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Where has the time
gone?? Has any one seen my time?? I seem to have lost it or misplaced
it. If anyone finds it please return it to me for a free drink. I have
no idea where it went because it's been since last November since the
last newsletter so I know I've lost all track of time. Oh well. I've got lots to talk about and as usual they are in no particular order. Let's start off with the www.goldpointghosttown.com website. We've added a couple of things you might be interested in checking out. First is the Special Events page. We've added a bunch of pictures to look at from last years annual Memorial Daze party. For those of you that can't make the event it might be fun to see what goes on. The photos are courtesy of the Las Vegas Trail Blazer's Singles Hiking Club. This was there first year with around 20 or so. This year (3 weekends from now) they hope to increase the size of their group. This year will also be their first year at entering the Chili Cook-off. They have an unusual plan of attack. Several of them are going to cook their own individual recipe's. On the day of the contest they are going to take the single pots and throw into one big pot for the final result. You have to admit that this is truly a "combined" effort on their part. Good luck to them and all the contestants this year (3 weekends from now). The other addition is called Sheriff Stone's Quest To Restore & Preserve Gold Point Ghost Town. It's a brief story of how I wound up in Gold Point and why I'm trying to preserve history. It should fill in a lot of blanks for interested people. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts after you read it. The third addition is on the Gold Point in the News page. For you new readers it is a 3 minute news video done a few years ago that wound up on YouTube somehow. Let's get some sad news out of the way now. Reverend Red Dog Lil, Minister of the Universal Life Church, since December has held memorial services for three of our friends. Their enclosed ashes going on a plaque, made by Fish Lake Dan, and mounted on a wall in the saloon. A few personal mementos were mounted on the plaque along with their picture. Our friend Kenny Payne was first the weekend before Christmas. This didn't make Christmas very merry this year for us. I met Kenny in Vegas in 1998 as a fellow paperhanger working on Mandalay Bay. He visited us many times over the years in Gold Point and saw that a previous friend had his plaque put on the wall and always said that he wanted to rest here also when the time came. His brother Tom from Seattle brought his ashes up and laid Kenny to rest on a shelf on the lower part of the plaque. Dan decorated each corner of the plaque with rifle bullets. Kenny was a Marine Vet so we lowered the Flag to half mast for the service and played echo taps and amazing grace. Our friend Dean lost his K-9 friend and companion Daisy May the Dally Doo to cancer the day after Christmas. She was a very friendly Dalmatian. He had her since she was a puppy with four legs. Several years ago she broke one of her back legs jumping up and landing wrong. He didn't heal well and to save her she had to lose the leg. After that I affectionately called her tri-pod. She spent a lot of time in the saloon over the years during parties working the crowd for goodies. Half her ashes were put in a miniature trash can on the plaque. The other half are kept with Dean and goes with him where he goes. He always wanted to say "I'm driving miss Daisy". She was laid to rest over Presidents Day weekend. The last one was a 22 year resident of Gold Point. Karen Anderson passed away in February and was laid to rest last month. Half her ashes in a little blue urn on her plaque shelf and the other half spread around Gold Point. She worked as a madam at the Cottontail Ranch down the road for 15 years. She loved her bunny friends that would come by for carrots and since she worked at the Cottontail there is a bunny in each corner of her plaque. We keep a shot glass full of libations on or next to each of our 4 friends as requested. Mike and Kenny drink rum, Karen drinks vodka and Daisy drinks beer. We are always refilling them every week. You should see how much they drink, especially in the summer months. We all hope they rest in peace and that it will be a long time before we add another friend to the walls of the saloon. The tradition of using recycled historical Christmas cards went well this past year. Next year we will be getting into the 1950's as well as some of the forty's still. We would like to thank Tom (from ??) who came up and stayed the weekend at Stateline and fixed up the porch at the old Stateline cabin a couple of months ago. It was in sad shape and ready to fall. We thank Paul from the Trail Blazers for his donation of a box of old beer cans to the saloon. We strung two wires from one side to the other over one of the long rafters and put the cans on top of the rafter in between the wires. When he comes up for the Memorial Daze Chili Cook-off (3 weekends from now) we're going to have him sign his name on the rafter. He has since donated another larger box of cans that will go into the saloon after the party because right now we don't have the time because we're getting ready for the Chili and Stew cook-off (3 weekends from now). I wasn't here, but Red Dog Lil had a visit from Senator Harry Wiley's grand daughter and great grand daughter March 9th. The last time she was here was in the 50's when she was a child and before Harry died in 55. We had a hanging party in the saloon a couple of months ago to hang pictures and artifacts in the ceiling. It had been a while before the last hanging party and there was a lot of goodies to put up. Now that we've added the extra supports in the ceiling we can put more weight up there. Uh, we hope. Some big items was an old wall phone donated by Tom of Texas. It's one of those made out of oak and is about 22 inches long and very heavy. Dan from Gold point donated a ringing crank for a phone. It's heavy and in an oak box about 10 inches square. We finally got to hang the pen and ink drawing of Charleton Heston and Robert Cummings and Roy Rogers provided by Sue from Furnace Creek. The artist is John Hagner. Heston's is a signed copy from the star himself and is number 4 of 500. Bob Cummings is number 1 of 250. Now for an amusing little story you might get a kick out of. In February our little pot belly stove needed a little more wood so I could keep the house warm. I went to our wood closet a few feet away and reached in to grab a stick. The stick moved!!!!!!!!! I almost grabbed the neck of a snake. It was only a 3 foot bull snake but at first glance I didn't stop to ask I just set a record for jumping backwards. I asked my good neighbor Dan to come help me get it out of the house. After taking almost all the wood out of the closet Dan grabbed it and stuck it in a bucket and out it went. Don't know how it got in there but I hope not to see one in here again for a very long time. Two Sundays ago we had a mommy horse give birth right outside Gold Point along side of the water road. We all went out to watch it get up and run off and get some pictures. It tried a few times but kept falling. Mommy stayed by it's side. Daddy didn't like people around so he stayed back about 100 feet or so pacing back and forth. Another yearling kept coming up to see and then back to dad again. Finally after a while everyone got tired of waiting for it to get up so they left. Red Dog drove out to get water in the devil truck and I stayed back in Old Blue with the camera. I turned off the engine and waited. Now that it was quite the other two horses came back. I stayed in the truck waiting for maybe 10 minutes. Then the baby after falling one more time got up on all fours. He stood there with legs spread apart shaking a little. Then he slowing brought them together. Then a few seconds later fell right over like a drunk sailor that really had too many drinks. He got up again a few seconds later and never fell again. He and his family then slowly walked off into the desert. We've had a set back on one of the cabins we've been working on. It used to belong to Beverly and Howard Harrell, owners of the Cottontail Ranch, so we call it the Bunny Hutch. It will someday be restored and made into a brothel theme bed and breakfast cabin. Over a period of time we've been working on getting a block foundation under it. We had gotten two rows length ways under it and one row under one end. We had been starting to raise the outside door wall up. It had dropped off the floor and settled a few inches down. We needed to get the door frame back up and on the floor. This would make the whole side stronger and would get the wall back where it belonged before we could start framing inside. Remember, none of these old cabins were built with 2 x 4 frame work like today. Anyway, the back side is missing most of its wall. This leaves a big hole for the wind to blow into. We had kinda secured the side wall, what was left of it, and worked a little on raising the door wall. It was getting late and was time for me to get ready to go back to Vegas. We would finish raising the wall into place the following week. Well the following week I had to go to Goldfield for an ICS Training class Friday and Saturday. After Saturdays class I went to Tonopah to pick up neat old fashioned looking gas stove donated to us by Dion & Tara of Las Vegas. I took it there to have it changed over from natural gas to propane. All day the wind had been picking up. It was blowing in from the South. I had quite a head wind driving back to Gold Point. I had heard that Vegas was getting 60 mph winds. We were getting the same with gusts that were higher. When I got to Gold Point I drove up to the Senator's house where Pat stays and looked over at the Bunny Hutch. Something looked different. I got out and went over to find that the wind had blown so hard into that big hole that it blew the walls out and moved the cabin a foot North off the block foundation we had it on. The wall now are on the ground with the floor about a foot or so higher. Oh well. I'll document it with photos and we will start over. We are determined to save the building!!!!! Now about the upcoming party 3 weekend from now. David toll at david@nevadaweb.com does a newsletter about Nevada called NevadaGram. If your interested in more happenings all over Nevada please write him and get on his list. In fact, he did a great article on Gold Point and the upcoming party (3 weekends from now) Write david and get the NevadaGram and read all about the upcoming chili and stew cook-off and everything else going on that weekend. Or you can e-mail me back and request a flyer or entry form. ok, that bout sums it up except for another chapter in "Tales from the Not so Old West. The following is from the May 9th, 1908 copy of the Rhyolite Bullfrog Miner. "Hornsilver is a promising camp. James McEntee, the Rhyolite merchant, returned Wednesday fro a trip to Hornsilver, and he entertains a very excellent opinion of the new camp. He says there are four stores there, eight to ten saloons, two boarding houses, two lodging houses and a population of about 400. The auto and stage lines are bringing in more people every day, and the town is growing very rapidly. Mr. McEntee understood that there were twenty-three sets of leasers at work, and several other applications for leases were being considered..." "William Seaman, contractor, left Thursday for Hornsilver, where he will build a house for Charles Stevens of the Ice Palace, who is going to open a branch establishment at the new camp." "Hornsilver Lots are held high. Andrew Marinovich of the Rhyolite restaurant returned Thursday from Hornsilver, where he went with a view to location a branch establishment. Owing, however, to the high price of lots he concluded to stay away. Lots in the main business part of the town are held at $1000 each and from $2000 to $2500 is asked for corner lots. While he believes the camp one of promise, Mr. Marinovich thinks these prices are entirely out of keeping with the general situation. Several Rhyolite people are in the new camp. John Beckman and M. Brick have organized the Great Western Brokerage company and are now open for business. The various leasers are steadily prosecuting development and as a rule the leases are showing up well.." "Guy T. Keene has sold his interest in the Rhyolite Herald to his former partner, Earle R. Clemens, who will in the future conduct the business... In addition to continuing the Herald, Mr. Clemens will undertake the publication of the Hornsilver Herald, at the new camp of Hornsilver, in Esmeralda county." "Fran Oleson has bought the Ice Palace Saloon on Golden street of Charles Stevens, the former proprietor.. Mr. Stevens left this week for Hornsilver where he will open a saloon. Well until next time be happy and healthy. Happy Trails and Sunsets, Sheriff Stone &/or Red Dog Lil |
