The Columbus graveyard overlooks the dry lakebed where borax was discovered. Marilyn Newton/RGJ / RGJ
Columbus in its heyday was a colorful town that rose on the edge of a playa and salt marsh. Today it is a ghost town with just a couple of buildings and some rock walls still standing and a graveyard overlooking the town.
It was the Spanish who, in about 1863, made the first ore discoveries in the area but it would be the Americans who, two years later, began mining operations and built the town.
What Columbus offered, in addition to gold and silver, were large salt deposits that were a necessary ingredient in the chlorination milling of silver ore.
What Columbus also had that other mining camps did not was water, though a meager supply. So Samuel Youngs, seeing an opportunity, along with his partner A.J. Holmes, erected a quartz mill at Columbus.
In an ironic twist of fate, the wagons transporting the mill, in pieces, were passing through an area where water was scarce, when they were caught in a flash flood scattering the mill pieces over a large area. Fortunately enough of the pieces were saved to erect a four-stamp mill.
Animal pack trains then began the arduous task of shipping ore over the mountains from Candelaria some four miles to the northwest.
Over time the pack trains were replaced by wagons and Chinese laborers were hired to drive them. Those men would struggle with their wagons and teams to the top of the mountain on one side, then with a scream they propelled the wagons down the other side, their queues whipping in the winds created by the careening wagons and scattering everyone in their paths.
By 1866 there were 200 people living in the desert town. The amenities included a 14x20 rough lumber and adobe hotel and bar that some say was so badly built that a gritty dust, supplied by the seemingly never ending winds, settled on everything including the food that was prepared at one end of the building in a lean-to.
In 1869 what started as a petty squabble between Youngs and Holmes escalated into an outright legal battle between the two men. When it was over, an embittered Holmes left town cursing that another year would find grass growing in the streets of Columbus.
But he would have his revenge and what he did almost spelled the end for Columbus. He bought the Northern Belle, one of Candelaria’s top producing mines and immediately stopped shipping the ore to Columbus. Instead he built a new mill and created a new town named Belleville.
Soon it wouldn’t matter that Holmes had almost brought Columbus to its knees. Within a year, the town was in the borax business.
The year was 1871. Things were looking bleak. It was then either William Troup (or Troop), or Francis Marion “Borax” Smith realized what the pesky white stuff blowing across the dry lakebed was. It was Ulexite better known as borax. The substance is used as a flux in soldering metals as well as in the manufacture of artificial gems, soaps and antiseptics, according to Webster’s dictionary.
Troup was a former Comstock miner and according to some historians he ran an test on the white stuff and soon discovered that it was borax while other historians say it was Smith, who had been making his living by hauling wood from faraway hills and supplying it to the mills at Columbus who first ran across the stuff while looking for wood..
It was Smith however who staked and claimed the whole area and eventually he gained possession of the borax works at Columbus and created the Pacific Coast Borax Company.
Columbus also had her share of lawbreakers. Take the 1873 New Year’s dance for example. Apparently there were only two women in town at that time and one of them, a Chilean guitarist, was playing with the orchestra.
Apparently a man identified as Victor Monega wanted her to dance with him but she refused. Livid, he grabbed her guitar and smashed it. A prominent Columbus resident, Antonio Rivera, came to her defense and got a knife in his ribs for his trouble.
Monega was arrested but didn’t long remain in jail. A group of drunken town folk was more than happy to escort him from his confines and take him instead to the butcher shop where he was lynched. Columbus was barren of trees but the shop had a windlass that was perfect for the job.
The men went back to their drinking and some time later returned to cut down the murderer. But Monega made a convulsive jerk, so the men once again returned to their drinking.
It was the following morning before they returned to the butcher shop. A coroner’s jury was assembled beneath the hanging man’s body. Concluding he was dead, they adjourned to a saloon to celebrate the victory.
Just as few days later, San Bernardino deputies, who arrived with a warrant charging Monega with two murders there, quickly departed after hearing the murderer was answering to a higher court.
The town’s greatest prosperity was between 1871 when borax was first discovered and 1875 when Smith discovered new borax deposits at Fish Lake Valley and moved his operations there. By 1880 there were fewer that 100 people living there supporting the small town. Then like so many before, the town died.