Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Miner Vincent's Cabin

(GPS: N34 22.075 W117 44.665)

In the last two blogs I covered the Big Horn Mine. There was one more thing I wanted to check out before leaving. I backtracked about half of the hike. I reached this point below and turned around. If you stay on the wagon trail then you get to the Big Horn Mine, but there is a small trail that you can't really see in the middle of the picture that drops down, and you head to left.
About a 1/4 of mile later I went off trail to my right and encountered the following cabin.
This is the Miner Vincent Cabin. It has been worked on in order to keep it around as a historical artifact. The inside of the cabin:
Here is some sort of tray. I assume that a lot of what you see in here is just stuff that has been added to give it a historical look rather than being original items owned by the miners. I could be wrong though.
Miner Vincent was a hermit that kept his cabin closed up most of the time. The open window areas would have been closed up.
Here is looking back out.
I will list a PDF file below you can read if you want to find out more about Vincent. Long story short, he was a Civil War Vet., went west to Arizona, and then ended up here working at the Big Horn Mine he helped discover.

While he was dying in a hospital he revealed that he and a friend that were working a claim in Arizona had killed three men in self-defense. Although it does not appear he was ever sought after for possible murder charges he came further west and changed his name around to confuse any possible avengers. Since he was a war veteran he was allowed to be buried at the National Cemetery in Los Angeles.

That covers the hike I did almost a year ago. My other goal was to make the connection to his gravesite. I did that a few weeks ago. This was my main purpose of coming to the cemetery. There were a few more graves I looked for, but this is the one I was after.

The name he was known as in California was Charles Tom Vincent. His real name was Charles Vincent Dougherty. That was the name he was received his Civil War pension checks from, but no one ever knew because he would always go to Los Angeles to receive them himself. The PDF talks more about the mystery life he was living.

GPS: 34 03.845 W118 27.265 (his Find a Grave Link for the actual grave section)
His tombstone is kind of different looking because it has a black line streak on it.
Other than that, you probably would not know about the mysterious mountain man life he had lived.
There aren't any facial pictures of him AFAIK because of the fact he was keeping a low profile in the mountains.

The Charles Vincent History PDF (This gives the most I think you will find on him)

I think this is best I can do in putting the pieces together on this little historical quest.