Horsebun Hollow
by
Sam Loschiavo
There it was the ghost town known as Horsebun Hollow. I found it on an old survey map of south western North America. Being an amateur student of ghost towns I wanted to learn more about this town with such an intriguing name. When the opportunity to visit the place became available I made my way there, first by major highway, then a secondary road, then an unpaved road, and finally by a winding narrow trail. It was a hot parched summer day and not a human soul was about except an old timer sitting on a wooden bench on the veranda of an old abandoned hotel. He looked as parched as the surrounding landscape. I parked my car and approached him. "Hello there, is this Horsebun Hollow?"
"Yep," replied the old timer, hardly giving me a glance.
"Do you live here?" I asked.
"Yep."
"Does anyone else live here?" I ventured, hoping to get more than monosyllable replies from him.
"Nope."
"Have you lived here all your life?" I wasn't about to give up after having come this far.
"Yep."
"Do you know the history of this place?" I thought this might make him open up.
"Yep."
At this stage of our exhausting conversation I went to the car to fetch some beer from the cooler. The temperature must have been more than 40EC. I offered a bottle to my talkative friend and asked, "Would you like one?"
"Yep." With that the old man poured the beer down his throat in almost one gulp. I offered another.
"Don't mind if I do, stranger."
Wow! I realized that I had stumbled upon the magic formula to produce more than single-syllable words from the old timer. This time he gulped the beer down a little more slowly. I knew I had touched the right buttons because with each successive beer he became increasingly loquacious.
"Gets pretty dry around here," he offered. "Get only about three inches per year y'know." With that he proceeded to relate one of the most fascinating yarns I have ever heard, even though some of it was to be taken with a grain or two of salt. According to him, Horsebun Hollow ceased to exist some time during the first quarter of the century. It disappeared after two short-lived booms, one for gold and the other for oil. In its heyday it was a hustling bustling mining town of hustlers and bustlers. It boasted a hotel, general store, lumberyard, garage, blacksmith shop, drugstore, dentist, barber, two restaurants, a bakery and six saloons. The saloons were the busiest places in town, especially at night when the ladies who lived on the second floor mixed with the customers so to speak. The weather was always dry but not the town.
The next most popular place after the saloons was the bakery, renowned for its buns. The swinging sign outside proudly proclaimed, "We make the best buns in town." Since it was the only bakery in town, no one could dispute that claim. It was truth-in-advertising at its finest. According to my newly-found historian the buns were indeed outstanding, and it was not really necessary to point out that the baker was also the best shot in town. However, the old timer warned me not to jump to the conclusion that there was a link between the quality of the buns and the name of the town. As he pointed out, "That was a horse of a different colour." The baker who weighed about 260 pounds, and whose name oddly enough was Slim, would tell his customers, "Yes, sir, these here buns are the best that dough can buy." Again, his claim was indisputable. He was living proof that quality and quantity could co-exist.
"The origin of the town's name is lost in antiquity," according to Miss A. Paige, the district librarian who lived in another town not far away from Horsebun Hollow. But my archivist old timer had offered a far more interesting, if perhaps less accurate, account concerning the origin of the town's name. By his sixth beer, the old timer who confided that his name was Dusty had lost his taciturn demeanour and poured out words faster than he was pouring in beer. As Dusty related it, "At the beginning of the gold rush which occurred before the town had a name, prospectors came with pack horses and burros laden with food and equipment.
"Well, there wasn't much gold in the hills and when it petered out the prospectors were left broke and discouraged, and were forced to return home leaving their animals behind. Well, sir, nature took its course and it wasn't long before the area had more horses and burros than people. The animals roamed freely eating every bit of grass and shrub." Dusty continued. "Well soon there was no pasture left and the animals came to depend on handouts from people. You might say they led a hand-to-mouth existence. Nature being what it is, it wasn't too long before we were ankle deep in horse buns,"
I could understand how this fact, together with the observation that the town was located in a bit of a dip, would strongly support Dusty's suggestion that this is how the town came to be known as Horsebun Hollow. That made a lot of horse sense.
Because of the claim that gold had been discovered in the area, I was curious to learn something of the geological history of the area and to record it for the benefit of the discerning reader. I visited Miss Paige's district library where I spent a day looking through some dusty documents that had originally belonged to the mine. I was captivated by what I read. According to an internationally known and eminent geologist, Professor Buster Rock, or Big Bust as he was known to his colleagues, the geological profile of the area around Horsebun Hollow was formed during the Early Plasticene epoch and about the Cretinaceous Period when large deposits of malarkium were laid down.
"It is in this kind of deposit that gold occurs in great abundance," stated S. Coundrell, CEO of the Bilkem-Z Gold Company. The Horsebun Hollow Gazette quoted him as follows: "We predict several million ounces of gold will be taken from this area. Horsebun Hollow will become a great metropolis." He reinforced his remarks with glowing reports of the richness of core samples taken from a shaft sunk by the company a shaft that was later given to the shareholders and that helped to sink the town. It wasn't gold that was taken, but rather the shareholders. As events turned out, the find was as hollow as the core samples and the statements by S. Coundrell. It should be noted that he and the other principals in the company, namely, I.M. Sharpe and B.A. Cheeter, had sold their shares for $300.00 each. The original purchase price had been eight cents. After the announcement that there wasn't enough gold to make a crown for a tooth, the share price dropped to six cents. Horsebun Hollow had been dealt an almost mortal blow. With all the horses and burros around, the streets may have been paved with something but it certainly wasn't gold.
As I continued to read those documents I was treated to some more interesting information about the early years of Horsebun Hollow. I have to thank old Dusty for steering me to Miss Paige's library. My chance meeting with him led to, if I may use the term, a gold mine of information. The twelve beers he drank was a small price to pay for the priceless nuggets of information. My meeting with Miss Paige didn't cost anything because she didn't drink beer. I am grateful to her for allowing me to read those old documents. I learned that, after the goldbust, the local Chamber of Commerce made a valiant effort to save the town. Members of the Chamber and their wives put on a potluck picnic to which they invited experts in the petroleum industry. The purpose was to ask these experts to determine the possibilities for oil exploration based on some surface oil seepage that had been observed by locals over a long period in a field behind Hank's garage. One of the experts was a Mr. C.A. Gusher, oil geologist for the Happy Bottom Drilling and Exploration Company. He considered that here was a virgin field pregnant with possibilities and he decided to sink an exploratory shaft. This was not the same as the shaft that had been given to the shareholders of the Bilkem-Z Gold Company. Being small compared to the giants of the petroleum industry, the Happy Bottom Company took a conservative and prudent approach to exploration and, for its initial probe, it used a post-hole auger borrowed from the Horsebun Hollow Horticultural Society. At three feet the drillers became quite excited when they struck bedrock which they thought was part of the Precambrian Shield. The discovery of a Precambrian formation in that part of the world, and of oil in the Shield, would have been astonishing and world-shaking events. Such astounding news would have rocked geologists around the world. A preliminary but premature note in the Annals of Oil and Snakes, Vol. 16, No. 1, page 9, announced the find as nothing short of miraculous. But, as happens with so many promising announcements, the enthusiasm was premature and was not to last. Closer investigation by an international team of scientists revealed that the presumed Precambrian Shield was nothing more than an extraordinarily large granite boulder probably carried there during the last Ice Hole Age.
These disappointments were more than the residents could swallow, and so Horsebun Hollow began its descent to oblivion. First, the prospectors and drillers disappeared to look for better holes, soon to be followed by the local business people. The hotel, general store, garage, and restaurants closed. The saloons and their lady residents disappeared into the night. The barber cut his losses, the dentist pulled out; and the drugstore was dispensed with. The owner of the lumberyard nailed up his business and the blacksmith was shoe-ed out. Finally, the bakery ran out of dough. Soon, there were not enough people left to hand out handouts to the horses and burros, and they too galloped away to greener pastures. The last remnants marking the golden age of Horsebun Hollow were the boarded up buildings, two shafts in the ground, and the faded bakery sign flapping in the breeze still proudly proclaiming: "We make the best buns in town". And yep, there was the rickety hotel with its old bench on which sat parched old Dusty.