Mammoth has characters

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the September 2005 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine.

Most of what we know about the old mining camps comes from the pages of their newspapers. Even the smallest and most transient camps had a weekly sheet of news, ads and stories that their editors spun to fill the empty spaces.

But one paper and one editor in particular stand out. Lying Jim" Townsend and his Homer Mining Index, based in Lundy Canyon in the late 19th century, was so decidedly outrageous and brazen that it earned him a unique spot in Eastern Sierra history.

His exaggerations, caricatures, and out-and-out lies are legendary. Here's how he described the beautiful, steep-walled Lundy Canyon to prospectors in 1880:

"The country about us is the roughest under the sun. ... The roughest neighborhood of Virginia City is a race-track in comparison. ... You start to climb a hill that looks like a modest knoll, and after two or three hours' desperate struggling you are tempted to swear that the hill grows faster than you can climb, and that its top is crawling away from you.

"Lundy in the evening looks like the camping-ground of an army. Fires twinkle and glimmer among the grand old pines while the weary prospector ... deftly flips the toothsome slapjack. Tents and brush shelters signify that their occupants have been delicately reared; the middle class bivouac on the lee side of a log, while the real hearty old mountaineer curls himself up on a granite shelf and snores the bullfrogs out of countenance."

Here's Lying Jim on the Lundy Canyon weather:

"The wind here is a holy terror. A puff will turn a dog inside out. I lived in a solid log cabin built against a granite ledge, and yet the wind is so strong that our habitation danced a jig every time a gust came down the canyon, and now we have been blown across several lots, and our house threatens to trot down to the lake.

"A fierce gust came down Main street. ... Taking the new hotel 'broadside on,' [the gust] slid it from its underpinning and deposited it in the adjoining lot."

The men who edited papers in the remote mining camps of the Eastern Sierra learned their trade as typesetters for papers such as San Francisco's Golden Era or Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise.

They formed a loose fraternity of newsmen, humorists, editors, typesetters, storytellers and varnishers of truth, often writing about the doings of one another, along with reports on the saloon fights and big strikes in their own districts.

Gold ore was discovered in Lundy Canyon in the fall of 1879. The Homer Mining District was organized as soon as the snow melted the next spring. When James William Emery Townsend arrived in Lundy, June 1880, he found Joe Baker and John Curry setting type for the first edition of the Homer Mining Index.

The editors set the stories into type as they composed them. Townsend pitched in, setting in type humorous descriptions of the camp. When Baker and Curry decided to try their luck at the lighter work of prospecting, Townsend bought the paper.

The weather, along with a whiskey famine, combined to drive many men from Lundy. Townsend also wearied of his toil and in the spring built an arrastra -- a stone mill to pulverize ore. He made enough money to tour the western slope camps. He took a job with the Reno Gazette, but the siren song of Bodie and Lundy kept calling him back.

Ore prices plummeted in the early 1880s, leading to the closure of most of the mines in Mono County by 1884.

In 1888, Townsend returned to Lundy to perpetrate his grandest hoax. He resurrected the Homer Mining Index: his purpose was to create a fiction that the May Lundy mine not only was active but that the town of Lundy was thriving.

The Index had no subscribers. Its advertisements touted defunct businesses. Each edition was shipped to England for the edification of prospective stockholders in the West May Lundy Company, Ltd.

His weekly mining reports were gems of avoidance: "Work at the May Lundy mine is progressing about the same as usual, therefore there is nothing to report, but we cannot help remarking that three times the present force ought to be employed. There is ore enough [to operate] a much larger mill than is now in use."

His local news featured such characters as "J. W. Heilshorn of the Dead Broke Mining Company," and the fantastic tale of one Billy, a sleepwalking prospector who scaled the cliffs of Mount Gilcrest, each night bringing home "the richest quartz he ever saw."

Discovery of the stock scam resulted in a hearing at the British Consulate in San Francisco. The mining expert called to testify for the defense was none other than Townsend. The fraud was uncovered, but none of the perpetrators was charged with any crime.

Townsend returned to Lundy. The harsh winter of 1889-90 set records and stimulated Townsend's descriptive genius.

"Four months ago today the storm began," he wrote, "and, with a few intermissions of an hour or two each, has raged with unprecedented violence ever since."

Avalanches "struck the lake ...with a thundering crash ... [and were] was followed by cannon-like reports ... the hoarse roar of a steam fog-horn with a bad cold ... shriek(s) like seduced angels of the ragged edge of repentance and despair ..."

When a slide hit the Lundy Brewery it was "wiped out and spread out like soft butter upon hot bread ..."
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