All that remains of the big dreams that fueled
Leadfield's meteoric rise and fall. |
DEATH
VALLEY, CALIFORNIA—
The
predictions were unusually optimistic. "Tonnage of ore from new
California district will be large," read a headline in March, 1926.
It was perhaps no surprise that eager investors were happy to shell
out hundreds of thousands of dollars to run a railroad line up Titus
Canyon, one of the least inviting construction sights anywhere on earth.
By August, three hundred people were living in Leadfield, and a genuine
U.S. post office opened to serve the new town.
But
Leadfield didn't last long. The post office closed only six months later,
and the residents vanished, too. All the wild prognostications about
the riches in Titus Canyon had produced nothing more than several mounds
of tailings and a large number of depleted bank accounts. One of the
men responsible for drumming up investors fled to Shanghai, China, to
escape the wrath of the people he'd duped.
Mark
Holloway, Death Valley explorer and guide |
Leadfield
may have had a short, ignominious history, but its legacy is a road
that would never been built if the lure of wealth hadn't provided the
necessary incentive. The canyon is the kind that road builders avoid
whenever possible: a long, rocky, twisting gorge with steep drop-offs
and abrupt elevation changes. Because it's narrow, the National Park
Service has made the route one way heading east to west. A well-graded
dirt track, the road is usually navigable by ordinary cars.
Forbidding
but breathtakingly beautiful, the scenery in the canyon is other-worldly.
The colorful strata and monumental roack formations make it easy to
see why prospectors believed they'd stumbled across a mother lode. Titus
Canyon looks like it's bursting with minerals worth mining.
The
remains of Leadfield lie about halfway through the gorge. Two buildings
are standing, and the foundations of others are scattered over the hillside.
The only other manmade structures are a National Park sign and a fiberglass
outhouse.
The
forlorn remains of Leadfield's brief boom mean that the road is the
town's only real gift to subsequent generations. It winds west down
to the valley floor past boulders etched with Indian petroglyphs and
water-carved chasms that prove it actually rains on occasion in Death
Valley. A more memorable thoroughfare you'll rarely find— a respectable
legacy for a town that never made it to its first birthday.
