This was, given my newly acquired original Fisher Gold Bug, essential reading and I must find a place for it on my shelf. My shelf, already stuffed and overflowing...
First published in 1963 the author had a chance to interview a lot of the original inhabitants of the ghost towns, even then in their 90's, and the book is well furnished pictures, maps, descriptions, conversations, it's a reference book, a guide to gold creeks and treasures, photos taken back in the day of ruins long since vanished - some of the towns won back, like Ferguson, others vanished, lidar will be the tool to search for their remains.
There are the Coal mining towns, Lumber & Sawmill towns (ghost towns by the 20's as even then forestry was a little overly zealous), Rail towns, vanished Forts and Trading Posts, Silver and mining towns, all these of interest, but no one laid up a cache of lumber in a sawmill town that I can metal detect my way to fortune, same with the silver, coal (I found a tin full of coal! I’m rich! I’m rich!); no, it’s the gold mining encampments that stir the imagination, the hidden unrecovered pokes and caches of gold and coins and robberies with spoils buried under trees….
Anyways, it was - as I noted before, a lyrical and poetic waxing on places long disappeared, and between the conversations and descriptions of decaying ballrooms and threaded in the writings of long dead reporters there are abundant clues to lead me on to treasure...