ABSTRACT
fort jones, california, is a classic Old West town, with the paint peeling off its antiquated wooden buildings and a Main Street that, in physical appearance, hasn’t changed much in a century. There’s an old hardware store, brick bank buildings, a couple Mexican restaurants, and a smattering of saloons. The few hundred residents mostly live in mobile homes or small wooden houses that look like they have been sitting there forever yet seem utterly fragile, as if it would take only one abnormally strong gust of wind to blow them into oblivion. Other communities in the region have a similar aura about them. Hamlets such as Dunsmuir, Weed, Callahan, and the larger town of Yreka. Yreka—one of the few urban hubs in Siskiyou County and the neighboring area not to have witnessed a population decline since 1990—still calls itself “The Golden City,” an optimistic throwback to its glory days, and still boasts Wild West saloons and elegant Victorian edifices along its central drags, Main and Miners streets. Similarly, the little railway town of Dunsmuir prides itself on its charming, somehow anachronistic eccentricity; in the window of a downtown law office is a plaster-cast skeleton reclining in a dentist’s chair, an aviator’s leather cap and goggles 22adorning its skull. Like moth-worn cashmere sweaters, these towns provide glimpses of past, unrecoverable grandeur.
