EXPLORING CALIFORNIA : CALIFORNIA'S CALICO OLD MINING TOWN DREDGES UP MEMORIES OF HARDSCRABBLE, HONKY-TONK PAST.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

Alan Baltazar hooked his thumb in his suspenders, pushed his flat-front miner's hat back on his head and narrowed his eyes against the desert sun.

``More than 100 years ago, this was the center of the mining district - with six railroads, 300 to 400 houses, 22 saloons,'' he said, gazing up Calico's steep main street lined with ramshackle wooden buildings on the 1880s site of California's richest silver lode.

``There were over 500 mines registered in this mining district, and miners took more than $130 million worth of minerals out of these mountains - $86 million worth of silver, $45 million worth of borax. It was a real boom town.''

Perched on the side of a mountain about six miles east of Barstow in the Mojave Desert, this dusty town in Wall Street Canyon got its name from the homesick miners who saw beauty in the red, white, purple and green of the minerals that covered the cliffs overlooking the town.

``The miners named it Calico because they said it was purty as a girl's calico skirt,'' Baltazar said.

Today, visitors can gaze at the same colored mountains and walk the same streets because Calico - which had become a ghost town after the mining petered out early this century - has come to life again.

Families can pan for gold, visit a mystery shack where the laws of gravity seem to have been suspended, stroll through the dank Maggie Mine, ride a mine train, see plays and musical performances inside the old playhouse or on two outdoor stages, and take a crack at being a crack shot in an old-fashioned shooting gallery. They can shop in the general store, needlepoint, basket, spice, candle and crafts shops; have a sarsparilla in Lil's Saloon; and get their photos taken in gunfighter or dancehall-girl garb.

And they can poke through the old town with Baltazar, a retired Navy man who came to Calico to attend a weekend festival a dozen years ago and ended up as the town historian. Drawing facts from old mining records, he's written five books about the one-time mining town.

And he dresses the part, wearing a miner's red long johns, a red plaid flannel shirt, dusty jeans, scuffed black boots (one with a big knife stuck snug inside), and the kind of flat-front felt hat that miners used to affix a candle to to give them light deep in the mines.

Take a stroll down the main street with Baltazar and you can almost hear the tinkle of a honky tonk piano and the drunken laughter of hard-rock miners as he tells of the discovery of silver in 1881; the pandemonium of wagons and railroad cars hauling silver ore from the mines; and the days Wyatt Earp used to come in by train from Arizona to find a lucrative poker game.

Most miners were employed by big mining companies and worked 12-hour shifts in black holes in the mountain, coming into town on Sundays for a bath, a shave, a few drinks and a little female companionship before heading back underground.

It was a hard life, Baltazar said.

Summertime temperatures routinely rose above 120 degrees in the barren area; wintertime temperatures dipped to zero and the mine entrances were sometimes obscured by snow.

``When you went on shift, you were given four candles,'' he said. ``Each would burn about three or four hours. It provided light and was also a warning that your oxygen was running out if the light flickered or went out. The miners would get all silted up with nitroglycerin dust from the blasting, and there were barrels of water underground for them to wash off the dust.

``The barrels would get so full of nitro that they'd go to put their candles out in the barrel at the end of their shift, and the nitro would ignite. The blast would sometimes be so big, it'd blow them out of the tunnel.

``It was very dangerous work,'' Baltazar said. ``You had to be a tough fellow to last.''

Most of the miners - the average age was 25 - were from England, Wales, Scotland, Sweden and China; many traveled from one boom town to the next, moving on when the mining petered out. Digging with picks and shovels, they progressed through the mountains at the rate of four to six feet a day.

Excavated ore was loaded onto a heavy wood-and-iron car that rode on two narrow rails; each miner pushed his full car, weighing several hundred pounds, to a central location underground, where it was routed along tracks out of the mountain. At a processing facility, chemicals ate away the rock, the silver was collected and melted into bars, and the men were paid according to the amount of ore they dug.

``A miner could make $3 or $4 a day,'' Baltazar said. ``Were they rich? It depends on what you want to call rich. The average man back then made about $10 to $20 a month. If you had $1,000, you were rich. If you had $10,000, you could live well for the rest of your life.''

Dreams of wealth began to die in 1893, when silver prices dropped abruptly, plummeting from $1.34 an ounce to 56 cents an ounce in just six months.

Borax - used in the production of glass, enamels and detergents - had been discovered in 1890 and for a time was a lucrative product. The 20-mule-team borax wagons made famous in Death Valley were actually born in Calico during that time, Baltazar said.

But borax, like silver, soon became too expensive to produce. Most of the mines closed by 1896, although a few miners held on for nearly another decade before moving on. The town closed down its school, its post office, its saloons and wrote its own epitaph: ``Calico: Born 1881 - Died 1907.'' Over the years, the desert sand and wind wore away most of the town.

In 1951, Knott's Berry Farm creator Walter Knott - whose uncle had made his fortune as a partner in Calico's Silver King Mine - bought what remained of the old ghost town with an eye to turning it into a tourist attraction. After restoring many of the old structures, he gave it to San Bernardino County in 1966 in exchange for a $748,000 tax writeoff.

Now a regional park, Calico is filled with 22 reconstructed buildings - six are original structures, including the park office, which is in an old bordello - among them a restaurant, a theater and a schoolhouse. Visitors can see the excavated walls of the old Chinatown, marvel at a cabin built completely out of bottles and poke through the old cemetery.

The county is working to renovate the old schoolhouse, on a plateau off the upper end of the main street, a project set for completion later this year. And restoration work is also under way on the cemetery, where most of more than 100 graves are marked only by piles of rocks.

``We know who's in about half the graves and we're working to figure out the other half,'' Baltazar said. A list of those who lie there provides a very personal look at what life was like in the boom town: Several babies were stillborn and others died of heat prostration, diptheria or pneumonia; some wives died in childbirth; many miners were killed in fires, falls or cave-ins, and one was kicked to death by a mule; nearly a half-dozen men whose dreams of riches were unrealized committed suicide - some by hanging, some by gunfire and one by taking rat poison.

Despite what old western movies show, only a few died in violent shootouts.

``It was a violent place,'' Baltazar said. ``They used to have 20 to 30 fistfights a week. But there were only five shootings in 26 years because it was considered very bad manners to carry a gun in town.''

Still, Baltazar's research shows that Harry Dodson, 22, was hunted down and shot to death by a posse in 1889 after stealing the Runover Mining Co.'s $4,395 payroll; Albert Roland, 25, was shot and killed by E.P. Scollard during an argument over a card game in a saloon; and ``Blackie'' Scroggins, age unknown, was lynched in 1882. His gravestone bears the warning: ``Claim jumpers, take notice.''

And there were the ``soiled doves'' like Daisy Dooley, who died in 1887 at an unknown age. Her tombstone bears the hopeful message: ``She came to town one day, wasn't long before she went astray; she leaves the town today to a better place, we pray.''

Although the graves date back to 1884, the old burial ground still receives those who called Calico home, like Donald ``Tumbleweed'' Harris, the town's ``marshal'' for seven years, who was buried atop a hill in 1979. Baltazar said he plans to be buried there, too.

``I'm going to be cremated and they can put me in the northeast corner, closest to town,'' he said with a laugh. ``Every once in a while, somebody can come out and pour a beer on me and tell me what's going on. I love this place and I never want to leave.''

ON LOCATION

Calico ghost town is off Interstate 15 at Ghost Town Road, about a 10-minute drive northeast of Barstow. It's open 8 a.m. to dusk daily except Christmas; shops are open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $5 per person and includes parking and a ride up the mountain to the town in an old mine tram. A 110-unit campground with cabins, a bunkhouse and campsites with hookups are available for rent in a tree-shaded canyon.

The town hosts several annual events: the Calico Hullabaloo, generally on Palm Sunday weekend; the Calico Spring Festival, usually on Mother's Day; Calico Days, on Columbus Day; and a Western Fine Arts Show, on the first weekend in November.

Information: [phone] or [phone].

Just east of the ghost town is the Calico Early Man Archeological Site, which experts say is either one of the world's greatest hoaxes or 200,000-year-old evidence that generations of archeologists were wrong. Excavated beginning in 1964 by Dr. Louis S.B. Leakey, discoverer of Africa's Olduvai Gorge, picks and scrapers found here upset earlier theories that man was in the New World for only 10,000 to 20,000 years, suggesting instead that man inhabited this region for some 200,000 years.

The site is open to the public only on guided tours 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is $1.

CAPTION(S):

5 Photos, Box

Photo: (1) Portraits of old-time gunslingers and la wmen line Lil's Saloon along Calico's main street. The former gambling parlor is now an eatery.

(2--color) A stroll across a footbridge leads to the town's schoolhouse, recently rebuilt.

(3--color) The Maggie Mine, a cool spot to visit, bores deep into the mountain.

(4,5--color) Alan Baltazar, dressed as an 1880's miner, leads historical tours of the old silver mining town near Barstow. At top, miners homes are built into rocky outcroppings.

Carol Bidwell/Daily News

Box: ON LOCATION (see text)