Thanks and Looking Back at 2023!

I just want to give a "Thank You!" for those who have followed this blog or my work on Youtube (or other video sites). It is not important to me to have thousands of people following what I do. If I only get a handful of people that enjoy what I do that is fine. With that said, I do appreciate those that share what I do with others. My motivations for doing this are a lot different than many other content creators. I do it for the love of it, not for money or as an instrument for something else.

I have learned a lot in the past six months or so. I kind of know the direction I would like to take this blog going further. Yet, at the same time, to do this takes a lot of my own time. It feels like since August I have been working on videos every few days, correcting mistakes in them, and then I wonder where the time has gone. 

So, I intend to take a few weeks off from this. I still have a bunch of drone footage I want to show and some other things in the next couple of months. 

In the meantime, please check out my last video of the year (and any others I did this year if you have not seen them):

Flying Over Aurora (Youtube video)

Have a Happy 2024!

Ghosts of the Past: Flying Over Aurora (Part 2)

Again, the Wild West Mine would have been here. I have never walked up here. This is the nice advantage of drones. You can see what remains here:

Now turning around where my drone was hovering over the Wild West Mine site:

It is nice to see some of the other roads. The following is looking toward the north:

Somewhat northeast here:

This one is a little out of place since it should have been in Part 1. This is hovering near Lover's Leap. Looking west and those roads are supposed to go Bodie.

So, this ends my "Ghosts of the Past" series where I have returned to a bunch of places I have talked about on this blog before. I felt the need for an update in video and pictures. Will I come back in ten years for 8K footage? Lol! I love these areas so I probably will return, but not for quite some time. There are other areas I need to get to.

Flying Over Aurora (Youtube video)

Ghosts of the Past: Flying Over Aurora (Part 1)

 Hey everyone! I hope you are having a great holiday season!

Long story short, I was supposed to have these next flew blogs up by Christmas for the ending of the "Ghosts of the Past" series, but I got sick and then my internet provider went out on me for over a week. With that said, let's get to it:

After I did the GoPro footage and did two drone flights over the area. The first flight started at the where the Daly Gang house would have been. I flew over to the other side near the peak of Lover's Leap. I knew that is where the most popular picture from 1890 was taken looking down on the town. I tried to emulate it, but was much higher up. If I had come down a little lower and moved the drone to my left I might have been a little closer:

A slightly different picture. You can see how the water really "carved" into the where the town would have been. It turns out the town was prepared for this, and I have seen how water would have come down almost like in some of the maps. 

This is trying is looking out where Pine St. would have gone east to west (or vice versa).

For comparison this is from my previous drone during 2020. This lacks the water "carving" drainage of 2023. 

Finally, this is crossing over to the eastern side. Where the Wild West Mine would have been:

I will continue with this one in Part 2.

Flying Over Aurora (Youtube video)

R.I.P. Gunfighter William E. Carder

So one-hundred and fifty-nine years ago, either a justifiable homicide or a murder took place. This is one of the big reasons I (and others) enjoy reading about the Wild West (aka Western Americana): we get to see what happens in areas where there is little law enforcement or rule of law, and how the areas evolve as time goes on until they get proper law enforcement and rule of law.

I have talked about William E. Carder before. More than likely, he would have been commonly known as Billy. In the video I give a short biography; this is mostly a transcript of what I said. This is a bit different, but consistent with my old blog about him that I will link below.

Interesting enough a bunch more about Carder has come out in the past ten years or so. I was reading an old book on the Western Sierra and Carder's name came up several times. That is something fun when you can start tracing names over various places and see how they all connect to each other. I mention one of these odd coindences in the video.

Carder was born in Tennessee In 1832, and by the age of 18 he was motivated by the gold rush to travel on his own to Placerville, CA. By 1855, he was the town marshal of Columbia, CA for 2 years. Right away he ended up killing a vagrant by the name of Martin Hennessy who had an outstanding warrant on him. On July 4th, 1857 he was part of a posse to capture a murderer of a man called John Leary. Carder ended up being the one who captured the guy. By September 1858 he started working for a local newspaper. He ended up getting in a shootout with a John Carinelli. No one was seriously injured. In 1861, Carder was down in Sorona, CA working for a local newspaper. He got into a feud with a rival newspaper editor H.C. Bennett. Bennett would constantly insult Carder in Bennett's newspaper. Carder challenged him to a duel. No duel ever happened but Carder eventually confronted Bennett in a gunfight where they both shot each other in the shoulder. Judge Wheaton examined Carder and dismissed him. 

Sometime after this Carder came to Aurora, NV. He got into a shooting scrap with Thomas Greely. An innocent bystander E.J. Warren was killed during this fight. He married Ann Davis in 1863. He tried to run for city marshal that year, but was defeated. He was not part of the Daly Gang. He did have some interaction with them drinking and gambling, but he was clearly opposed to them by the time the town formed a vigilante group against them. Finally, he was out of town on business with a man named Moses Brockman in the fall of 1864. Carder came back to Aurora and was expecting Brockman to bring a specific horse with him for Carder. Brockman came back to Aurora without the horse. Carder was angry and eventually let it be known that he intended to kill Brockman. More than likely this was idle words of a drunken man, but Brockman believed him. 

This is where the following takes place so on the night of December 10th, 1864. Brockman was right around here hidden in an unused doorway on the outside of the Exchange Saloon. Carder walked out at 11:30 that night and Brockman shot Carder point blank range. Carder never knew what hit him. The buck shot tore through his neck and his right shoulder instantly killing him. Due to Carder's reputation and Brockman being known as a peaceful miner, he was let go with a justifiable homicide. The thinking was while it was a surprise attack, was Brockman just supposed to sit around and wait until an expert gunfighter was ready to fight? One person disagreed with this assessment.

So out here in the middle of nowhere at the Aurora Cemetery we find his grave:

Then...it takes a little work to find it because it is what you might call the "Boot Hill" section of Aurora. It is a little off and away from the other obvious graves. 

It is interesting to note that there are some other graves nearby without names, headstones, or markers, but surrounded by rocks. I have seen an old picture in one of my books that says that one right next to Carder's grave would be a member of the Daly Gang. It had a wooden marker that would obviously not be there anymore.  

That person that disagreed with the justifiable homicide verdict was his wife Ann.

William E. Carder

Native of Tennessee

Aged 33 Years

was assassinated

in Aurora on

the night of

Dec. 10, 1864

I will avenge saith

The Lord

Erected by his wife Annie E.

The video:

R.I.P. Gunfighter William E. Carder (Youtube)

My old blogs:

The old Auora Ghost Town (William E. Carder) blog

All my Aurora Cemetery blogs

The following books contain most of the information about Carder: 1)McGrath, Roger D. Gunfighters Highwaymen & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier. University of California Press, 1984. Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/3ejduebr McGrath's book is the classic for all the "wild west" information regarding Aurora and Bodie ghost towns. There is a page or two about Carder. 2)Silver Sue. Mineral County Nevada. Museum Ass. of Mineral County, 2011. Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/wzjknjwa In the chapter about Aurora there is a short biography about Carder. It mentions his days in Western and Eastern Sierra. 3)Silver Sue. Aurora Nevada's Silent City on the Hill: An Historical Perspective. S. Silver 2011. Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/bdhdwmew This is the book you want for learning about the graves at the cemetery. There is an entry and short biography for Carder.

R.I.P. Marden Kids

 I went over a lot of the Cemtery at Aurora back in 2011. I did not really feel the need to do this one over again so I will link to that one below.

I do want to go over two of the grave areas that are important to me. The one I am focusing on in this blog will be the Marden family kids.

I am going to refer you to the video below that covers everything I want to say about this family. It is the mark of living in the olden days when you have big families because you never know how many kids will survive into adulthood. These days with medical technology it is a lot different.

The obelisk on the left represents four kids. There is a name on each of the four sides of it. I have taken pictures of each side since I was there since I did not in 2011. I show the sides in the video.

I might come back and edit this blog at a later time if there is something else I want to say about this family. I will probably reread the books I mention in the video sometime next year. 

The one thing I did in the original video is I was emphasizing the diphtheria outbreak on members of the family that had it so I said one of the kids of the family survived the outbreak. Yet, there were two others that never had it so the total family kids of the Marden's that survived into the 20th century were three. In other words, all the kids that had diphtheria died, but one. Yet, there were two others that never had diphtheria at all. So, a total of three Marden kids were still alive after the outbreak. I made something more complicated than it should have been, but what you do?

 I think this is something we need to keep in mind when we talk to others and read what others say on the internet. There is a tendency to emphasize something and leave out other things depending on how important they are. I always see people respond to others, "You forgot to mention..." which is probably not true at all. I had this issue when making the Streets of Aurora video. I had to remind myself to keep things simple because a lot more could be said for just about everything I said in that video. Like a lot of videos I do that I talk in, I have to narrow down what I say. My rule of thumb is if I talk to much I ruin the video. The Streets of Aurora video was an exception I felt I really needed to speak in that one.

R.I.P. Marden Kids (Youtube Video)

R.I.P. Aurora Blogs 

Ghosts of the Past: Mark Twain's Cabin Again

 In almost every blog entry I have written on here there have been mistakes. Some are not really important. I would put stuff like I went left when I went right, words left out or not making sense, etc. I have had stuff up for years only to find out, "Did I say that?! Good grief! I never meant that at all!"  For the most part, my readers have been forgiving about those sort of things. 

I have had a few contact me over a few things over the years were my locations were off. In one or two situations I was not trying to show the location of what they thought. Lol! In others there was a good reason that I was mistaken, and I just had not gotten around to updating what I had done. I have few like that I still want to take care of. 

This is one of those situations that no one has said anything to me about, but I have known I have been a bit off for quite some time. 

My original blog on this cabin: Aurora Ghost Town (Mark Twain)

Here is the reality of this situation...I don't care.

Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) lived at a variety of places in Aurora during his six months there. He lived with friends while there. There is a story that some woman took a piece of wood for this cabin and presented it to Mark Twain. His reply was something to the effect that he never owned a cabin in Aurora. 

So, in the blog above I ended up going a little further than I should have. At the time I did not have access to the older picture shown in this photo:

The above picture was taken in 2020. It is a little closer to where this cabin would have been. Notice that Lover's Leap can be seen in the background. That is key. 

When I went this last summer in 2023 I had forgotten I had taken the above picture. So I ended up a little further on East Pine St. than I should have. It is in the video that I note the mistake.

Again, it is a situation that I just do not care enough about. My apologies to any Mark Twain fans that this is important to them. There are certain things I bring up on this blog that are really important to me and others that are nice tidbits, but I just don't care that much about this compared to other things about Aurora. If you do care about this then let me link you to this article:

Mark Twain's Aurora Cabins - Site of his First Success

Heading back down west to Pine St. we see this:

Again, this would have been in 2020 when it was a lot less green and road eroded than in 2020. The Esmeralda Hotel and Courthouse would have been the building on the left.

In the next blog or two I will be heading back to the cemetery.

The Streets of Aurora 2.0 (Youtube)

Ghosts of the Past: The Streets of Aurora

 The video I link below gives you the two main streets that would have been the main intersection of Aurora: Antelope and Pine Streets. Those two streets are where most of the business, drinking, and gambling would have taken place. There were other streets around the town. On those streets there would have been cabins and houses people would have lived. After the years of the first mining boom and until the 20th century, most people that lived in Aurora would have lived peaceful lives. I tend to focus on the "wild west" era so just about everything I talk about in the video is from the early 1860s when there was a lawless element at Aurora. 

Now a reminder about the town, there is nothing really there in the town anymore. Around the time of World War 2 many people came to Aurora to take the bricks of the buildings for use elsewhere. You can find some of the foundations of the buildings while looking at the remains. However, some of the fun is trying to recreate the town from the pictures we have. 

For example, looking east on Pine Street:

This picture taken from 2020 combined with the black and white picture gives you an idea of how the buildings would have been on the Pine Street looking east. The Exchange Saloon would have been right next to where two adults and kid are on the right side of the picture. That was the most important saloon in town and most of the "wild west" action happened there.

At this point, I want to mention the mistake I back in 2011. I assumed the name "Exchange" was the name of something called the "Merchants Exchange Hotel" which would have been a few hundred feet behind me on West Pine Street. I had seen the name "exchange" in print so many times that I assumed they were all the same. Recently, I read there was another "exchange "saloon on the lower level/basement of the courthouse. Each time I come to Aurora I learn something new. 

Going up the road one eventually encounters this:

This is The Last Chance Saloon foundations. 

The road eventually splits. The side of the road on the left continues Pine Street. If one goes right then it is Wide West Street that takes you here:

This is where the Daly Gang house would have been. The Daly Gang was hired by one of the mining companies to protect their claims while they were settled in court. The gang of professional gunfighters eventually became deputy marshals in town due to one of the gang members being elected City Marshall. So, for about a year the gang controlled the town.

I am going to stop here for now. I will come back in a day or two for another blog entry on this town.

The Streets of Aurora 2.0 (Youtube)

My old blogs I did during 2011:

For my blog on the Daly Gang go HERE.

My old blogs on Aurora during 2011 go HERE.

More blogs I did on Aurora during 2011 go HERE.

Some of the books that are important about Aurora:

1)McGrath, Roger D. Gunfighters Highwaymen & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier. University of California Press, 1984. Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/3ejduebr McGrath's book is the classic for all the "wild west" information regarding Aurora and Bodie ghost towns. 2)Shaw, Clifford Alpheus. Aurora Nevada 1860-1960 : Mining Camp Frontier City Ghost Town. Second ed. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018. Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/bdd4pzeh Most people will want to get the paperback edition in the above link. This the best handbook for trying to "recreate" the town of Aurora. LOTS of pictures through the book. In fact, using this book and pausing my video might be the best way to appreciate the town! :) 3)Silver, Sue. Mineral County Nevada. Museum Ass. of Mineral County, 2011. Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/wzjknjwa This book has a chapter on Aurora that was useful. 4)Shaw, Clifford Alpheus. The Last Days of the Daly Gang at Aurora Nevada. CreateSpace, 2014. Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/bdd4pzeh This small book gives most of testimony people had in the days following the final murder committed by the gang up until they were hanged. I would recommend the McGrath book with the chapter on the gang first, then getting this one if you are looking for more information. It does include some of the location pictures of where things happened (kind of like what I did in the video).

Ghosts of the Past: Aurora, Nevada

So my series I have been calling Ghosts of the Past was not really meant to be just a October/Halloween series. It kind of worked out that way, but I knew I was going to be doing something that would take me into December. So here we are. This series was mostly me going back to places I have shown before on the blog and them being ghost towns or mines. It was primarily me updating a few things and adding a more up to date GoPro video. 

With that said, I love Aurora Ghost Town in Nevada, but I think I said most of what I wanted to say about the town back in 2011. I will link all those old blogs below in the next blog entry. So let me update you on what has happened.

Overlooking the town in 2023:

First, I did make some big mistakes that I tried to correct during that time. I have not looked, but I think Youtube took down the annotations I did to correct the errors I made. This was a big motivation for me to do another video and make things right. I will note them as we come to them.

Second, a few more books about the town have come out since I was last there. I will note those in the next blog or two, but it was really great getting lots of new information about the town and people that had inhabited it.

Third, I was in Aurora back in 2020. I am going to actually admit to you that I was much sharper in finding what I was after during that time than when I came in 2023. There is a reason for that. In 2020, I was still using my old-style camcorder, and it was about that time I was seriously thinking of shifting to GoPro. One thing I did not really want to give up was my ability to zoom in and out of places, but I knew it was time for me to switch video technology. This is one of the reasons I delayed talking about Aurora again. I meant to, but I knew I would probably be coming back.

I am going to use this blog to point out a few things, maybe a few more blogs to clarify some of the errors I made in 2011, and show what I did on the recent trips. 

 

So what made 2023 a much different year that 2020 or any other time I had been there in the past? Check out this picture of me looking towards the east of Pine Street.

Due to the winter/spring of 2023 the whole entire Eastern Sierra was much different looking than I was used to. I was walking around where this picture was taken and having a hard time identifying things as easily as I did in 2020. All the bushy plant life of Aurora was much bigger and green than I had ever seen before! Not only did I have a hard time walking around, but I had a harder time seeing where the roads would have been. 

Then just walking past the main intersection you could see parts of the road were washed out by the water that had come through here. The above picture is looking at where the Exchange Saloon would have been on the corner of Pine and Antelope Streets. You can see where the water came and washed this part out. It is shown more in the video I took as I mention it a few times. 

In the past I would see maps of where two areas of water would come through the town, and how they must have dug out parts of the area to allow for this. This time I could clearly see where an overwhelming amount of water had gone through the town earlier in 2023. There was a small stream going through the town during the summer. That I had never seen before.

You will see this in the video. So, I was a little disappointed in how that turned out. I truly hope that there is some repair work done on the roads since there was quite a bit of erosion that took place this past year. There were parts of these roads were there were big holes in.

Okay, I am going to stop here for the time being. I'll get back to this tomorrow.