![]() But at the mouth of American Canyon a big piece of our history was lost when that little wall came down. Until last spring, when it tumbled down into a heap, and the last remaining handiwork of the men who located the Comstock Lode became just a meaningless jumble of rocks.Īround the state there are many historic treasures that are being protected, restored and revived. But through the years of bonanza, and the borrasca that followed, as the generations succeeded one another, the significance of the stacked rocks was forgotten. ![]() Its wooden parts were doubtless scavenged by other miners to burn for heat one freezing winter. The little cabin, long abandoned, fell into disrepair. The back wall of a neighboring cabin remains intact on Main Street, Silver City.Īs the mines were developed, Virginia City soon became the greatest city between San Francisco and Denver, Gold Hill was renowned for its rich mines and Silver City, which took form just uphill from the Grosh brothers’ crude cabin, attracted over 1000 residents. These papers were never brought to light, and it was Comstock’s name that was attached to the great discoveries of gold and silver that followed: the Comstock Lode. Their little cabin had been left in the care of Henry Comstock, “a lazy, drunken prospector” (as one historian described him), who took possession of their possessions, including a trunk containing documents and correspondence. Allen then struck out on foot for California, but was caught on the Sierra by winter snows and died of exposure. In 1856 they wrote home, “Native silver is found in Gold Cañon it resembles thin sheet-lead broken very fine, and lead the miners suppose it to be.” Later they wrote, “One of these veins is a perfect monster.”īut before they could record or develop their claims, Hosea drove a pick through his foot and died of blood poisoning. Like their neighbors they built a rough cabin, dry-stacking rock against the wall of American Canyon, where a tributary stream feeds into the main channel of Gold Creek, and building the other walls and the roof of logs and limbs. After a season in the California placer mines they had crossed the Sierra to Nevada, following the directions they’d been given, and found a small population of prospectors panning gold from the little creek flowing down Gold Canyon to join the Carson River at present-day He told them about a region far to the north where silver abounded, and told them how to find it. As they packed their way across the Isthmus of Panama, they met a man who had ranged north from Mexico with a prospecting party. It had been built more than a century and a half ago by two brothers from Pennsylvania, Allen and Hosea Grosch, who had come west as ’49ers. That rock wall in Silver City is a more complicated case. They had become old and in the way, preventing the high-priced real estate they occupied from realizing its prime purpose, and so they had to go. ![]() Granted, both the Mapes Hotel in Reno and the Stardust on the Las Vegas Strip, the most recent landmarks to be scraped away, were beyond redemption as profit centers. In Reno and Las Vegas, landmark structures are being demolished. ![]() It has been happening for many years, and it happens in big ways and small. The tumbledown remains of the Grosch brothers’ cabin in American Ravine, Silver City. I spent most of it preparing the new edition of The Complete Nevada Traveler for the printer, and in the process I was struck by the way the old Nevada is slowly - and not so slowly - disappearing. You can buy your book orders online for Personal copies and gifts or for Resale. ![]()
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