Category: Ghost Towns

In the sun-scorched folds of the Greenwater Range, on the eastern fringe of California’s Inyo County, the ghost town of Lila C—also known as Ryan or Old Ryan—whispers tales of the borax boom that briefly animated the desolate Amargosa Valley. Perched at an elevation of 2,562 feet (781 meters) and roughly 6.25 miles (10 km) southwest of Death Valley Junction, Lila C emerged as a fleeting industrial outpost in the early 20th century, tethered to the fortunes of a single mine that bore its name. Unlike the silver-laden ghost towns of the Sierra Nevada or the gold-fevered camps of the Panamint Range, Lila C’s story is one of quiet extraction: the mining of colemanite, a hydrated calcium borate mineral essential for industrial borax production, which fueled everything from glassmaking to fireproofing in America’s burgeoning factories. Named for the daughter of a pioneering borax magnate, the settlement’s rise and fall mirrored the volatile economics of the Death Valley region’s mineral rushes, where isolation, ingenuity, and the iron rails of progress intertwined to create ephemeral communities amid the relentless desert heat.

Early Discovery and the Borax Rush (Late 19th–Early 20th Century)

The saga of Lila C begins not with a thunderous claim stake but with the opportunistic eye of William Tell Coleman, a San Francisco merchant and early borax entrepreneur whose ventures spanned California’s arid interior. In the 1880s, as the 20-mule teams of the Harmony Borax Works hauled refined borax from Death Valley to Mojave—covering 165 grueling miles across sand and alkali flats—Coleman scouted new deposits to challenge the monopoly of Death Valley’s “white gold.” By the late 1890s, he acquired claims in the Greenwater Range, a rugged spur of volcanic and sedimentary rock rising from the Amargosa Desert floor, where shallow borate beds hinted at untapped wealth. In 1905, Coleman’s prospectors struck rich colemanite veins at what would become the Lila C Mine, on the eastern slope of the range in sections 1, 2, and 12 of Township 24 North, Range 4 East (San Bernardino Meridian). He named the property for his daughter, Lila C. Coleman, a sentimental flourish amid the harsh calculus of frontier capitalism.

The discovery ignited a minor rush in an already storied mining county. Inyo, the second-largest in California at over 10,000 square miles, had long been a crucible for mineral seekers: from the silver bonanza of Cerro Gordo in 1865, which shipped ore via mules to a smelter in Swansea and bankrolled Los Angeles’ early growth, to the gold strikes in Ballarat and the tungsten veins near Bishop. Borax, however, represented a quieter revolution. Colemanite, prized for its high boron content, was refined into borax at coastal plants, feeding the demands of an industrializing nation. Initial operations at Lila C were primitive—open pits and hand-sorted ore hauled by wagons—but production ramped up swiftly. By 1906, the mine yielded its first shipments, even as the nearest railhead lay dozens of miles away across the barren valley.

Boom and Infrastructure: Rails, Labor, and Daily Life (1906–1911)

Lila C’s true efflorescence came with the arrival of the rails, transforming a remote dig site into a humming company town. In 1905, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (T&T)—a narrow-gauge line backed by Nevada mining interests—broke ground from Ludlow on the Santa Fe mainline, snaking 168 miles northward through the Mojave and Amargosa deserts to serve Tonopah’s silver boom. The T&T reached Crucero, a flag stop in the valley, by late 1907, but Lila C’s operators couldn’t wait. Mule teams, echoing the 20-mule hauls of yore, bridged the gap, dragging ore wagons over rutted trails to temporary transload points. By 1908, a dedicated 6.7-mile spur—initially standard gauge, later converted to dual and then narrow gauge—jutted westward from the T&T at Death Valley Junction (then a nascent siding) directly to the mine mouth, easing the flow of colemanite to refineries in Bay Area plants.

Under new ownership, the Pacific Coast Borax Company—led by the enigmatic “Borax King” Francis Marion Smith, who had consolidated Coleman’s holdings—oversaw the town’s construction in 1907. Smith, a former Searles Lake operator who once controlled half the world’s borax supply, envisioned Lila C as a linchpin in his empire. Frame boarding houses, a commissary stocked with tinned beans and bolt cloth, a assay office, and bunkhouses for 50–100 laborers sprouted amid the creosote and Joshua trees. Water, that desert phantom, arrived via pipelines from distant springs, while dynamos powered headframes and crushers that processed up to 100 tons daily. The air hummed with the clatter of ore cars and the lowing of mules, punctuated by the distant whistle of T&T locomotives hauling freight from as far as Chicago.

Life in Lila C was a stark tableau of immigrant toil: Cornish miners with their expertise in hard-rock extraction, Mexican laborers hauling timbers, and Chinese cooks in the mess hall, all under the watchful eye of Anglo foremen. The town boasted a modest school for the few families and a post office that doubled as a social hub, where letters from distant kin mingled with assay reports. Yet, isolation bred hardship—temperatures soared past 120°F (49°C) in summer, and flash floods could wash out the spur. Surrounding the camp, the Greenwater Range’s badlands, etched by ancient Lake Manly’s retreat, offered scant respite, save for the occasional jackrabbit hunt or starry vigil over the Panamints’ silhouette.

Relationships with Surrounding Towns, Train Stops, Mines, and Historic Citizens

Lila C’s web of connections wove it into the broader tapestry of Inyo’s mining mosaic, where borax complemented the county’s silver, gold, and lead legacy. To the southwest, across the Amargosa’s shimmering flats, lay the T&T’s ribbon of steel, linking Lila C to Ludlow (a Santa Fe junction 100 miles south) for transcontinental shipments and to Tonopah, Nevada (70 miles north), the silver queen whose 1900 strike had birthed the T&T. Death Valley Junction, just 6 miles northeast, served as the vital rail nexus—a cluster of sidings, water towers, and a Harvey House hotel where passengers en route to Beatty’s goldfields or Rhyolite’s boom paused amid the alkali dust. Crucero, a whistle-stop 10 miles south, marked the spur’s origin, its name evoking the crossroads of fortune seekers.

Nearby towns underscored Lila C’s peripheral role in Inyo’s economy. Tecopa, 20 miles southeast in the Calico Hills, buzzed with hot springs and talc mines, its stage lines occasionally ferrying Lila C’s overflow supplies. To the west, Shoshone—another T&T stop—emerged as a rival borax hub with the nearby Dublin Mine, but Lila C’s higher-grade colemanite kept it competitive. Northward, the Harmony and Ryan borax works (the latter named for Smith’s foreman, John Ryan) dotted the valley, their 20-mule teams yielding to rails by 1907, fostering a loose network of borax barons who swapped labor and lore. Further afield, Lone Pine (50 miles west over the Panamints) and Independence, the county seat, supplied hardware and legal services, their merchants profiting from Inyo’s $150 million mineral bounty since 1861.

Mines formed the gravitational core: the Lila C itself, with its colemanite nodules gleaming in limestone beds, outproduced rivals like the nearby Greenwater borates. It fed into Smith’s conglomerate, which spanned from Searles to Death Valley, but competition from cheaper Pacific deposits loomed. Historic citizens animated this nexus—William Tell Coleman, the visionary whose 1880s Harmony operations romanticized borax lore; Francis Marion Smith, the shrewd consolidator who arrived in 1906, his fortune built on Searles Lake’s brine; and John Ryan, the eponymous overseer whose Ryan Camp (adjacent to Lila C) housed refinery workers until 1920. Laborers like the fictionalized “Borax Bill” in period accounts embodied the grit, while Indigenous Shoshone guides, displaced by claims, lingered on the fringes, their knowledge of water holes invaluable yet uncompensated.

Decline and Legacy

By 1911, Lila C’s star waned as abruptly as it rose. Floods ravaged the spur in 1909, and cheaper borax from California’s Kramer District undercut prices. Production halted in 1911, the town emptying like a receded mirage—bunkhouses dismantled, rails uprooted by 1917 (relaaid briefly in 1920 before final abandonment in 1926). The T&T limped on until 1940, hauling wartime freight, but Lila C faded into the National Park Service’s embrace after Death Valley’s 1933 designation. Today, within Death Valley National Park, scant ruins—a collapsed adit, scattered ore tailings, and a lone interpretive sign—mark the site, accessible via graded roads from NV-374. Borax’s legacy endures in Inyo’s museums, from Independence’s Eastern California Museum (displaying Lila C colemanite specimens) to the park’s borax wagons, evoking an era when white crystals rivaled gold in the desert’s alchemy.

Lila C stands as Inyo’s understated footnote: a testament to borax’s industrial might, the rails’ transformative pull, and the human threads—Coleman, Smith, Ryan—that stitched isolation into enterprise. In the Greenwater’s eternal hush, it reminds us that some booms leave no ghosts, only echoes in the salt wind. For visitation, consult NPS guidelines; the site’s fragility demands a light tread.