Ophir

[These pictures were taken from my camera phone, Mark was taking the boy scouts backpacking at the time.]

 

My first inkling that Ophir existed was during the longest drive Mark could come up with, short of a road trip, sometime in June a few years ago. I had just had my second baby, and I always get antsy and emotional right about as I hit the two week mark. I absolutely love driving through lonely, barren country. Wyoming ranching country – I'm daydreaming about wild horses the entire way through. I just about cry driving through Kansas, looking at all of that sky. Needless to say, western Utah is like balm to my soul. We drove up highway 73 towards Tooele, stopping at anything that looked interesting. We found an old cemetery near the Mercur mining town site that was everything a cemetery should be – small, a little bit sad, with just the cedars watching over those old miners. Then we drove up the highway a few miles, taking a detour at the turnoff for Ophir.

It was like hitting a time warp. They've obviously tried to preserve the place, but it feels like they are holding onto ghosts. It used to be a big, raucous, silver mining town. There aren't any more brothels and there is only one touristy saloon, but even the way they've preserved it feels gaudy, which is strangely appropriate.

Of course, they started by naming it Ophir, after the place King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba got all of their gold from. Actually, it started before that, when General Patrick Connor showed up after the Civil War. He was adamantly anti-Mormon and he had a plan to do something about it. When he wasn't harassing the local Indian tribes, he would send his soldiers out prospecting. As soon as they found anything promising, they'd put out the word and within a few years, they'd filled up Tooele County with the roughest, meanest, dirtiest miners they could find.

[Wouldn't this make the coolest haunted house?]

The miners took the torch from there. They formed their own political party, the Liberal Party of Utah, determined to take control of the politics of the area. Except they must not have been too confident in their campaigning skills, because come voting day, poll workers complained of people voting twice, sometimes three times, then getting all their non-resident friends in the area to vote with them. The district judge sided with the miners, but the mormons in the area seemed pretty cranky too, because they wouldn't give up the county courthouse until President Brigham Young told them they had to listen to the judge. (They may have been right since only 1500 taxpayers were on record, but 2200 votes were cast.)

The Liberal Party of Utah referred to themselves as the Republic of Tooele after that. Nobody's sure if they were joking or not. Ophir was right in the middle of all of this and loving it.

[I have no idea what this is all about.]

Today, it is a little more sleepy, with maybe 20 houses lining the sides of a narrow mountain valley. Driving through, people still sit on their porches in rocking chairs and if you are polite, you can ask how long they've been there and about any good trails in the area. They may or may not be in the mood to talk, because even now, they can be suspicious of outsiders. They do tours on weekends and they've left a few of the mines open if you are curious. We were there again just last weekend and I swear I saw a little boy herding his cows down the road with a stick like he might have done a hundred years ago.

 (This is all Wikipedia information, but somebody wrote a paper about the miners and the whole Republic of Tooele thing in 1890s, I was just too lazy to drive up to the U of U and actually look at it - so I'm pretty sure it's all true.)