Ghost writer

Shawn Hall spends his weekends on the run from angry, rifle-toting prospectors and maneuvering his car around treacherous mine shafts on deserted roads.

Someday, he hopes to don scuba gear and go scavenging for ruins at the bottom of Lake Mead.

Is he a treasure hunter? A stunt double?

No, just a mild-mannered historian.

His daredevilish ways are merely an occupational hazard on his personal crusade: To document every ghost town in Nevada.

"When I know there's a place up there I want to see," Hall explains nonchalantly of his brushes with danger, "I don't like giving up."

He even has a name for this affliction -- "ghost town fever."

Hall, a 38-year-old Massachusetts native and Harvard University history major, fell in love with the West early on and spent his collegiate summers on a ranch in Northern Nevada, "playing cowboy" and exploring the area.

Two years before he graduated, in 1981, he convinced a New York publisher to publish his first book, a documentation of Nye County ghost towns.

After moving to Nevada following graduation, Hall served as the assistant curator of history at the state museum in Carson City and as the director of the Northeastern Nevada Museum in Elko. The divorced father recently took a job at the state library and archives in Carson City to be closer to his 4-year-old daughter, Heather.

Now, Hall has a book deal with University of Nevada Press to pen a series covering all of Nevada's 14 counties, beginning with "Romancing Nevada's Past: Ghost Towns and Historic Sites of Eureka, Lander and White Pine Counties," now in its second printing, and his most recent release about the ghost and mining towns of Elko County. He's also reworking his first book on Nye County.

He plans to tackle Clark and Lincoln counties in about three years, and is eager to check out Calville, one of the cities submerged when Lake Mead was filled.

"The idea of the series," Hall says, "is to do a county-by- county history of the state, because it hasn't been done. My own personal goal is to bring out and preserve the history that otherwise no one would ever know about."

Gathering clues

What qualifies a town as ghostly? Hall says it is "a place which is a shadowy semblance of a former self."

The first ghost town he ever saw, Rhyolite, left him awestruck.

"When I first visited, I went 'Wow,' " he recalls. "In 1908, they had a strike and 14,000 people came. The streets were lined with cement and stone buildings. At the time, it was the second largest city in Nevada; four years later it was abandoned. It just boggled my mind."

With the 5 percent per book royalty that he receives and press runs of around 2,500 copies, the "Romancing Nevada's Past" label is appropriate: This project is definitely a labor of love.

"I love Nevada" he says. "This is my contribution to being a resident of the state."

The books, which are one-part historical tome and one-part off-off- the-beaten-path travel guide, are organized region-by-region, town-by-town, instead of by subject, which might have been a more lively read.

Hall ends each historical listing with a description of what he has observed left standing, in case you want to peruse the area, too.

In the process of researching his books, Hall hiked through government land and privately-held property (after getting permission, of course), trolling for ruins of 1800s saloons and schoolhouses, and racking up 15,000 miles in his beloved Toyota four-wheeler ("It's gotten me out of some situations I had no business getting in," he says).

"Most of the time, it's pretty much going in blind," he says of visiting a town for the first time. "I always expect there not to be anything, so if there is a building left, I get really excited. The saloons are easy to find -- because of all the broken glass," he says. "And the banks you can tell, because there's often part of the vault left."

After that comes the more laborious, but still fascinating work of poring through the Bureau of Mines and Geology annual reports, county court records ("they tend to be pretty darn dusty"), old newspapers and postal documentation.

Surprisingly, it can be easier to piece together the history of the late 1800s than the 1920s, '30s or '40s, Hall says.

"The newspapers then were really meticulous, which is extremely valuable. They would write, 'Joe and Don worked such-and-such claim for two weeks.' I don't know if the interest waned or whatever, but (later) there wasn't that much in the newspapers, so that's what I focus on when I talk to people.

"Of course," he adds, "you've always got to take oral histories and newspaper articles with a grain of salt."

That's because memories are faulty, and newspaper articles in boomtowns were often promotional pieces published by the mine's owners, which exaggerated prosperity to lure in residents.

Colorful characters

Finally comes the most tedious part -- writing the darn thing.

His most recent release, "Old Heart of Nevada: The Ghost Towns and Mining Caps of Elko County," (University of Nevada Press $21.95) is a book that will find a place in the heart of any Nevada history wonk.

It matter-of-factly retells the history of each town -- the discovery of silver, copper or gold; the sales of claims; the construction of schoolhouses, hotels, brothels and even opera houses; the establishment of postal service; and the eventual bust, complete with fires, avalanches and the inevitable drying up of the mines.

But despite the somewhat dry recitation, the dedicated reader can find a glimpse of life in the wild, wild West -- with train robberies, saloon gunfights and characters seemingly out of a John Wayne flick.

There was Mort Groton, the stage coach driver, who disappeared from White Rock one day on his way to deliver the mail and supplies, which included a shipment of alcohol. A few days later, Groton wandered into a nearby town, rip-roaring drunk.

There was George "Old Allegheny" Mardis, a man with a sinister look (his face was half-charred from a mining explosion) who founded Mardis, a town with a "widespread reputation for its lawlessness." Later, Mardis was reformed -- he turned into a bible-quoting preacher after locals played a joke on him that scared him into thinking he had killed a man.

Tex Hazelwood, a notorious cattle rustler from around Contact, cleverly fashioned shoes with cow hooves on the bottom and confounded ranchers over how the thief stealing their cattle never left any human tracks.

A.R. Smith was the railroad ticket agent in Toano who "had the bad habit" of pointing empty guns at people as a joke, until one day the gun was mistakenly loaded.

Locals of Tuscarora discovered that Sam Pollard wasn't Sam, but "Sarah," a woman disguising herself as a man to protect herself from an abusive father.

Even famed boxer Jack Dempsey makes a cameo appearance in the book. Enchanted with a mine in Midas that he discovered while setting up a practice camp, Dempsey returned later to become a part owner and the mine was renamed in his honor.

Hall figures that had he been around back then, he would have been running a newspaper, traveling from boomtown to boomtown. Clearly, his biggest regret is that he didn't get a chance to play a part in one of his sagas.

"I've always felt I was born 100 years late, I really do," he says wistfully. "I would have loved to have been there."

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