While exploring Surprise Canyon and Panamint City, one of the coolest places I found was "The Castle," a cabin nestled near the base of Stewart's Wonder Mine, up Sourdough Canyon. There, historic information was plentiful, including a photocopy of the Panamint News, Vol. 1 No. 9, from December 15, 1874 and a short introduction contributed by a fellow explorer.
GREATER THAN THE COMSTOCK!
To this exultant boast Panamint City was born in 1873 after a gestating decade of periodic prospecting.
Hidden in a small cul-de-sac high in the rugged Panamint Range, cradled between the searing wastelands of Panamint Valley and Death Valley, the site had long been the refuge of those fleeing the law. But word that the legendary "Lost Gunsight Lode" had been found in its silver-streaked ledges began to spread like wildfire. From camps in the Cosos, Cerro Gordo and Bodie, Austin and Pioche, a stream of fortune seekers surged up steep, serpentine Surprise Canyon to the raucous, riotous boomtown of Panamint City.
Like dominos, structures lined the one main street. Stores, shacks and canvas shelters, more than two dozen saloons including the lush Occidental and plush Oriental, banks and butcher shops, bakeries and booteries, even a boutique. Smoke curled skyward around the clock from Munsinger's Brewery. Lights glowed red along the "Maiden Lane" of Martha Camp and her demi-mondes. Poker pots ran into the thousands, with one notable hand raking in $10,000 with two pairs.
Nevada's silver champions, Senators Jones and Stewart, bought a commanding share of the Panamint mines for over a quarter million dollars.
Over $50,000,000 in stock was floated.
The finest 20-stamp mill was built with half a million bricks to tower like beacon of faith extolling Panamint's prosperity and permanency. There was even talk of a railroad — the Los Angeles and Independence — from Santa Monica to the flatlands at the foot of Surprise Canyon.
Putting action into words, type and press were laboriously hauled in by an itinerant printer, Thomas Spencer Harris, launching the nonpareil Panamint News on November 26, 1874.
At first a small 5x9 single sheet 2 column four-pager tri-weekly, "50 cents a copy by carrier," it expanded with Panamint City's fortunes to an 8x12 three column format by February 1875.
Its pages were crammed with camp news, prospects and promises. And for the news hungry, tidbits from the outside world brought in by stages from Los Angeles, Bakersfield and train connections with San Francisco.
Today the crumbling smelter chimney still lifts its ornate chimney to the sky. But little else silently survives time, flash floods and the paper promises that sounded the death knell for Panamint City.
Among the skeletal rubble of laboriously built buildings, corrals and fencing, rattlers reign undisturbed. Where a thousand miner's picks clattered and clanged only the sound of an occasional rock hunter's hammer is heard. Spring wildflowers forgivingly blanket Maiden Lane. The cemetery in Sourdough Canyon is buried under a landslide of rock. The poker tables over which quick-triggered dealers once held sway lie among the scattered debris.
But look not for the pied type of the Panamint News.
By October of 1875, T. S. Harris saw or sensed the fading high-grade writing on the tunnel walls of the Wyoming Consolidated, the Hemlock, the Wonder of the World mines, and moved on to more silvered pastures.
First to Darwin, putting type and press to use with the Cosco Mining News. By September 1878 the siren song of Bodie lured him to merging with its Standard. Thence, in 1882, to Santa Ana to start its Semi- Weekly. And with an itchy foot that needed scratching about every three years, he moved on to Lancaster with the Weekly News in 1885.
But the sands of time and peripatetic pressmen were running low. Sadly he turned to opening a small print shop in San Francisco. Here, with fading health and funds, he committed suicide in 1893 at the age of 54.
Save for a few never-say-die prospectors, Panamint City is no more.
But - Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment
That was known as — greater than the Comstock!The Westerners, Los Angeles Corral, Keepsake No. 27, March 1988
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