Cerro Gordo, California: The Fat Hill That Fed Los Angeles

01Belshaw, Beaudry and the Fat Hill

On June 19, 1868, Mortimer W. Belshaw's first bullion wagons rolled along Sixth Street in Los Angeles. Each loaf-shaped bar was stamped "Union" and weighed, on average, 85 pounds. Belshaw was a mining engineer who had worked mines as far afield as Mexico. He had come over from San Francisco that April and bought a one-third interest in the largest galena lode on the mountain. He also built the first wagon road to the top, the Yellow Road, named for the color of the rock it was blasted through, and he charged a toll to anyone who used it.

Silver had drawn people to these slopes before him. Mexican prospectors who regularly searched them for ore gave the mountain its name, Cerro Gordo, "Fat Hill." One party of five was attacked there. Three died, and the two survivors were held captive until they promised never to return. In 1865 Pablo Flores found silver ore near the summit of Buena Vista Peak and began mining and smelting on a small scale.

Victor Beaudry, younger brother of Los Angeles mayor Prudent Beaudry, built his holdings through the ledger. He extended credit to miners and foreclosed on their claims when they could not pay, until most of the camp's mines were his, half of the Union among them. He and Belshaw began as rivals and finished as partners who between them controlled the town. Beaudry put up two modern smelters that ran around the clock. In 1872 Belshaw added an aerial tramway to carry ore down the mountain, one of the first in the United States.

02Nadeau's Teams and the Bullion Road

In December 1868 Belshaw and Beaudry hired Remi Nadeau, a French-Canadian freighter, to carry their bars to Los Angeles, and regular shipments began on the first of the month. Nadeau put thirty-two teams on the road. Even so, the $50,000 in silver and lead they hauled was only half of what the mines could produce at full output. His ten-mule teams worked the long haul south, while eight-mule teams took on loads at the camp.

James Brady arrived in 1869 as superintendent of the Owens Lake Silver-Lead Company. He founded Swansea, about three miles north of Keeler, and built a furnace there to treat Cerro Gordo ore. When Nadeau's contract ran out on December 1, 1871, Brady took it over. On Owens Lake, the steamboats Bessie Brady, christened in 1872, and Molly Stevens carried bullion from Swansea at the north end to Cartago at the south, sparing the wagons more than 40 miles of hard road.

Nadeau returned in 1873, and this time he set the terms. Belshaw and Beaudry had to become his partners in the Cerro Gordo Freighting Company and spend $150,000 on a chain of stations a day's journey apart. The stations went up at places called Coyote Holes, Red Rock Canyon, Forks-of-the-Road, Cow Holes and Barrel Springs. On June 6, 1873, Nadeau was back in Los Angeles with a load of bullion.

03A Town That Had a Man for Breakfast

When the furnaces were running, some 500 to 600 men lived on the mountain. The camp kept plenty of saloons and brothels, though it never built a church or a school, and it had no formal law. Newspapers and personal histories said Inyo County and Cerro Gordo "had a man for breakfast," meaning that most mornings somebody found a body. In 1874 one paper wrote the place off as a "cheerless, rocky, disagreeable burg."

Christmas Day 1870 at John Hughes's saloon made the Inyo Independent the following January. The gunfighter Ned Reddy had stepped between James Cock and Mart Sullivan to keep the peace. In the clinch that followed, he knocked Tom Dunn to the ground near the billiard table.

Petra Romero, who went by Maggie Moore, ran what the Independent called a "dead-fall dance house." In January 1872 someone broke into "Madam Moore's" bedroom, and the break-in ended in a shootout. The coroner's inquest appeared in print on February 10 as "The Garcia-Alvarez Affair." The paper printed the dead man's name as both Rosalia and Rosealtis, and one February article admitted that reporters were unsure how to pronounce or spell it. Lola Travis, another madam, kept a dance hall with small rooms near the Assay Office.

On November 6, 1873, a man named Miranda claimed that Antonio Mesa owed him five dollars and tried to grab the money. Mesa killed two of his fellow Mexicans. The Independent ran the story two days later under the headline "Two men killed in Cerro Gordo." In May 1875 the Los Angeles Times reported a stage robbery at the camp. That same year a paper told of prospectors who had been caught in a Death Valley blizzard and, after trekking to Cerro Gordo, ate a donkey. "Jackass meat, as an article of diet," the writer concluded, "is a lamentable failure."

04What Happened to Cerro Gordo?

In 1877 fire tore through the mines and destroyed the Union Mine hoist works, and Belshaw's furnaces shut down the following year. With silver and lead prices falling, most residents packed up and left. The Bessie Brady caught fire and burned on May 11, 1882, and the Cerro Gordo Freighting Company was dissolved at about the same time.

Billy Crapo, pronounced "Cray-Poe," was a well-educated French-Canadian civil engineer and one of the oldest residents still on the mountain. A December 1892 election had not gone his way. On December 29 he stepped out his front door, took aim at the backs of Postmaster Harry Boland and a friend, John Thomas, and killed Boland instantly. No later gunfight is on record in Cerro Gordo.

The mines got a second run from zinc. By 1912 Cerro Gordo was the country's largest producer of zinc carbonates. In 1917 a Leschen tramway began carrying ore 5.5 miles down to the railroad at Keeler. That revival faded too, and by 1920 about ten miners were left. Between 1865 and 1949 the mountain gave up more than 35,000 short tons of lead, 4.4 million troy ounces of silver and 11,800 short tons of zinc. The total was worth an estimated $17 million at the time, roughly $500 million in today's money.

05What Remains of Cerro Gordo Today

On Friday, July 13, 2018, Brent Underwood and his business partner Jon Bier bought all 336 acres of the town for $1.4 million, intending to restore it and open it to visitors. In March 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the caretaker left, and Underwood came from Texas to live there full-time. He arrived in a snowstorm, "horribly underprepared," as he tells it.

Three months later, on June 15, 2020, a fire of undetermined origin destroyed the American Hotel, along with an icehouse and a residence. The Englishman John Simpson had built the hotel in 1871, and it was the oldest standing hotel in California east of the Sierra. It burned 149 years to the day after it opened. Underwood rebuilt it to modern standards and finished the new American Hotel in late 2025. He has recorded the work on his YouTube channel, "Ghost Town Living," which has more than 1.88 million subscribers, and in a book of the same name.

Much of the old camp survives around it. The Belshaw House and the Gordon House stand, as does the assay office, and the old Belshaw Store now holds a museum. Part of Beaudry's furnace is left. A stretch of Belshaw's 1872 tram hangs an ore bucket on its cables hundreds of feet above the road, and the remains of the 1917 Leschen tramway are there as well. The bullet holes from the Crapo shooting can be seen. Underground, more than 30 miles of tunnels reach into the ore bodies, among them the one the miners called the China Stope.