In the summer of 1980 I was 3 years old, and my aunt and uncle were building an off grid cabin in an eddy along Hungry Gulch in Rosita. The cabin was only a floor on pilings at that point, and the first night we camped there on the platform, playing Uno by lantern light and I ate Oreo cookies with a glass of powdered milk. It was Heaven. I stayed up all night in my sleeping bag breathing mountain air, watching shooting stars, and eager to explore when the sun rose.
The first morning I left at sunrise to go look for arrowheads. I was already obsessed with prehistory and arrowheads. I did not find arrowheads, but there was a lost mining town out in the rabbitbrush. It was magical. There was a cabin site near where my relatives were building which I found immediately. In those days there were still abundant and interesting artifacts on the surface of the ground. That morning I found a number of curios which interested me, to include a couple of old suspender ends, a porcelain doll head, the tip of a mining pick, a tinware spoon, and an interesting mineral specimen. I returned to the cabin for breakfast with a handful of neat stuff. They fed me eggs and bacon from Jenning’s Market. My aunt went back to the cabin site with me and we spent some time looking for additional artifacts. We found a few more items, and they are still displayed in the little rock garden alongside the cabin 45 years later.
Over the years I always explored around the ephemeral ruins of Rosita when I came up, and when I was 12 years old I purchased a metal detector with money I earned from selling candy at school at a 400% markup. Candy was forbidden at school, and so I took advantage of the black market premium. The metal detector I wanted was $650.00 in 1990. That was a lot of money to earn. I started with $10.00 in assorted candy I bought from Walgreens in bulk bags, and I worked my way up to a White’s Eagle 2 metal detector. It was the first metal detector with an LCD screen instead of an analog needle and dial meter. It had a big American flag sticker on the battery hatch. I loved it dearly.
When I brought my metal detector to Rosita for the first time I thought I was really going to hit it big. I decided there was a tin can full of silver dollars hidden in the saddle about halfway up the side of Pringle Hill, and I went up there at first dawn. There was nothing there except natural beauty. I returned down into the town site of Rosita with my metal detector and began the first day of my new adventure in life- being completely overwhelmed by tin cans, fragments of tin cans, and sheet tin from roofs and flashing .
The metal detector is almost unusable, and almost every find is tin. But it works once in awhile, and so I swing it around and dig up my tin cans, and I enjoy the process and the eternal joke. I always laugh when I dig up a can, so that the universe can see that I am trying to be a good sport about it. I find many laughs and almost no “treasure” which is fine.
The story of the town that came to life as I saw it thorough old spoons, broken bottles, cartridge casings, tin cans, and the passage of my own life was the story of us. It was full of poignancy and terror and desperation. It was full of deep and high religion and earnest hope. They had churches and they had brothels. Some of those miners had to use narcotics to overcome their fear at placing their feet into a small bucket, grabbing on to a rope, and having a mule hoist them 700 feet down into a totally dark and vertical shaft. There were horse races and balls. They had no electricity, no railroads, limited access to goods, no labor laws, and yet they built roads, banks, hotels, saloons, mines, and steeples.
I even encountered some of the Indians who passed through Rosita for at least the last 13,000 years. Lots of different people and tribes came through the area over the years, but I am not sure that anyone really ever stayed for long and in large numbers. They hunted deer and processed pinon nuts on every little hill overlooking the courses of the arroyos. The first people in Rosita probably saw the last of the Pleistocene megafauna. The last Indians in Rosita were still using little stone arrowheads on the tips of their arrows, but also used little metal arrowheads , and muskets from the fur traders. Perhaps the very last one knapped a cutting/scraping tool out of the deep aqua glass from the broken base of a Carl Conrad and Company Original Budweiser bottle, ca. 1881, before discarding it alongside Euclid Street as it runs through the bottom of Poverty Gulch next to where my mama lives now.
I am as interested in the fields and artifacts of Rosita as ever. Now I am well into middle age and I like digging holes more than I like filling them in. I am currently digging into the cellar of a saloon which burned in the great fire of 1881 and was the end of the original town. Down in the cellar it still smells like charred lumber and smoke. It is just like 1881. The fire boiled the bottles of Rosita Brewing Company beer and popped the tops off in a very precise way. It is amazing and I am grateful to sit in my hole in the field at the intersection of the roads and come to know the passing of time by artifacts in layers of soil, light and dark, and the seasons.
The Rosita Museum 