Cerro Gordo & Tiburcio Vasquez

Look east, across the pale crust of Owens Lake, and trace the steep wall of the Inyo Mountains. High on that ridge, near 8,500 feet, sit the bones of Cerro Gordo — "Fat Hill" in Spanish — one of the most consequential ghost towns in California. After a Mexican prospector named Pablo Flores found rich silver here in the 1860s, the camp poured out so much silver and lead that the Los Angeles News wrote in 1872 that it was "the silver cord that binds our present existence." It is barely an exaggeration to say this hillside helped fund the infrastructure of early Los Angeles.

Getting that wealth to market was its own saga. Mortimer Belshaw cut the toll "Yellow Grade" up the mountain, and from a landing on the lakeshore the steamer Bessie Brady carried bullion across the water to Cartago, just down the highway from you. From there, Remi Nadeau's freight outfit ran long mule teams — often eighteen or twenty animals — south toward the city.

That river of silver also drew Tiburcio Vasquez, the Californio bandit. In February 1874, near Coyote Holes south of here, his gang held up the Cerro Gordo stage — making off with its silver, the Wells Fargo box, and the valuables of the passengers, Belshaw among them — before scattering toward Robbers Roost. Vasquez was hanged in 1875.

There is a final, bitter turn. The lake you're crossing was real water then — until Los Angeles, the city Cerro Gordo helped raise, diverted the Owens River into its aqueduct beginning in 1913. Over the following decade the lakebed shrank and went alkali, until by the mid-1920s it was little more than dust. The silver built the city; the city took the water back.