Pine Flat

The Press Democrat's Clark Mason told some of this in the Sunday paper.

Near Healdsburg, near the Jimtown store, Pine Flat Road snakes up into the Mayacomas. It's a steep climb used by some Tour de France cyclists for an extreme workout. At the top of the mountains it ends in a locked gate, and on the other side is a dirt road leading down to Lake County. Dan, Tim and I sometimes bike about a half mile up the road, and then we turn around and boast to one another on the way back.

I  have driven to the top five or six times, and short of the top there is a little meadow with a creek. It's bear and cougar country, now owned by the Audubon Society. A great place to stroll. There once was a town there, Pine Flat, with 3,000 people mining quicksilver. They had stores, hotels, brothels, and a stage coach route. That was in the 1870s, and the town had three districts: a Latino district, a Chinese district, and between them was what they called the American (or white) district. But there is nothing left of the town, not a stick, not even one photograph or personal diary, just some newspaper accounts. The town completely vanished.

The stage coach owner and driver, Clark Foss, has a mural in his honor in Calistoga, and the creek that floods Healdsburg is Foss Creek. Foss was famous for rapid stage coach rides, and he did crash once and kill a passenger. Pine Flat had homicides, of course, and the most famous killer there was Eadweard Muybridge. I suppose he is most famous for some photographs he commissioned of a running horse that proved that there were moments when all four hooves were in the air.  Muybridge murdered Major Henry Larkins, his wife's British  lover. The British were unpopular at the time.  Muybridge pleaded temporary insanity and walked free.