nder where you may
throughout the length and breadth of this mountain-barred wilderness,
you everywhere come upon these dead mining towns, with their tall
chimney stacks, standing forlorn amid broken walls and furnaces, and
machinery half buried in sand, the very names of many of them already
forgotten amid the excitements of later discoveries, and now known only
through tradition--tradition ten years old.

While exploring the mountain ranges of the State during a considerable
portion of three summers, I think that I have seen at least five of
these deserted towns and villages for every one in ordinary life. Some
of them were probably only camps built by bands of prospectors, and
inhabited for a few months or years, while some specially interesting
canyon was being explored, and then carelessly abandoned for more
promising fields. But many were real towns, regularly laid out and
incorporated, containing well-built hotels, churches, schoolhouses, post
offices, and jails, as well as the mills on which they all depended; and
whose well-graded streets were filled with lawyers, doctors, brokers,
hangmen, real estate agents, etc., the whole population numbering
several thousand.

A few years ago the population of Hamilton is said to have been nearly
eight thousand; that of Treasure Hill, six thousand; of Shermantown,
seven thousand; of Swansea, three thousand. All of these were
incorporated towns with mayors, councils, fire departments, and daily
newspapers. Hamilton has now about one hundred inhabitants, most of whom
are merely waiting in dreary inaction for something to turn up. Treasure
Hill has about half as many, Shermantown one family, and Swansea none,
while on the other hand the graveyards are far too full.

In one canyon of the Toyabe range, near Austin, I found no less than
five dead towns without a single inhabitant. The streets and blocks of
"real estate" graded on the hillsides are rapidly falling back into
the wilderness. Sagebrushes are growing up around the forges of the
blacksmith shops, and lizards bask on the crumbling walls.

While traveling southward from Austin down Big Smoky Valley, I noticed a
remarkably tall and imposing column, rising like a lone pine out of the
sagebrush on the edge of a dry gulch. This proved to be a smokestack of
solid masonry. It seemed strangely out of place in the desert, as if it
had been transported entire from the heart of some noisy manufacturing
town and left here by m