's get into it all right an important note kind of as i start this video is that this is the history of cerro gordo as a mining town obviously this land existed before it was a mine and at that time the indigenous population out here was the paiute and in the years perceiving the founding of sarah gordo as a mining town from about 1850 to 1866 or so there was a devastating war essentially down in owens valley between the settlers and the indigenous paiute to my knowledge the connection that i found between this land specifically so cerro gordo as a town corps and the paiute is that there's two main stories that pablo flores the mexican prospector that founded the town either a came up here with two companions and the two companions were killed by the paiute flores ran off came back later and started mining or b that flores was actually led here by a paiute guide who led him to the silver deposits here and that's how cerro gordo started i don't know definitively which one of those it is if you're interested the story of inyo goes pretty well into the story of the paiute and the settlers conflict there's probably 200 pages in here about it i will leave that to you to discover further but that's just a side note as we get into this thing this is mainly cerro gordo as a mining town 1865. pablo flores mexican prospector came up here the floorlist was able to set up a small scale operation up here and get about 1.5 tons of ore every 12 hours and the ore spread to the surrounding area and the next year in 1866 it attracted the attention of a guy named victor beaudry and beaudry came up here he was a french canadian merchant and he set up the first store in cerro gordo in 1866. that general store is where i'm sitting in right now and beaudry was one of the first one to start realizing that this town was going to be more than it was you know he realized that there's a demand here and this town's going to continue to grow so we invested in the general store and a number of other buildings around the property and a couple years later he teamed up with mortimer belshaw the man the myth the legend that owns the house just across the street from the store and shaw was a titan of his day you know he was the one that on the road he owned almost everything and he really was a big part of why cerro gordo became what it became he brought the very first load of silver into los angeles in 1869 he went to san francisco got an investment from the head paper company up there and just brought the production here to the next level he also created the first road up here the yellow grade road so he would charge them a quarter come here going he bought into the general store and he also owned a lot of the mining claims so in a lot of ways he was almost the jeff bezos of cerro gordo you know he got you coming up the road leaving the road on the silver on the general store pretty much anything involved with cerro gordo mortimer bell shell was involved with by 1869 the silver and cerro gordo became so important to the town of los angeles that the local paper said what los angeles is is mainly due to it it is the silver core that binds our present existence should it be uncomfortably severed we would inevitably collapse also in 1869 remy nadeau got involved in cerro gordo and remy nadu is known as the king of the desert freighters he was basically the guy that put together the mule teams to get any of the stuff from the mines to the major cities so you put together 90 mule teams or 20 mile teams and then a couple years later in 1873 he actually teamed up with the owners of cerro gordo so belshan and dew and the others to create the cerrogodo freighting company by 1873 the ceremonial freighting company had over a thousand mules 90 wagons and was just coming and going every day between los angeles and these mountains and nadu kind of parlayed his earnings from the freighting company into los angeles you know he built the first luxury hotel in los angeles it still stands today you know his name is on a lot of the streets in los angeles bellshot also has streets in los angeles cerro gordo street is even in los angeles so the clues are there if you look for him about how important this town was to the history of los angeles so to give you an idea of kind of the type of place it was in its heyday here's a couple news articles from 1873. the first one from november 6 says pistols continue to crack and good men go down before them as though neither law nor society valued men's life any more than those of many wild animals and then the next week this makes five men four killed outright in this county in as many weeks and then two months later the editor had to change it to seven men in seven weeks there was basically a murder per week up here and after the seventh murder the editor wrote this these lawless ruffians side note ruffian great word these lawless ruffians who with murder in their hearts and the implements of death strapped upon their persons congregate in public places ever ready to discharge their death-dealing weapons upon the unoffending and unarmed citizens some of my other favorite stories from that time that kind of illustrates what type of town it was is when they were trying to get a doctor to come up here you know and so they convinced this young doctor to come up and on his very first day here he's encountered so much that he left so he packed his bags and left and on the way down the hill he ran into a newspaper reporter and he said my friend i came here to buy a stock of drugs and practice medicine but damn me if i want an interest in a shooting gallery and so basically he was tired of having so many gun fights happening around him then they convinced another doctor to come up here and he came and his very first patient there's a report in the newspaper where basically he went to see his first patient and the patient that he found had had lined his bed with sandbags six feet tall so to access the patient he had to climb over the sandbags of the ladder and down in and the reason the patient did that was to stop all the straight bullets that were flying through the town in the middle of the night it's just crazy stuff and then the same doctor there's another fun story where basically he decided to go and take one of his companions to one of the brothels here and as he was there his friend asked what the name of one of the women at the brothel was and the doctor replied the horn toad over hearing this she drew a stiletto and was about to stab the doctor when the feminine another woman at the brothel grabbed her wrist then one of the horn toad's friends came after the doctor with a knife a prominent local man george snow drew his revolver and shot the man dead the shooting became general the room filled with smoke the lights went out and the doctor's young friend left the dance hall on cerro gordo when george snow was brought before the justice of peace for the hearing his honor concluded the court finds you 30 and if the spine is not paid in 30 days you'll go to security and basically every night there are shootings at these at these brothels you know you have to figure these reminders that are working 12 hours days underground would come up and go to one of the many brothels or saloons here and solve their issues with gunfight another really important incident in sara gore's history was what some referred to as the china stope incident and which we've covered in other videos but essentially in the 1870s a part of the 200 level of the union mine collapsed trapping up to 30 chinese miners and they were never able to recover them and it's sad and what sad to me is when the newspaper reported it later they said somewhere between 15 and 30 miners and how you cannot know how many miners died was indicative of the time right this was 1865 this was the civil war ended that year right lincoln was shot that year it was a different america then and that's part of sargo's history you know it's not something you can shy away from there was a chinatown here you know they had a lot of chinese workers were the men who brought the ore out of syrigore's mines and they had to live in a different part of town and it wasn't fair uh it wasn't unique to cerro gordo this was you know if you look at america in general in 1865 it was an unfair place but there's a huge chinese population related cerro gordo and i hope to celebrate that you know there is part of the museum here with a lot of the artifacts that i find from chinatown it's something that we won't you know whitewash or wash over but it's a it's a wrinkle and sarah goes past it's complicated place these are complicated people but it's something that happened here and uh i think any telling of story would be incomplete without at least mentioning it in 1871 this hotel was built so the american hotel was constructed and it was the finest hotel in california at the time it's a hotel that there's rumors that butch cassidy hid out here in his early years you know it's one that even today is the oldest standing hotel in california east of the sierras and so it's a it's an important hotel and it's one that a lot of different interesting people came through and it was a hit you know downstairs was a chow hall where miners would come in after a long day eat food fraternize and upstairs there was a number of rooms there was a large room there was bunk beds that was for shared accommodation and then three private rooms upstairs it was known as the finest hotel west of the mississippi and it stood for many many years had many many guests you know tragically we lost the hotel this year six years after the town was founded 49th birthday on june 15th 2020 it uh it burned because of electrical fire and so at this point in time if we're recounting cerego history as of december 2020 there is no hotel hopefully we if you look back at this video in even a year's time there will be a new american hotel on the exact same site as the old one and if you're watching this in a hundred years time if video is still a thing hopefully that hotel is an infamous hotel that's had a number of infamous bandits well maybe not bandits but interesting people staying at it as well so the american hotel is a big part of cerro gordo it was kind of the heartbeat the the town core and right now we're we're getting by without it but hoping that you know in a very short order thanks to a lot of your guys's help that hotel is standing again and this period of no american hotels serogoto is just a very minor piece of the history extending from here in 1874 alone cerro gordo delivered more than two million dollars worth of minerals to los angeles and that was in 1874 3 400 tons of supplies are brought into cerro gordo every year and the town's population grew to more than 4 000 residents so it bloomed from you know not even 10 years before being a sleepy town that was producing 1.5 tons every 12 hours to 4 500 people living here hundreds of buildings there's weddings here there's families that moved up here there's obviously a lot of murders that happened here but it became the boom town and darshan himself was known as a little bit of a i mean he was a little bit of a gangster back in the day there was lawsuits that brought before him where somebody had a claim to sarah gordo and if they would have paid some backhoe taxes in bishop by a certain date then they would have claimed the main union mine and belshaw got word of this and when the companies sent their messenger from san francisco with a bag of gold to bishop the sheriff before accepting it which would have lost belle shaw of the mine they called bellshaw and bellshot told the sheriff basically get out of town wait it out so they can't get in by the timeline and so i guess the sheriff said uh i need to go see my horse and he just left and so the they were never able to meet the deadline of to get the property and eventually this came the lawsuit obviously you know that wasn't the right thing to do so it became a big trial in inyo county and at the trial basically the pivot point was if they could prove that their mind also had galena in it as well as belshaw's the bell shot would have lost claim to his mind because the previous claim was prior to his and so it came to the stake where the judge was basically like hey go out send people to try to prove that the minds are connected and dalshah being the kind of guy that he is he sat out a bunch of his guys with guns and basically said you're not searching this land and so the court-ordered search had to be turned around bell shell was found in contempt of court but due to his power in the area he was able to get the timeline pushed to the point where their claims expired and he remained with the mountain no discussion about sarah gore's history would it be complete without a discussion about water obviously water is a huge issue at cerro gordo it's been an issue for over a hundred years and it's an issue that i deal with you know every day i can't wash my hands with turning on the sink and there's all sorts of ways to fix it but most relevant is owens lake that dry lake bed directly below cerro gordo used to be a beautiful huge lake it was over 13 miles long and nine miles across something like 108 square miles of lake and it was beautiful you know this is a place that celebrities from l.a were starting to buy up land around because i figured this would be the next place imagine like down there a beautiful 100 square mile lake surrounded by you know the inyo mountains on one side and then the sierras on the other side of mount whitney and just all this stunning scenery then starting in 1913 the water started being redirected to los angeles as part of the la aqueduct program by the department of water and power so that meant this beautiful hundred square mile lake was slowly drained and then by 1926 lake owens was just a dry lake bed and this area was without a lot of the water which is a complicated subject and one that if you're interested in reading a lot more about i would recommend cadillac desert it's a great book also if you want a more fictionalized version if you watch chinatown with jack nicholson that movie is about the department of water and power and the issues surrounding it so i would recommend that for further reading and information [Music] in the coming years the price of silver plummeted and a lot of the mining operations were shut down or moved to different towns by 1888 the town was all but abandoned with only 30 to 40 people still living here then in 1911 louis d gordon found significant zinc deposits in the union mine and started the zinc era for cerro gordo saragoru became the main zinc producer for the united states gordon was responsible for constructing the two aerial tramways that brought orr down the mountain the zinc operations lasted until the 1930s gordon was also responsible for building the gordon mansion here that still stands today it's kind of in the center of town and it's one of the most beautiful buildings here on the property so ld brought a whole other wave of prosperity to sarah gordo you know he moved his whole family up here the gordon house was finished around 1910 or 1911 and he wanted to create the state-of-the-art house that's why it looks a little bit different than the rest of the buildings here it was built a little bit later and he built it specifically to be state of the art so that way his wife cornelia would be comfortable living up here and would want to raise their family here the books say otherwise she wasn't super comfortable living in a mining town obviously there was a lot of gun fights and just generally rude behavior but led brought another 20 years of prosperity to this town till maybe 1930 the town was a boomtown again thousands of miners moved back here the town was kind of on the map again and then around 1930 again the minerals dried up and a lot of people packed up and left and by 1945 1947 the town was essentially abandoned again you know it was left to a former caretaker named wally wilson who couldn't really figure out how to make a living here so he ended up doing stuff like selling artifacts by the bucket or even sold the floor out of the kitchen here in the saloon the actual wood floor to a pharmacy in lone pine i mean that pharmacy is currently for sale and so i kind of want to buy our wood back and bring it back up here but uh that was it you know from 1930 on there's pretty much a single occupant here a caretaker or maybe a family but the peak saragordo days ended when the zinc ran out and ever since there's just been different families of dreamers and idealists trying to make something out of this town in 1973 a woman named jody patterson came up to cerro gordo and her uncle owned the town at that point and he was in a little bit of financial stress so she agreed to be a silent partner and she bought 25 in 1973 and about nine years later she ended up purchasing the whole property and jody was somebody that was from lone pine originally uh she had gone to los angeles and been an actress and a game show host she was a pilot and just a generally badass woman and she fell in love with sarah gordo she moved up here pretty much full time in 1985 and along with her partner mike patterson they they're our inspiration up here you know they they put their heart and soul into this place they cared about this town more than anybody you know jody this is actually jody's still here overlooking the town and so you know whenever we're kind of struggling with a decision sometimes i'll come up here and sit with jody overlooking the town just kind of reflect on the past history of sierra gordo it's such a rich history as we just went through and then what the future holds for sarah gordo and i guess that brings us to today you know i currently own sierra gordo it was purchased july 13th 2018 friday the 13th which if you're gonna own ghost town seems like an appropriate place to start and from day one my my goal here my hopes are to preserve the history here you know i think history is why this piece of dirt is interesting um while allowing more people to come up and experience it meaning i hope to eventually have overnight accommodation here you know i think day tours are important people come for the day look around take a tour of the town but i'd love for people to spend the night just because when you spend the night here it's such a different experience you see the way the sun is rising and hits the different peaks at different hours and it's beautiful up here and i think it's a bit selfish to kind of keep that to yourself so that's the hope you know the first step of that will be the hotel hopefully summer of next year fingers crossed trying hard to do that um and we'll see from there you know over time i'd love to offer almost every level of accommodation from camping on the back side very basic campsites where people can pitch a tent and just be very inexpensive to little miners cabins you know we have almost 200 acres behind the town that is heavily wooded so i'd love to put little cabins back there they're very basic you know solar will come if they don't want to camp they can see these cabins all the way up to the hotel you know the hotel only have six rooms but hopefully they'll be fairly nice and so that way whatever your comfort level there's something at cerro gordo for you because my goal my hope my dream is to share this place not just on video but in person and so hopefully this is just a reference point for the future history of cerro gordo that's what i see my job as i see it as a chaperone as a curator as a custodian of the town for the brief amount of time i'm able to you know be here thank you so much for watching all these videos it's just been so so amazing to see the support for the town and the project we're trying to do again i'd love to have you guys up here at some point but for now please subscribe to this channel it means a lot to the to the town comment below with future videos that you'd like to see um share with friends but generally thanks again for all the support and until next time i will uh well i'll be here so obviously this video is just scratching the surface of the history of cerrogodo you know my hope here was to expose you to some of the people places ideas things that happened here but if you're interested in a further dive i will give you some recommendations first the book i recommend the most is a book that i can't even find but it's roger and c silvargo's book images of america cerro gordo i'll try to put it here as an image but the book is great it shows photos of sarah garth of the years with a great explanation of it i recommend it most number two is the book that i put into the time capsule it's called from this hill by robert c likes and it's got an orange cover you can maybe find it on amazon but look up robert c likes and sarah gordo that is a very good book as well highly recommend next i would say silver seekers super cool book this book is written by remy nedu who interestingly enough as you just learned was a very big part of star wars history and this is written by his great great grandson who is a prolific writer and i'm going to recommend a lot of his books but silver seekers will be next i recommend uh i really like the story of inyo this goes over the history of the entire county out here which is very interesting cerro gordo was obviously a big part of the county so story vinya would be next boys in the sky blue pants this is about the area out here it doesn't isn't necessarily just about cerro gordo but it has a lot of cool tidbits in it so i would recommend checking out that if you're interested uh another by redmi nadu will be ghost towns and mining camps of california looks like this it's very cool not just about cerro gordo but about the whole mining scene out here so recommend that if we move away from just related to sierra gordo to more like the area of inyo county and the sierras i would say women of the sierra is very interesting it talks about some of the badass women that you know were out here in the mid-1800s so that is a very good book to check out the water seekers also by remini do worth checking out los angeles from mission to modern city by remy nadu also worth it cerro gordo is why los angeles is what it is today and this book shows you why so i recommend that city makers similar thing we're going to do talks about a bunch of guys that were up here and finally as i mentioned if you're interested in the water situation cadillac desert is very interesting and actually not to be hola not to be forgotten robert damaris who is the caretaker here for 20 years uh and still comes around every once in a while wrote a book called the journal of lost mine canyon it's a fictionized version of his story up in the mountains and mining it's available in our store check it out and that's it that's my suggested reading list related to sarah gordo if you have any other suggestions put them in the comments below thank you guys always for checking out this video i'm gonna see you next week

Channel: Ghost Town Living

Views: 547,151

Rating: 4.9802365 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ItfFOpZ8no8

Length: 26min 43sec (1603 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Lucazzo123]

I really enjoyed the history lesson of this video. It seems so surreal with the violence and shooting from a modern standpoint.

[u/Gumgums]

Was as usual a great episode. Very informative