Skidoo : A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of the American West | Alex Capus

In the company of bank robbers and grave diggers, desperados and cunning Indians, brewers and failing inventors, Alex Capus visits the Wild West's ghost towns, where he descends into a disused silver mine and looks for traces left by the robbers who held-up stage coaches in Death Valley. Capus discovers stories that are a match for any Western: In Bodie the gravediggers used dynamite rather than shovels to blow holes in the ground; in the town of Skidoo, Hootch Simpson, a brawling bartender, was first hung by the mob, then by the law, before being beheaded during his autopsy; in Flagstaff, Capus finds that the legendary Route 66 was, for a time at least, a trail for Edward Fitzgerald Beale's 'Camel Corps'.