MARK SMITH / PVT George Ross, left, discusses life in the caves of Dublin Gulch. At right, Susan Sorrells listens. COMING UP Feb. 21, 2009 Saratoga Springs and talc mines Full day; easy to moderate walking, 1-4 miles) Meet at the Amargosa Conservancy office at 8 am. Visit an outstanding riparian area and interesting historic talc mines with many standing structures. March 21, 2009 Amargosa Conservancy Amargosa River History Tour Full day, easy walking, 1-2 miles) Meet at the Amargosa Conservancy office at 8 am. Tour the entire Amargosa River basin from Beatty to Saratoga Springs in Death Valley. April 11, 2009 Amargosa Conservancy Kingston Mining Tour Full day; easy to moderate walking, 1-2 miles) Meet at the Amargosa Conservancy office at 8 am. See the famous Kingston Mountain mines and possibly see some late blooming wildflowers. Advertisement

SHOSHONE, Calif. -- It might be difficult to locate a more innocuous place than Shoshone, Pahrump's neighbor over the hill in California.

On a recent mild, sunny Saturday morning there was a low hum of conversation in front of the Crowbar Cafe as different elements of the town got going.

Some locals, some Pahrumpians, and even a young couple who happened to be visiting from Florida and had used their computer to find out what was happening, got together with Brian Brown, Susan Sorrells and George Ross -- something of a living memorial whose grandfather was a Paiute elder -- to learn something about life in the desert.

Sorrells, who helped found the Amargosa Conservancy, led a discussion that ranged from Milton the mastodon in the town's museum to the cave-dwellers who lived in Dublin Gulch outside of the downtown district.

The town was born on the railroad as the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad made its way through in 1907. Its stops included several that no longer exist, such as Zabriski, between Shoshone and Tecopa. Where about 100 inhabitants called Zabriskie home a century ago, few even know where it was today.

The museum itself, said Brown and Sorrells, was originally a mining hospital in Greenwater, which like Zabriskie no longer exists, then was moved to the latter place before being brought to Shoshone by its founder, "Dad" Fairbanks.

Brown noted that, on one side of the building, there was a sign: "My wife is boss," it said.

"That was painted out," he said. "I would love to have heard that story."

The museum was, at the time, the scene of some serious poker playing and, as Ross recalled, a store supplying, among other things, mining gear, food, candy, half-pint bottles of alcoholic beverages and the post office.

In the 1980s a new rear to the building was attacked, and it was probably about time. Said Brown, "The whole building leans toward Nevada."

Charles Brown, said Ross, was a character. Visitors would see the old gent in his old clothes, out in front of the store across the street, pumping gas. They'd feel bad for "the poor old man who has to pump gas" and maybe give him a dollar tip for 25 cents worth of fuel.

Unknown to them, however, Brown was a California state senator and nobody's fool.

But, added Ross, he wasn't against lifting a bottle of booze from the store that has become the museum.

Brown recalled a phrase he had picked up: "Behind every good man, there was a woman -- with a rolling pin."

Sorrells detailed the discovery in the late 1970s of an old suitcase that, until 30 years later, had meant little to the world at large.

It turned out to be a trove of old documents from an earlier day when people like Jack Madison and Joe Vollmer and others mined, played cards and made plenty of white lightning.

"There was extremely active moonshining going on," said Sorrells.

(Madison's niece, it turned out, lives in Pahrump, and his suitcase has its own exhibit at the museum.)

The caves sound like something out of a bizarre silent movie, with a pair of royalists from Great Britain keeping to themselves on one side of Dublin Gulch and the hoi polloi, who tended to be sympathetic to working men, socialists and such groups as the International Workers of the World, or "Wobblies," across the way.

"It was a very lively community," said Sorrells.

"Don't know who actually dug them," said Ross. "It could have been the Chinese when they were building the railroad."

"Prospectors and poker games," said Sorrells, "that's what got this area charged. Music and breer-drinking and gambling ... In the '20s and the '30s, this area was just booming with mines."

The Ashford brothers -- with an English tea set and their sneers for "the rabble" -- were among the men who removed borax, talc, gold and silver and other minerals from the ground. The remnants of the Ashford Mill are still visible in southern Death Valley.

The tour wound in and out of several of the caves as the guides noted that the Ashfords may not have been well loved, perhaps due as much to their body odor as their monarchist tendencies -- they didn't believe in bathing.

They also had no use for the woman for whom Edward VIII gave up his throne. "The bloody American whore" was how they referred to divorcee (and later Princess of Wales) Wallis Simpson.

In Sorrells' words, the brothers had what may be called "philosophical differences" with those across the gulch.

Looking around Brown remarked, "The major resource we had was the desert itself."

Sorrells and Ross noted that they stay or have come back simply because they love the place. Brown joked, "I couldn't leave 'cause I couldn't get my car started."

The result of their thoughts was the Amargosa Conservancy. As Sorrells explained, "It gave us a seat at the table. We could tell our story."

Even as the tour moved along, a tamarisk removal effort was continuing.

Sorrells said the area may look like just more desert surrounded by mountain ranges, but it has become "a magnet for geologists," with as many as 50 universities a year sending teams to study this formation or that prehistoric creature.

Stromatolites from well over a billion years ago have been found along with Milton the archidiskadon tamenensis, whose discovery may have extended the existence of mastodons by 400,000 years.

Not far from the downtown area is a primitive old road that follows a wide spot that was left when volcanic ash, called pumicite and used for scouring and cleaning compounds, was removed by miners.

Today, it is a paleontological wonder where the tracks of a cornucopia of extinct Ice Age mammals have been found.

(Brown explained that the prefix "paleo-" means little more than "old." One tourist was overhead wondering, "Does that make us 'paleos?'")

Actually, the whole area seems fraught with fossils. One site, said Sorrells, is said to rival the famous La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles for the sheer number of animal fossils found there. The site where the tracks were found was referred to in one academic paper as "the Shoshone zoo." Footprints from mammoths and hoofed animals are engraved into the bedrock, some seeming as fresh as if they had just been made in freshly blown dust.

Shoshone, like Tecopa, was where ancient Lake Tecopa formed and created a food and water bonanza for denizens of the prehistoric past.

When the dam created at its south end broke, the lake rapidly departed, leaving merely the valley of the Amargosa River. (The mural on the south side of the post office is of the lake.)