A quicksilver boomtown of two thousand, now capped shafts and desert
Somebody found cinnabar out here in the mid-1880s, which is the ore that mercury comes out of, and at the peak this was a town of two thousand people in country that supports almost nobody. What is left is the ghost town of the Chisos Mining Company, owned by Howard Perry, and a scatter of capped and abandoned workings carrying names like California Hill, the Rainbow, the 248 and Study Butte. The mineral terlinguaite was first found here at California Hill. It sits in southwest Brewster County near the Rio Grande, and the desert has been taking it back for a hundred years.
