This city has creepy stories of brothels, serial killers and lawlessness.
In the US, entrepreneur Brent Underwood bought the whole city of Cerro Gordo for $1.4 million: he became its only resident and reveals the terrible secrets of the past.
Writes about it dailystar.co.uk.
Founded as a mining town in 1865, Cerro Gordo went on to become California’s largest silver producer. In its heyday, it had a population of 4,500, nearly two-thirds of the population of Los Angeles at the time.
Hundreds of buildings were built here, including department stores, saloons and brothels for miners’ entertainment, and the American Hotel, one of the finest hotels in California at the time.
But now the 360-acre site is a ghost town with just 20 buildings and one resident, Brent Underwood.
Brent, an entrepreneur, purchased the over 150-year-old abandoned city with his savings in 2018 for $1.4 million and is documenting the journey of the city’s transformation into a resort on YouTube. But along the way, he discovered that the once bustling town also has a dark past.
Removal of the indigenous people
Before Cerro Gordo became a mining town, this land was home to an indigenous population known as the Paiutes.
“In the years leading up to the founding of Cerro Gordo as a mining town, from about 1850 to 1866, there was devastating warfare in the Owens Valley between settlers and the native Paiutes,” explains Brent.
The US Army forcibly evicted the native Paiutes from the Owens Valley, and soon the Mexican prospector Pablo Flores began mining and smelting ore at the mine.
But his dark history did not end there, and thousands of miners flocked to work in the prosperous city of Cerro Gordo, which soon created a reputation for lawlessness in the Wild West.
The city became infamous for its violence, and shootings and murders became a regular occurrence.
City of constant killing
“In the 1800s, Cerro Gordo was a silver boom town fueled by booze and greed, and the newspapers of the day reported the murder weekly,” says Brent.
He cited only a few newspaper articles from 1873 to give an idea of what the city was like, in particular one of November 6: “Pistols continue to crack, and good people fall before them, as if neither law nor society appreciated human life is larger than the life of many wild animals.
The following week, another article appeared that said, “There are already five men, four of whom have been killed in this county in the past few weeks.”
Two months later, the editor changed it to “seven men in seven weeks.”
Brent added: “So there was actually one murder a week here, and after the seventh murder, the editor wrote the following: “These lawless robbers, who, with murder in their hearts and instruments of death attached to their bodies, gather in public places, always ready to defuse their deadly weapons on innocent and unarmed citizens.”
Due to constant crime, doctors refused to work in the city
Once in the 19th century, the city tried to hire a doctor, but he left on the first day.
On the way out of the city, he met a reporter and told him: “Friend, I came here to buy a supply of medicines and practice medicine, but I’ll be damned if I’m interested in shooting.”
When the second doctor arrived, the newspapers reported that his first patient had enclosed his bed with a 6-foot wall of sandbags to keep him from being hit by stray bullets at night.
The second doctor faced even more violence when he took his companion to one of the many brothels in the city.
When they arrived, the doctor’s friend asked him what the name of one of the women was, to which he replied: “Horned Frog.”
Hearing this, the woman wanted to stab the doctor with a knife, but then another woman from the brothel grabbed her wrist.
Things then escalated when a friend of the “horned frog” rushed at the doctor with a knife, only to be stopped by a local man named George Snow, who pulled out a revolver and shot him dead on the spot. He was fined $30 for the fatal shooting.
In brothels, terrible murders constantly occurred, since visiting miners used to resolve conflicts in this way. Once a tragedy occurred in the mines. Then, due to the collapse, up to 30 miners of Chinese origin were killed.
Miners from China were forced to live in a separate area of the city
The history of Chinese workers is also a dark spot in Cerro Gordo’s past.
Brent explained: “There was a Chinatown, there were a lot of Chinese workers moving ore from the mines of Cerro Gordo, and they had to live in another part of the city, and it was not fair.”
Brent suspects that the Chinese workers who died in the city were even buried in a separate area from the main cemetery, which is estimated to contain the remains of 50 to 500 people.
In an update released last month, Brent said he enlisted the help of former police detective Paul Dosti and his dog Bosco, who searches for human remains, in an attempt to find new burial sites. He succeeded and he suspects that there could be more such burials.
Bad luck in the city and a notorious killer
For the past three years, Brent has been working to preserve the ghost town’s history and open a hotel for overnight stays.
But in 2020, Brent, who bought the city on Friday the 13th, suffered a huge setback when the historic American Hotel burned to the ground. By an eerie coincidence, exactly 149 years before the day it first opened its doors on June 15, 1871, the hotel caught fire due to electricity.
The flames also destroyed the ice house, as well as the cabin of the infamous killer Billy Crapo, who just shot people for no reason.
Despite this, the entrepreneur rebuilds the hotel and plans to turn the ghost town into a tourist attraction.
Recall that the girl earned a million by cleaning the dirtiest houses in the world.
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2023-08-13 18:55:16
