28 July 2019 IF YOU FIND YOURSELF in an authentic Wild West mining settlement with a donkey in your path, congratulations... you’ve arrived in the Route 66 ghost town of Oatman, Arizona located in the Black Mountains of Arizona's Mohave County. Oatman enjoys an elevation of over 2,700 feet. The town of Oatman was named after Olive Oatman, a young girl traveling west with a group of Latter Day Saints to establish a Mormon colony in California. Along the way, in 1850, she was captured by the Yavapai tribe where she was held captive for five years until being released nearby the modern-day location of Oatman in 1855. Oatman was sparsely settled starting in 1863 when a small bit of gold was discovered in the surrounding Black Mountains. Not much came of the discovery until two lucky prospectors struck it rich in 1915, with a 10 million dollar claim. The town grew rapidly after that, and in the course of a single year, the tiny tent village became a town of 3,500 people. The town prospered during a decade-long gold rush, but when the mines dried up, so did everything else. The town’s biggest mine closed in 1924, and by the early 1960s, the whole area was all but abandoned. Main Street through Oatman, is tiny with just a handful of junk stores, restaurants, and gift shops. An afternoon is all you’ll need to explore thoroughly. Oatman provides a good sense of what the frontier West was really like: rough, shabby, and naturally chaotic. The Oatman Hotel The Oatman Hotel is an attraction in itself. Now a for handouts. When you arrive, go into the stores and purchase a bag of alfalfa cubes. Please do not feed the burros carrots! The Oatman burros have consumed too many carrots, which aren’t good for them. The carrots have made them overweight and aggressive, and they are showing signs of poor health. Keeping dogs away from the burros is recommended. Wild West Gunfights Oatman is one of only a few functioning municipalities with regular Wild West gun battles on its main street. The gunfighters simply walk out into traffic and block the street. The encircling crowd stands within 10 or 15 feet of the action, and these are real guns going off, although loaded with blanks. For comfort, you can cling to a burro—they are totally unflustered during the mock killing. The gunfighters perform daily at 1:30 pm and 3:30 pm although the later show may be canceled during summer months because of the heat. 4th of July On Independence Day, contestants can compete in the Oatman Egg Fry, where participants attempt to cook an egg on the hot sidewalk (with the help of a solar cooker). The egg fry is held at high noon. Fry cooks and their two assistants (mostly to keep the burros from eating the contest results) have 15 minutes to fry two official Oatman Chamber of Commerce eggs — please, no substitutes — using solar power in any way, including mirrors, magnifying lenses, foil or whatever creative manner restaurant and bar, visitors can sign one dollar bills and tape them onto the ceiling and the walls, adding to the decor of thousands and thousands of signed bills. Also found in the hotel is the honeymoon suite, once shared by actors Clarke Gable and Carole Lombard after their 1939 wedding in Kingman. Some say the lovebirds’ spirits as well as other former lodgers still vacation there. Gable was a big fan of poker, it's said he loved the town and became friends with the miners. The hotel is also the home of “Oatie the Ghost”, the poltergeist of William Ray Flour, an Irish miner who died at the hotel in 1930 after drinking too much alcohol. As legend has it, his body remained undiscovered for several days, and was then buried out back in a shallow grave. The hotel remains open as a museum and restaurant. The Burros The "wild burros" are the ancestors of the burro's that worked the mines. After the mines closed, the burros were cut loose and remain to this day free residents of Oatman. They come into town to beg for food whenever tourists arrive. You can smell their presence even when you can't see them. Slow your car down and burros are likely to stick their heads in the windows searching OATMAN Mike McBey Joshua Noble