Free Lilac Mines by Cheryl Klein Page B

back.”
    â€œSeriously?” Felix tries to picture her aunt hoisting herself up the face of a mountain, or whatever search and rescue people do.
    â€œYeah, all those search and rescue folks are great. But super modest. Don’t let her get away with not telling you about it.”
    Felix sighs. She tries to concentrate on the sepia tone photos and blocks of text interspersed with the carnage. Bearded men with pickaxes stare back at her, as if she sent them down in the deep black mines. Here and there a testament to the gargantuan nature of mining: a rusted bolt the size of her fist, a slice of the beam that held up a stamp mill, cut from a 200-year-old tree. Things that could crush her to dust.
    She follows the story on laminated cardboard. Lilac Mines, a silver town in Gold Rush country, did its best business from the 1860s through the 1890s, when it was still referred to as East Beedleborough. Mineshafts shot through the mountain like bullets, and the mountain bled silver. Teams of mules lugged the ore to a V-shaped trough that snaked down the mountain to the stamp mill. Once crushed, the ore stewed in vats of cyanide until the silver let go of the rock.
    â€œStill cyanide in the ground water,” Ranger LeVoy says cheerfully. “I’d stick to bottled Arrowhead if I were you. We all do.” Six days a week, the town shook to the rhythm of the stamp mill. Immense iron wheels engraved with their places of origin—Los Angeles or San Francisco—pounded out the shape of a new place.
    There was also a sawmill on the eastern side of town, just above the mining camps, where the less glamorous half of mining took place. Trees were felled, planed square, and more mules pulled them up the mountain, where they shored up the mine, making a hole in the rock look like a saloon entrance. Rustic but welcoming. Miles and miles of wood lined the mines, and as the trees vanished from the eastern half of East Beedleborough, the mountain was, in a way, turned inside out.
    The town became a boomtown, which was not unlike a city, except that everything was the same age and everyone thought they’d be leaving soon, even as they hung curtains and planted telegraph poles—in a straight line, because who knew if electricity could bend? The women held quilting bees at the church. The men joined E Clampus Vitus, the miners’ fraternal order. “Both good places to gossip,” says Ranger LeVoy.
    Then, in 1899, the 16-year-old daughter of mine foreman Harold Ambrose walked into a mine entrance at the top of the town and never walked out. No one knew why Lilac Ambrose had gone there in the first place. Her father wasn’t even working that day. No one knew much about Lilac Ambrose at all. For 20 days, the men and the mules searched the hollows of the mountain. Lanterns swinging and voices calling as loudly as was possible without causing a cave-in. They found a few artifacts. Girl things—a shoe button, a hair ribbon. The latter hangs on a nail behind glass. But they didn’t find Lilac or Lilac’s body. They started calling the town Lilac Mines. They even wrote it into the hillside, a giant LM made of tiny white pebbles, but Harold Ambrose was still broken-hearted.
    Within ten years, the mine dried up. The mountain was like a person who’d cried so hard he had no more tears. The people who’d talked about moving back—to Chicago, Hartford, Iowa City, to the tenements of New York—finally did. Or they moved forward.
    History stops at the 1920s. Lilac Mines becomes a ghost town. The end. But there are people here now, plenty of them. Still, Felix concedes, it would be weird to see color photos from, say, the 1960s alongside the stuffed snakes and rusty pickaxes. History has to be black-and-white and rust-colored.
    â€œThe sawmill re-opened in the ’40s,” Ranger LeVoy volunteers. “But they ripped most of the mine equipment apart and used the metal in the War. Hey,