From about 1965 to 1967 two prospectors named Jerry Caywood and Jim Craig operated a gold mining operation in Rattlesnake Canyon on the north flank of the Old Woman Mountains, about 7 miles southwest of Danby on old Route 66 in the Mojave Desert of California. Although they were able to extract some placer gold from the dry wash, the amount of gravel that had to be sorted and washed was too labor intensive and expensive to make the operation profitable and consequently the mine was abandoned. As far as I know, the mine never had a name.
While they were living there, Jerry met and married Donna Smith whose family lived in a small cabin about 6 miles south of Essex and shortly thereafter their daughter Theresa was born.
In addition to their water tanks, a kiln, and a galvanized settling tank there were two trailers at the mine site, one for Jerry, Donna and Theresa, and one for Jim Craig. Both trailers were hauled out of the canyon when the mining operation ceased. Jim had been drafted into the Army and Jerry decided not to carry on mining alone.
Although it was always a small 2-man operation, the Rattlesnake Canyon mine was particularly relevant to me because it led directly to my decision to write a book about the area, which I did three years later titled The Silence and The Sun.
When I first visited Rattlesnake Canyon, I had been exploring the Mojave Desert in my Jeep and on foot for several decades and frequently came across abandoned mines, prospects and the remains of small cabins and I often wondered who had lived up here? How did they ever get all this heavy equipment to this remote site? Who were the miners who worked here? Did they ever strike it rich? What did they see in the rocks that made them start mining at this spot? Those questions mostly went unanswered because the miners who worked there had long since passed and any written accounts of the operations were obscure and almost impossible to locate.
In 2004 I hiked into Rattlesnake Canyon intending to hike to the summit of the Old Woman Mountains, and I was unaware that canyon had been occupied previously by the Caywood family and Jim Craig. I found a flat clearing where the trailers had probably once been, two rusty steel supports for a clothesline, an abandoned automobile, and the rusted remains of a child’s tricycle amidst tin cans and rusted bed springs. For the first time I realized that there were families living at these mines, not just the miners, and I decided at once that I had to learn more about these people. I began in earnest to track down families who formerly lived at these remote sites, and their stories eventually led me to publish The Silence and The Sun, An historical account of people, places and events on old Route 66 and railroad communities in the Eastern Mojave Desert, California. The first edition of the book was published in 2007 and the second edition in 2012 - a direct result of seeing the remains of young Theresa Caywood’s tricycle in the dump in Rattlesnake Canyon.
Jerry Caywood passed away in 1998. Jim Craig lives in Arizona. Donna and her daughter Theresa live in Oklahoma.
