Ghost Towns of the U.S. West are Haunted by Writers and Historians

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October 29, 2001

In the nooks and crannies of Utah, off the interstate highways and
tucked away from today's fast-food civilization, sit villages of
sinking foundations and splintered wood, boarded-up windows and
scattered stones.

In some cases, these spots are nothing more than an indentation in the ground, a memory in an old-timer's mind, a slice of history forgotten by most.

Long ago, hopeful folks, ranchers, railroaders, miners and their families socked their money and dreams into this land. For a long list of reasons, unfortunate circumstances and fate, these boomtowns went bust.

And the people went away.

Or did they?

"One of the things that is so fascinating with ghost towns is that almost anyone who sets foot in one can feel their presence—the people who lived there," Teresa Jordan said. "Almost like the heat, the essence of them, their bodies, is still left in the ground.

"You can't help walking through and wondering what happened to the people who were there…who were they, what had they done, why they're not there anymore."

Jordan, a writer from Salt Lake City, and Moab photographer Tom Till set out to answer some of those questions in their recently released book Great Ghost Towns of the West (Graphic Arts Center Publishing).

The book features 130 photographs and the stories behind more than 100 ghost towns scattered from Alaska to Texas.

Many of the ghost towns were casualties of the gold rush of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. They sprang up when people were lured west by the promise of riches.

Town Abandoned When Residents Went Broke

But they were abandoned when those residents went broke.

The same forces that created those ghost towns in the 1920s and '30s, though, are responsible for ghost towns before that and since, Jordan's research revealed.

When crops fail, so do farm towns. When the trees are gone, logging towns fall. When oil and gas towns are depleted of their resources, their communities dry up. And so on.

Till, best known as a landscape photographer, has been shooting images of these abandoned towns, off and on, for about 15 years.

The spots drew him as much for their scenery as for their history.

"The satisfaction for me, the fun part for me, was finding these places, these ghost towns, in beautiful settings. They were a type of landscape," he said.

Along the way, he learned more about the ghost towns and how they came to be. He gained an appreciation of the valuable lessons to be learned from what some might consider pioneering failures.

Uncovering the lessons, or solving the mysteries, can be part of the forgotten towns' charm.

"The interest is in the name ghost towns. There's a fascination in seeing an abandonment, whether Anasazi ruins or the pyramids of Egypt," he said. "For some reason, the human race has left the area.

"There's a real mystery there, and an interest in the artifacts, seeing what's been left behind."

To help tell the story in words, Till enlisted the help of Jordan, who has spent the past two decades writing about Western rural life, culture and the environment.

Jordan is author of several books, most recently Field Notes From the Grand Canyon: Raging River, Quiet Mind (Johnson Books, 2000), and editor of two anthologies of Western women's writing.

Author Lived in Ghost Towns Herself

She visited several ghost towns on her tours of the West for previous books. Plus, she's willing to brag, she's lived in several herself.

She grew up in Iron Mountain, on a ranch 43 miles (70 kilometers) northwest of Cheyenne, Wyoming, that was once a town with a rail station, stores, telegraph office and several dozen houses.

By the time she graduated from high school, no one was living there anymore.

Also, she and her husband own a ranch in Deeth, Nevada, at one point larger than the cattle-shipping station town, Elko—but now not much more than their plot of land.

"I guess I'm one of the ghosts," Jordan jokes.

Although there are dozens and dozens of spots in Utah once home to settlers and fortune-seekers but now vacant, Till and Jordan—and sometimes their editors—had to pick and choose which they would include as "great" among Western ghost towns.

Till's favorite, Grafton, didn't make the final cut.

Near Zion National Park, this abandoned farming town was the site of some of the filming for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

Several groups in Southern Utah have banded together to take care of and restore buildings on this site, a place Till describes as the "most beautiful agricultural ghost town in Utah."

One that did make it into the pages is Iosepa, a unique Mormon ghost town 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the Great Salt Lake. It was founded in 1889 by a group of Hawaiian converts who moved to the area to be closer to the temple.

They managed to grow lush vegetation—trees, berries, grapes and flowers—in the seemingly inhospitable desert. At one point, the town had 228 residents.

In 1896, leprosy attacked the colony and many died; the rest left when the Mormons announced in 1916 that a temple would be built in Hawaii.

A lot of people felt it was cruel, Jordan said, that the Hawaiians were placed in such a situation. But she found, in interviewing descendants, that it was "an incredible spiritual experience" for the residents.

"It was a way for them to be in communion with their faith," she said. "That's something that really separates this town from other ghost towns."

Some readers may be shocked to find Park City among the towns listed in many ghost town books and reference materials. Now home to Olympic venues and the getaways of the rich and famous, Park City nearly fell off the map a few decades ago.

It was listed in 30-year-old ghost town guides Jordan discovered, and she heard about people who visited Park City and talked about seeing every house falling down.

Recreation Has Been Savior of Many Towns

Recreation has been the savior of many towns, like Aspen and Vail in Colorado, on the brink of full-fledged ghost status, Jordan said.

If Park City didn't have ski resorts, Till said, "the city would be in our book today."

There's one sure way, Till jokes, that he can tell if a town has risen above its ghost-town label: "If it has a McDonald's, it's not a ghost town anymore."

If towns can blossom so quickly, Jordan cautions that they can wither and die at the same speed particularly in an arid, desert state like Utah.

Someday, if the area runs out of water, people might not stick around. Or if the economy crashes (and some worry the latest technology-stock woes are warning signs), Utahns could be in for a rough road ahead.

Jordan said she overheard a conversation once in Las Vegas. Two people were looking around in amazement at the glitz and excess and one said, "Aren't the archaeologists going to have fun with this place?"

"It's booming now, but some say it's a false economy. It won't be sustainable in the long term," she said. "I think it'll be one of the first places to go."

Till and Jordan had many before them scout out and write about ghost towns, and they used many previously published books to research theirs.

Among them are Some Dreams Die: Utah's Ghost Towns and Lost Treasures (Dream Garden Press, 1999) by George A. Thompson.

"I think people are fascinated by the way people's dreams have crumbled," Till said, playing off the title of Thompson's book, which was written in the early 1980s and recently revised.

Stories of Buried Loot, Stashed Gold

Thompson focused as much on lost mines and treasures in and around ghost towns as he did on the towns themselves. He referred to buried loot from wild-West-style bank robberies or gold stashed for safekeeping.

He claimed that most of those lost treasure stories were true, tales of someone's grandpa burying his money behind the barn but never telling anyone where it was before he died, or someone's uncle getting killed by an outlaw before he could reveal the location of his hidden mine.

Maps and tales delve into the legends.

One of the first to comprehensively document Utah's abandoned settlements was Stephen Carr's The Historical Guide to Utah's Ghost Towns (Western Epics, 1972).

Carr, a now-retired pediatrician from Holladay, had been "poking around a ghost town north of the Great Salt Lake" in the late 1960s and wanted to know more about it.

When he couldn't find much information on the subject and when he found out Sam Weller's bookstore in Salt Lake City received two or three similar inquiries a week, he decided to tackle a book project.

For the next year and a half, on his days off and weekends, he researched and traveled approximately 9,300 miles (15,000 kilometers), visiting more than 130 towns throughout the state.

"The dining room table was piled up high with research. We didn't eat at the table for 18 months," Carr recalls.

His hunch about the popularity of ghost towns was correct.

Within the first six weeks of publication, the book sold out its first run of 5,000 copies, and the next 5,000 printed sold out in 18 months, he said.

Utah's Ghost Railroads

He has revised it twice and written another book that focuses on Utah ghost railroads, the rails that had been abandoned and disappeared over time.

Carr's biggest fear about writing the first ghost town book nearly stopped him from finishing it. He worried that by telling people about the ghost towns and offering maps pointing out where they were, he was inviting vandals to finish them off.

Carr wrote at the beginning of the book about the folks near these "out-of-the-way places" who worried that the book might "increase the small number of vandals who search out a town and pilfer items, knock chips out of an historical building for a souvenir (can you believe it), or perform some equally offensive act."

He warned that some landowners were strict about trespassers "to the point of leveling charges or firearms."

Carr eventually decided to risk it, because he wanted to document these towns' whereabouts and backgrounds for historical purposes.

He also wanted to give artists and photographers, like Till, a guide to follow so they could visit the spots and use them as subjects, capturing their magical, mystical qualities in creative ways.

He asked those reading the books, "ghost-towners" as he called them, to follow the old adage, "Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints."

Till and Jordan also were concerned about alerting potential vandals when writing their book. But Till hopes that the book will serve another, more positive purpose—to invite people to step up and pay for preservation of some of these ghost towns.

Protected in "State of Arrested Decay"

Preservationists in some parts of the West have found the resources to protect ghost towns like Bodie, California. Nearly 150 buildings remain in Bodie, and the California State Park Service now maintains it in what is called a "state of arrested decay."

If visitors listen closely, they might almost hear the "devil-may-care rowdiness" of miners that Jordan describes in the book.

The rumors of raucous, reckless abandon are said to have prompted one little girl en route to the town with her family during the gold rush to write in her diary, "Goodbye God, I'm going to Bodie." That phrase became famous throughout the West.

Till included in the book several images of Bodie's Wheaton and Hollis Hotel, still featuring piles of gaming chips, an old pool table and a roulette wheel, all covered with a hundred years of dust.

"I treasure the past. I don't want to live in the past, but I do think it instructs us," Jordan said. "There's something about the physical remnants of history that inform us in a way that books and documents never can.

"I hope that the book helps people see these places in a new light and new depth. If we understand them and value them, they'll last longer," she said. "These places are jewels. It's up to us to keep them safe."

Copyright 2001 Ogden Publishing Corporation