The Camel Races

I lived in a brewery for a spell. It wasn't entirely a brewery and neither a working brew house when I lived there. But it was called The Brewery because it was reputedly the first brewery ever built in Nevada. It was a huge wooden building about a half a mile down Six Mile Canyon from Virginia City. As far as rent, it was a damned bargain, 54 bedrooms, brick terrace beer garden, a brass rail bar and swinging doors saloon-style in front. The landlady was a woman by the name of Madam Zori, she had about three-quarters of the rooms stored with antiques and several varieties of junk, bric-a-brac, old clothes, and accoutrements of the carriage trade, so to speak, because among other things, The Brewery had been a stage coach stop, hotel, and saloon. And a brewery, the brewery's remains consisted of two very large stone-lined vats sunk into the floor of one side room. It seldom rained, which was a good thing, as the roof leaked a bit and scorpions tended to seek shelter there. There were wild mustang horses that roamed the desert there that occasionally had to be shooed off from the dog food on the beer garden terrace. All in all, it was worth the forty bucks a month rent. The only cheaper place was a nearby three-story, it was let rent free to the couple with the most kids, the current family had fifteen children.

Virginia City had some curiosities in the way it was founded. There had been an old prospector named Virginny Finney, an Irishman from Virginia, who'd been prospecting up that side of Sun Mountain leading his pack mule when he stumbled and landed on his hind-side breaking one of the two pints of whiskey he'd had in his hip pockets. Still, having one pint remaining, Old Virginny Finney figured that he'd pitch tent right there, drink the other pint and fry up some pan bread. In the morning, he scratched around a bit and found some "color," the color he was looking for being gold. That strike turned into what is known as The Comstock Lode. There was some deep hard-rock mining done there, a mile down and more, a lot of it done by Chinese miners who endured temperatures of 130F and bad ventilation to extract the tons of ore. Virginia City turned into pretty much of a movie set version of a frontier mining town, Mark Twain ran a newspaper there for a while, and was fond of drinking his whiskey at The Bucket o' Blood Saloon.

When I lived in The Brewery, the mining boom was long over and there were piles of poorly refined ore, ore that had been milled, but since milling techniques had improved, the slag heaps could be profitably re-milled. There were assay cups that had had ore tested in them that were prized by collectors, and desert glass, old bottles that had turned purple in the desert sun. After a rain, one could find bits of turquoise in Six Mile Canyon.

There were three wild-assed Piute Indian sisters who drove around in an antique Buick gangster car and lived in a wickiup, a kind of igloo-shaped structure made of sticks. Off the road toward Carson City, there was an obsidian knapping pit where the Piutes used to knock out beautiful, long slender and very sharp arrow points. There was a con man prospector named Badwater Bill who would come into town to hustle drinks and sell maps to the Lost Dutchman Mine.

In the summertime, thousands of people would show up for the Camel Races. The US Army had experimented with using camels for desert transportation during the frontier times, importing many of the beasts, as well as a camel driver named Haj Ali, whose name was bastardized to High Jolly. There's a monument to High Jolly over near Twenty-Nine Palms, California that I found by accident during a sandstorm. The camels proved to be generally so cantankerous that the Army abandoned the project and turned the camels loose in the desert. The day of the camel races, the throng of people assemble a bit toward Six Mile Canyon where there is some flat ground. They run the camels in a straight line due to the fact that they are too damned contrary to run on a regular-shaped proper racetrack, so there's a starting line and a finish line. There's a King and Queen of the Camel Races elected, they climb to the top of Sun Mountain, which takes the better part of two hours. There's a flag pole on top of Sun Mountain, and the crowd is all looking at the flag pole, a bra and panties are run up the pole, there's a great cheer from the assembled camel fans, and that's the official opening of the Camel Races. The camel drivers are generally all dressed-up like Arabs with robes and turbans. Two guys were hoisting one camel driver up, and were enthusiastic about it, launching the camel driver clear over the camel. The camel driver landed on his backside with a crash, got up rubbing his butt and reeking of whiskey, which was a fitting tribute to how Virginia City was founded.

And that's the way it happened, headed West.