The Dust of San Bernardino County offers tales of flying rock and buried whiskey – San Bernardino County Sun

Miner Stephen Godard came across a rather special looking stone in a river bed near the short -lived Ivanpa mining camp nearly 150 years ago.

He did what any prosperity would do in this situation – he hit him with his choice and was shocked by his most unusual ringing sound. Godard had met with a visitor from the sky, with only the second meteorite discovered in California.

All this took place at the end of the 1870s in the far northeast district of San Bernardino about eight miles from Ivanpa and south of what is Primm, Nevada today.

The discovery was certainly not gold or silver – Godard’s main interest. After pulling him into Ivanpa, he gave it to the desert pioneer Heber Huntington, who brought the 128-pound rock to San Bernardino. Thus, after hundreds or perhaps thousands of years lying unnoticed in our desert, meteorite San Bernardino – sometimes called the Ivapa meteorite – finally received a little attention.

The meteorite, which is 95% iron, was first exhibited in 1880 as a curiosity at the Joseph Craig San Bernardino San Bernardino Shop, which was also a mining test. Naturalist, WG Wright and Craig have admitted that he is probably a meteorite, so he was later sent to the state geologist Henry G. Hanks in San Francisco.

Today, the bigger part of this celestial visitor is on display in Mariposa in the minerals of the California state minerals in California of the Golden Rush, explained Darchi Moore, curator at the museum.

For the visitor, the meteorite looks carved like a festive ham. The thin pieces of it have been cut over the years and sent to researchers to universities such as Ucla and Harvard and museums so far from Vienna, Berlin, India and even the Vatican’s collection in Rome. Kelsey Falker of the Smithsonian National Museum of Nature Nature Museum said its institution has eight pieces of it weighing about six kilograms. What remains in Mariposa is about 90 pounds.

When he first arrived in San Francisco, he quickly became the subject of custody dispute. The meteorite was seized by a sheriff by writing on behalf of a man named Bidwell, who claims to have purchased it from Huntington in San Bernardino. The meteorite was returned to state control after Bidwell failed to provide proof of the purchase. He said it costs $ 150, but has never offered a sale account and the claim has never gone anywhere, Stockton Evening Mail reports, December 23, 1880.

Before going to his last place to vacation in the museums, the meteorite in San Bernardino made one last trip. He was sent to Chicago, where he was part of the World Fair, a meteoric exhibition, according to the San Francisco -examiner of June 12, 1893.

There was no whiskey

Here is a tale of some other buried riches for the time of Godard’s discovery. I have to warn you that it seems exaggerated a bit of an official desperate desperately desperately finishing a project.

There is no doubt James W. Cole, a district commissioner on the road, would have difficulties in 1924, receiving workers to help build the first auto highway between Barletow and the state line.

Arrowhead Trail highway – a road that has become 15 highways today – is necessary to shorten the significantly existing auto route, which then went south of Las Vegas almost to needles before turning west to Barrestou on the future Road 66.

Cole connected a 50-year history of a legendary lost whiskey wagon, in the 1924 Sun newspaper. needs to work on the highway of the rural desert, away from accommodation.

“This is a chance that the ancient wagon will be found in grading operations – it’s not a very good chance to be recognized – but this year Commissioner Coles believes it may be easier to secure the workers along the Arrowhead path,” the sun writes, the sun writes August August this year. 5, 1924

Cole said that the lost whiskey load was sent in 1874 by the Ivanpa Wilson innkeeper to Krcherpo, a deserted desert about 50 miles southwest of Baker.

History says four mules were used to withdraw the load, but the wagon was sinking into desert sand. The drivers returned the next day, just to find a wagon covered with wind, swollen sand. Every time they manage to clear the wagon, the winds cover it again. Rescue efforts were soon abandoned.

“Gold digging was more boss and there was never a whiskey hunger in Ivanpa to inspire more demand,” the Sun article concluded.

In the end, Cob was able to hire enough workers to fill the highway. The workers did not find a trace of the missing whiskey, maybe because there was a real drawback in his history.

Crucero did not exist in 1874. It did not appear only after 1900 as a station where two railway routes passed.

The San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railway (today the Pacific Union) opened around 1905, and the Tonopa and Tidevater railway, which was moving from Ludlow to the north to Beatty, Nevada, arrived two years later. It is difficult to say whether Cole decorates the tale of whiskey with wagons for its own purposes or just get bad information.

We know that Menifei Wilson was a real man. He later gave up Ivanpa and his lost whiskey and headed for a less ghostly mining zone north of today’s temecula. And there he was successful, finding some relatively productive gold digging, which he called Menifee Mine. His name lives with the city of Menifi in Riverside County.

The sun was wondering in its 1924 article how it could have a taste of whiskey if it was actually revealed in the highway project.

“Some claim it will be pure alcohol; Others that it will be improved with age, “the article said. “The question can only be answered if the district scrap bite in the buried wagon.” And we still don’t know.

So while you are on the next trip to Las Vegas, be careful about a suspiciously looking sand dune that can hide Menifee Wilson alcohol. And while you are in it, look at every strange -looking stone there that looks “ping” if you hit it.

I want to thank Jennifer Reynolds, a former employee at the San Bernardino County Museum, and Sue Payne of the San Bernardino Library for their help in the study of this article.

Tablet

Dedication to a tablet in honor of the visit to the Rubido Mountain Summit by the famous African-American teacher Booker T. Washington will be held in the mountains at 2 pm on February 28.