Doble

Not much is left: about twenty-five marked graves under white crosses on the slope, a hole in the mountain, and rock-paved paths where the streets were. What that understates is how hard people tried.

Barney and Charley Carter were crossing to the Rose Mine to prospect silver in 1873 when one of them looked at a quartz ledge above the north shore of the lake and found gold in it. They called it Carters Quartz Hill and sold it to Elias J. Baldwin. Sam Baird put up the first buildings the year after, which is why the place was Bairdstown before it was anything else, and by September 1874 it had a blacksmith, a butcher, two boarding houses and two saloons. The list kept growing: three general stores, two hotels, three restaurants, a bakery, a meat market, a tailor, a shoemaker, a barber, and a Chinese wash house, which is the only trace the record keeps of the Chinese who worked here.

Baldwin's forty-stamp mill fired for the first time on March 6, 1875, and could crush a hundred tons of ore a day. Later that year the mine shut.

Why it shut is the interesting part, and the story usually told may be wrong. The Bank of California failed in San Francisco that August, the Comstock stocks went down with it, and Baldwin is often said to have been ruined and the mine with him. But he was liquid enough that winter to lend money to the failing bank of Temple and Workman against their ranch, and to foreclose on it three years later, sixty-eight miles from here and recorded at their own family cemetery. Other accounts say simply that the ore was poor. What happened next supports the ore.

Because they kept trying. In 1894 Budd Doble, a champion harness driver who had married Baldwin's daughter Clara, put twenty-five thousand dollars into reopening the mine; it took his name, and so did the town. In 1899 it passed to a mining captain who believed the new cyanide process would draw gold out of rock that had beaten everyone else, and who built a mill to prove it. It did not. The town emptied for the last time.

The mine ruins stand on the hill above the townsite, with the dry lake and its pebble plains below.