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A for-men-only feature dealing with basic Christianity/by Lloyd Hamill
RHYOLITE, NEVADA
Ghost Town o f the Old West
In dealing with basic Christianity it is often helpful to see it in terms of our own experiences. I just got back from a desert camping trip. One of the more interesting experiences of this trip was wandering 'through the Ghost Town o f Rhyolite, Nev. :/ This old abandoned town is a graphic reminder of the glory of our Old West. The wind has a way of whining through the ruins in an almost frightening way. I found Rhyolite was a place that could make a man a little lonely . . . and a little reflective. It was gold that brought Rhyolite into existence. ¡Some 12,000 people came to make it one of the most ¡elegant— and short-lived—mining towns of the gold- boom era. It was August 9, 1904 when two bone-tired prospectors—Eddie Cross, a green kid from Iowa and Shorty Harris, a veteran desert prospector— stopped to rest on the north rim of the sizzling Amargosa Desert just east o f Death Valley. It was the kid Eddie who found the gold float and it was his partner Shorty Harris who spread the word in the nearest bar some 75 miles away. The rush was on. Beautiful buildings sprang up along Golden Street, among them 45 saloons whose doors were never closed. There was a school and an opera house and an elec tric plant and an ice plant and four newspapers and a busy stock brokerage and three rail lines. (Later, Death Valley Scotty bought the ties from 70 miles of one of the rail lines and hauled them off to his $3-million desert castle to be used as firewood in the castle’s many fireplaces.) The buildings of Rhyolite were not shacks. They were imposing three-story structures of reinforced concrete and gleaming marble. Among the ruins today is a portion o f the prosperous H. D. & L. D. Porter store that did a whopping $150,000-a-month business during the boom years of 1906-1909. The Porter brothers carried just about anything needed by the pioneers of Rhyolite . . . from groceries and women’s
clothing to blasting powder and Studebaker wagons. But the end came. Yes, there was gold. According to the Nevada State Bureau of Mines the Montgomery- Shoshone claim alone produced $1,388,398. But there had been too much speculation. Not enough hard thinking and careful planning. Today it’s a place of wind and, of the high, thin yap of the coyote and of memories. And I like it. I like it because it causes a man to think. And in our busy day we don’t spend much time just plain thinking. We talk and we look and we listen and we read. But we don’t do much thinking. And I suppose nowhere is less good, hard thinking done than in the area of a man’s relationship to God. A man can hear sermons aplenty and he can get a lot of advice and he can express a lot of opinions on this basic relationship but somehow I have a feeling that isn’t enough. The men who built Rhyolite did a lot of talking and a lot of listening and a lot of look ing. And they lost everything. I don’t suppose there’s a man reading this who doesn’t want a right relationship with God. I mean deep down inside. He doesn’t just want some good rules to live by. He doesn’t want a lot of pious- sounding platitudes. And he doesn’t want some mush rooming emotional fluff that looks great on the surface today and tomorrow is as dead as a ghost town. He wants a relationship with God that is satisfyingly solid and one he can be sure of. If you are such a man I suggest you really think through on this thing. And as a guide, check your reasoning against Chris tianity’s sourcebook, the Bible. Read and reread the Gospel of John. And as you read, think in a really concrete way about such words as these, "But as many as received him [Jesus Christ], to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.”
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