Bummer Dan and Happy 4th, Thursday, 7/3/14 and Friday, 7/4/14

Thursday, July 3, 2014

We left home around 8:00 a.m. this morning and headed east to Bozeman.  We went a different route today so we could check out the Bozeman airport for our friends and family who are flying in at the end of this month.  Since it was still too early to eat lunch, we stopped at the mall and wandered around for a while.  We bought some DVD’s to watch at night since we don’t have television or internet service in our room.   

After eating barbeque for lunch, we made the usual two hour Wal-Mart stop and spent lots of money.  We arrived home at 4:00 p.m. and after unloading all the groceries, we went to the rehearsal hall to use the internet for a while.   

Around 7:30 p.m. we headed to Nevada City to meet Duel and the inn mates.  We met them at the cemetery, and Duel showed us the T-shaped graves of the murder victim and murderer that Cindy could not find a few days ago.  We explored the graveyard for a while and petted some horses in the adjacent pasture.  Then Duel offered to show us the old Nevada City dump and we were all game. 

We drove about a mile down the road and went back on a dirt road for a ways.  We parked in the road and crawled through some barbed wire fence to begin our exploration.  We hiked up some rough rock covered hills and Chuck turned back because it was hard on his artificial knees.   Duel explained that the natural draws were where garbage was dumped.  He also told us that most of the rock piles were the result of gold mining by hand.  We came to a hill that Duel said was the gold claim of “Bummer” Dan McFadden.   

In the 1860’s Bummer Dan was too lazy to mine his own claim, so he bummed money off all the other miners and that is how he got his name.  The miners got tired of him always bumming from them, so they told him that they wanted him to work a claim for one day so he could see how hard they worked for their gold.  He went to the assayer’s office and filed a claim above town where no one else was mining at the time.  Legend has it that he borrowed a shovel and when he turned up the first spade full of dirt it was full of gold nuggets.  After just one day, he sold his claim for $5000 and had some special underwear made.  He hid his money in the underwear and walked nine miles that night so he could catch a stagecoach out of town.  His stagecoach was robbed, but he did not get killed and his money was safe in his underwear. 

Chuck was waiting for us at the car, and he soon called us on the cell phone to tell us the property owners came by and told us to get off their land.  We headed back to the road and upon returning home went to the rehearsal hall where Cindy worked on some travel agent business while Chuck watched Netflix. 

 

 

Friday, July 4, 2014 

Happy Independence Day!  It was in the high eighties today, and we both worked at the gold panning operation.  We had 171 customers visit us, and at peak period we had 40 people panning for gold at one time.  Chuck handled the brunt of gold panning instructions, and Cindy ran back and forth to the office collecting money.  There is nothing exciting to report about our day, but we did have one German family and one family from France spend some time with us. 

We did not get off work until 7:00 p.m., but we had started a pork roast in the crock pot this morning so we had a barbeque sandwich when we got home.  We are going to the Virginia City fireworks display tonight, but we shouldn’t have to go far as they are to be lit off from cemetery hill and should be visible from most anywhere in town.