Oatman’s Truly Land of Free, Home of the Bray

OATMAN, Ariz. —  Life sometimes is a zoo for the 250 people of this former gold-mining town in the rugged Black Mountains.

Each morning, packs of wild burros, abandoned by miners in the first half of this century, take over the town like an occupying army. They stop traffic, foul the streets and regularly nose and bray their way into the gift shops, saloons and eateries along Oatman’s two-block Main Street on old Route 66.

“They definitely have the right of way,” Billie Jo Moore, proprietor of the historic Oatman Hotel, where several of the burros loiter, said.

The burro invasion, however, is a peaceful takeover. Enterprising merchants aid and abet the occupation by selling up to 1,000 bags of alfalfa pellets a day to tourists who feed the animals.

“For a while the burros snacked on whatever people had in their ice chests--leftover baloney sandwiches, Oreo cookies, carrot sticks, you name it,” Moore said. “That’s when some of us in town decided it would be a whole lot better for the health of the burros and the upkeep of our streets if we began pushing the sale of alfalfa pellets.”

While alfalfa remains Oatman’s hottest commodity, merchants also are cashing in on tourist demand for everything from Indian artifacts and Western antiques to ice cream sodas and sarsaparillas.

As a result, Oatman is in the midst of another boom that may prove far richer than the $35 million worth of ore that prospectors hauled out of the mines from 1900 to 1942.

Disaster Always Loomed

Life didn’t always pan out for the denizens of Oatman. Inauspiciously named after the surviving members of an Apache massacre in 1851, Oatman clung to a hardscrabble existence until gold was first found in the area near the turn of the century.

Although commerce boomed with the construction of new mines, saloons, hotels and a red-light district, disaster never seemed far off. Much of the town was decimated in 1918 when influenza claimed 26 lives in 21 days.

In 1926 fire destroyed all but five structures. Finally, in 1942, Oatman’s 50 gold mines closed after Congress declared that gold mining was no longer essential to the war effort.

With the news, most of the prospectors pulled up stakes, leaving their burros to fend for themselves in Oatman’s rough terrain.

Then came the opening of Interstate 40 in 1951, which allowed motorists to bypass Oatman and Route 66, then known as America’s Main Street, forever.

“I think the population sank to about six people,” Moore said. “That’s a far cry from the 12,300 we had here during the heyday in the ‘20s and ‘30s.”

Of course, Oatman was never completely erased from the fertile imaginations of Hollywood producers eager to mine new locations for filming their next Western.

Hollywood Love Affair

In 1955 “Foxfire,” produced by Howard Hughes and starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler, was filmed entirely in Oatman. The town’s lunarlike backdrop at an elevation of 2,700 feet also provided the setting for “Edge of Eternity” in 1959 and “How the West Was Won” in 1962.

But this Oatman-Hollywood love affair blossomed much earlier. In one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets, screen idols Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their wedding night in Room 15 at the Oatman Hotel after exchanging vows on March 29, 1939, in Kingman, 29 miles to the east.

Upon his return to Hollywood and his Encino ranch, Gable explained his selection of a wedding site.

“We received hundreds of invitations from nearly every chamber of commerce in the country asking us to get married in their city,” said Gable, who was on a short leave of absence from work on “Gone With the Wind.”

“Kingman was about the only city that didn’t ask, so we went there.”

Thus, Kingman’s good fortune indirectly helped Oatman open a few doors in Hollywood, and thereby spare the tiny frontier town from almost certain anonymity. In time, the town that was once compared to a semicolon, “a place for people to pause, before eventually moving on,” became a destination or exclamation point for curious newcomers.

One of those was Duke Clark, a veteran actor who had come to town in 1972 to perform in the play, “Deadwood Dick.” Six months later, he came back to stay.

“If you can’t fall in love with this town, your nerve endings are shot,” Clark said.

Gunfighters Organized

To help bring business and tourism back to Oatman, Clark organized the Oatman Gunfighters. For more than a decade these quick-draw artists have been shooting it out on Main Street every Saturday and Sunday at 3 p.m. during the summer, and 2:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. the remainder of the year.

The gunfighters are more like one-act morality plays, with several of the cast members ending up face down on the hot pavement. “The asphalt’s not getting any softer, but I am,” said Clark, who still makes his own blanks out of black powder and Styrofoam.

Another relative newcomer to Oatman is Ruth Stauffer, who owns Jackass Heaven (pronounced Haven), a gift shop that served as the town’s post office in the early 1900s.

“My husband and I fell in love with the mountains here,” she said. “Every time you look at them, you see something different.”

Jackass Heaven is also the unofficial in-town home of the wild burros.

“I wouldn’t change places with anyone,” she said.

The Wisconsin native also noted that many of the burros bear crosses down their backs and shoulders “just like those in the Bible.”

“Just don’t spook ‘em,” Stauffer warned, “or you may end up on the seat of your pants.”

Indians Make Jewelry

Today 31 merchants in town run the various cafes, shops, saloons and other emporia designed to rekindle interest in the Old West.

At the town’s southern entrance there’s also a flea market that sells leather goods and turquoise jewelry made by the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico.

A favorite Oatman stop is Old Timey Photos, across the street from Jackass Heaven. In the blink of an eye, octogenarian shutterbug Fred Pack can jury-rig you into a saloon-hall dress or miner’s garb and make a stylish sepia-tone, 5x7 print for about $8.

No visit to this former gold-mining center is complete, however, without visiting the historic, 26-room Oatman Hotel, the only two-story adobe building in Mohave County.

Although it hasn’t offered overnight accommodations since 1975, the combined saloon, restaurant and museum is awash with local color and more than its share of unexplained phenomena.

“Sometimes the jukebox starts playing in the middle of the night,” Moore said. “I’ve been in the kitchen downstairs when I’ve heard someone walking around overhead. Things also disappear for three or four weeks at a time, then miraculously turn up in a strange new place.”

Moore also swears that a lime-colored bedspread in “Oatey’s Room” reveals, like a modern-day Shroud of Turin, the silhouette of a miner and the outline of a book he was reading.

“My first reaction was the bedspread must be faded,” Moore said. “But when I had it cleaned, it came back as bright as ever.”

Throwing Coins in Rooms

You can be the judge of this tale for yourself and view all the other hotel rooms as well, including the Gable and Lombard honeymoon suite, for 50 cents.

All the rooms are paneled with corrugated tin because lumber was in short supply and too costly to haul up to Oatman. Today, tourists throw coins into many of the rooms, perhaps as tokens to the hard life of the miner and his often illusory quest for riches.

When you visit the upstairs museum, spend some time in the memorabilia room. There’s an old catcher’s mitt and iron snow-cone holder recovered from a ball field south of town. There are also several mining exhibits and prospecting tools on display.

Downstairs in the miner’s bar, listen to live Western music and sip a beer or a frosted sarsaparilla, but don’t pay for it with one of the more than 1,000 one-dollar bills that line the establishment’s walls and ceiling.

“We give away the coins each year for the kids’ haystack scramble,” Moore said, “but the dollars are going to stay stuck to the walls.”

The visitor also can swagger across the street past the burros and into the Dollar Princess Mining Saloon, built in 1924 after the great Oatman fire. The rustic, wood-beamed saloon connects by a tunnel in back to a mine shaft, which could have been used for a fire escape.

Legend has it that the tunnel was used for poker games in the early 1900s. Today, house specialties such as Indian frybread and Navajo tacos are your best bet.

Antique Gun Shop

Oatman also offers historic, albeit limited, overnight accommodations.

The town’s only motel, the Z-Inn, offers eight rooms, constructed from the stage and seating area of the old Oatman Theater, built in 1919. On the premises is an antique gun shop that specializes in firearms from the Civil War era. Rooms are $30 a night, seven days a week. Call owner Jim Hunt at (602) 768-4603 for reservations.

Most visitors to Oatman, however, stay in either Needles, Calif., Bullhead City, Ariz., or Laughlin, Nev., all along the Colorado River and all within half an hour’s drive of the town.

To reach Oatman from Los Angeles, drive I-40 eastbound to Needles and exit at any of the town’s three exits. Cross the Colorado River at the foot of K Street and proceed north along Arizona 95 for about eight miles. At Boundry Cone, head east for 14 miles to Oatman.