Kern River Ghost Towns

Just when the 49er's had given up their feverish search for gold in Northern California, rumors began to spread about golden nuggets being found in the hills above the River Kern.  When a group of miners found gold in 1854 in the Greenhorn Mountains, the second gold rush was on.  One year later, 6,000 men had poured into the Kern River Valley.  Camps grew into towns.  Saloons, hotels and small wooden stores went up over night.  As soon as the gold was gone, however, the towns were abandoned.  Ghost towns are up and down the Kern River.  My travel buddy and I visited two of them last week.  Gravestones and historic markers are all that's left of most of them.  It was a bit eerie.

Keyesville

Keyesville was named after Richard Keyes, a veteran prospector, who found a quartz vein in the gulch above today's Lake Isabella.    The view of the lake is spectacular from up here, but other than that, there's not much to see.  The town of Keyesville reached its peak during the Civil War.  Five stamp mills in this area brought in one million dollars worth of gold and silver.  There are people living up here and we saw a sign staking a new claim.  With gold inching towards $2,000/ounce, it makes me wonder if another gold rush isn't on the horizon.

Havilah

Havilah was far more interesting.  Both the courthouse and the school are replicas of the buildings that were in this town during the 1860's.  During its prime, there were 147 buildings here and Havilah was the county seat of Kern until it moved to Bakersfield.  Even though it was named after the biblical land found in Genesis, Havilah was a hotbed of vice.  Story after story can be found of the despicable characters who settled here.  It had a reputation for endless drinking, gambling and murder.

One sad story I read in Ardis Walker's excellent book,  The Rough and the Righteous,  was about a woman named Alice Sterling who lived in Havilah.  She was betrothed to Fred Stewart who got shot by Bill Hammond, a gambler.  Fred had accused him of cheating.  Fred's brother and six other friends went after the reprobate, but never found him.  Alice succumbed to depression and disappeared.  Locals said she threw herself down a mining  shaft.   Three years later, however, in Pioche, Nevada, a young woman walked quietly into another saloon and shot Bill Hammond to death.  Then she turned the gun on herself.  It was Alice Sterling.

There's a cemetery in Havilah which tells the tale of a more sorrowful story.  This tombstone of three tiny children surrounded by teddy bears reminds us that people died very young back then.  With no antibiotics, diseases like the flu and measles often brought certain death.

  In an antique shop in Bodfish, we started talking to the owner about the mining relics, and he reminded us that the average man was only about 5'4" and weighed 110 lbs. back then.  Mining for gold was backbreaking work and young men were wrecks by the time they reached 30 years of age.  Although the mining towns of the Kern River Valley were abandoned when the gold was gone,  the spirits of the men and women who lived there still remain.