From Booming to Ghost Town

Ghost Towns, you know of them or even know of one, heck, you may even live in one yourself, but what exactly is a ghost town? Sure, it could be a town inhabited by ghosts, but that’s not what I’m talking about here, although the TV show Ghost Wars does a good job of this. In this case, a ghost town is a town, usually a small one, that gets destroyed, taken over, or, in most cases, the people leave out of their own free will, or they are driven out. But why? What could possibly make people simply live in a town one minute and be gone from it the next? Well, there are a lot of factors here, but the biggest one is that sometimes abandonment is inevitable or even necessary in order to live; it’s seen as a way to move on. In this article, we will find out what makes a town go from booming to ghost town, but more importantly, why it happened so much during the Wild West Era, an era that was cruel, rugged, and in many cases, lonely, and drove so many people from their homes. So what makes a small western town go from booming to a desolate and forgotten place?

The Wild West was a time when people would gun you down simply for looking at them wrong. It was a time when people were dirty, reckless, ruthless, and savage. Also, during these times, it was so easy to build a town from scratch. Watch any Western TV show from the fifties and look at the buildings. Sure, these are TV shows and props of buildings and whatnot, but to be honest, it wasn’t much different during the real Western era. Buildings were usually all constructed the same and took little to no time to put up. So why were they left abandoned sometimes? There are a few factors.

-Outlaws/Crime: We all love a good western story, but knowing that outlaws were real sometimes hits all too close to home. One reason a town became a ghost town was that crime was just unavoidable. Outlaws would come in, stake their claim, and simply wipe out or run out the townspeople, including the sheriff. They would either kill everyone, use guerrilla warfare and burn the place down, or, in the most common fashion, run everyone out and leave themselves, leaving only the buildings of what used to be a promising town.

-Change/Reconstruction: During this time, it was always about location. Sometimes, was you set up a town may not have been the safest or financially the best, so when it became time, people would move out altogether and build elsewhere or go their own way. What did they leave behind? Probably nothing, maybe everything, but one thing they just left without a second thought was the town, becoming a ghost town, a shell of its former glory and lively populous reputation.

The boom during the Wild West era was temporary. Many towns were like small businesses today; one day they could be on top of their world, but eventually, time and bigger businesses will come along and just wipe them out of existence. What was once popular and the place to go or be will become sad memories and remnants of what used to be. Don’t let the wild west fool you, though. Ghost towns happened all over in many different eras, not just the Wild West to which they are mainly known; in fact, some ghost towns are still popping up even today. Abandoned places are one of the saddest and yet most beautiful places you will ever come across, as they have so much history left behind, and if they could talk would tell you of many a tale. Ghost towns are just one of many abandoned places; they tell you of either a simpler time or a just as hard enough time, if not even harder, time to live.

Ghost towns remind us of the past, but they also tell us that unless we want to end up just like them, we need to slowly adapt to our surroundings, to better ourselves, to make the most of our opportunities. A story called, The Ghost Town Gun Ghost by L. Ron Hubbard tells of a man who rides into a ghost town and finds another man. The man asks him where he can stay and if he can talk to the sheriff, and finds that the man is the only one in town and serves all the duties of the town. It’s an odd but fun story, and the reason I bring it up is that it’s a great representation of not wanting to let go of the past. Even when only a ghost town surrounds you, you try to make the most of it, but in most cases, people don’t stay; they leave behind ghosts. So the next time you see an old western ghost town or perhaps your car breaks down in an old, rundown town, take a look at it all and take it all in. Perhaps the history of the place will reveal itself to you, or you can create your own story of what it used to be like there.