 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
On Location: Idaho
|
|
A visit to Custer Ghost Town brings the dusty past into sharper focus
|
|
BY JAMES VLAHOS
|
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
Gavin, a fill-in docent at Custer Ghost Town; the town of Stanley sits at the edge of the Challis National Forest.
|
|
|
|
Vlahos considers ghost towns pointless, usually a little boring. Rusty relics, sagging shacks—what's the big deal? But he never passes up the chance to visit one, and he's never failed to enjoy the experience.
ON A ROAD TO NOWHERE
I was on Highway 75, about 14 miles east of Stanley, Idaho, when I saw the turnoff for Custer Ghost Town. I was tired from rafting the Salmon River all morning, and the water of explosive rapids was still draining from my ears. But I had to turn. For a little ways the road followed the Yankee Fork of the Salmon, slaloming through the pines in a small canyon. Then the terrain opened up and the pavement turned to gravel. The road signs conveyed what amounted to a cautionary parable of frontier life: names promising either payoff (Silver Creek, Bonanza) or despair (River of No Return). Finally, after a bumpy half-hour gamely endured by my two-wheel-drive car, I reached Custer, a dusty street lined with forlorn wooden buildings. The last inhabitants were more than a century gone.
BOOM AND BUST
In the two decades that followed the town's founding in 1879, area mines produced millions of dollars worth of gold and the town swelled to 600 inhabitants. But by 1911 Custer was all but abandoned. I strolled around, trying to imagine what life had been like here. Hulking steel equipment, once used for crushing ore and now sitting by the road, spoke of mining as a difficult, dirty business. And I could sense from the bullet-hole-ridden poker table in the old saloon that Custerites had enjoyed a wild good time. A short walk from the saloon, I found a small graveyard. The cause of death marked on one of the tombstones was "OVERDRUNK."
THE REAL THING
One of the town's biggest buildings was a 1901 schoolhouse, now a museum. I was met inside by the docent, an elderly man with thick glasses, watery eyes and a nametag that read "Gavin." The school had educated kids from grades 1 to 8 in a single room, Gavin told me. That somehow led to the tale of Slop Sing, an enterprising Chinese man on whom the kids persisted in playing tricks. As he showed me some encrusted old sheep shears and a pair of spectacles, he must have felt my attention slipping. "This is it," he said. "If you're here for a theme park you're going to be disappointed."
But I wasn't. I love the randomness of ghost towns, the collections of obscure relics and factoids, not carefully screened and polished as in some Smithsonian exhibit. History gets to speak for itself. I also love their contrarianism in a culture that generally memorializes only the heroic. Ghost towns remind us of failure, and somehow that's comforting.
"Well, you must really like this place," I said to Gavin.
"Uh? Yeah. It's fine," he said. Gavin was doing a favor for a friend of a friend, and making only $20 a day. Like me, he couldn't totally explain what had drawn him to Custer.
"Do you think you'll work here next year?" I asked.
"Oh yeah," he said. "I'll probably be back."
NOTE: Information may have changed since publication. Please confirm key details before planning your trip.
|
|
|
|
Published: September 1, 2009
|
|
Photos: Dmitri Alexander
|
|
|