An influencer who bought a California ghost town is ready to die there

This is a story about the history and future of an evil town.

Cerro Gordo is a settlement of bloodstained brothels, skeletons and busted up pianos on the wind-battered southern slope of the Inyo Mountains, overlooking Death Valley. It was once the most violent town in America.

Into this haunted high desert comes an interloper, an entrepreneur, an adventurer or a TikTok star, depending on who you ask.

“I don’t have an exit plan. Dying here is the exit plan,” Brent Underwood tells me from somewhere above the accidental tomb of 30 immigrant miners.

Underwood and a partner bought Cerro Gordo two years ago, and despite the pandemic, snowstorms and a historic fire, he won’t be leaving, maybe ever. In fact, he’s still planning on opening a hotel there this summer.

Long before it was a town, Mexican prospectors first explored the mountain they called Cerro Gordo, meaning “fat hill,” in search of silver in the 1860s, back when California was still a wilderness beset by violent men hunting for treasures. An early group was attacked by Native Americans on the hill, and three of the five prospectors were killed.

It would be the first of many, many murders at Cerro Gordo.


In 1863, 35 Paiute Indians were chased down the mountain into the now-parched Owens Lake by white soldiers and massacred as they tried to swim away.

A silver vein was unearthed in the hills in 1865, and the town soon became the largest producer of the precious metal in California. It would make $50 million in today’s money from its rich mines over its brief, fiery history.

Miners sent their precious metal from the smelters down the hill on wagon trains with a 20-mule team. The ore would cross Owens Lake via steam boats and travel on to Los Angeles, which at the time was itself not much larger than the mining town.

Cerro Gordo brought so much money to the city that the Los Angeles News wrote in 1872, “To this city, Cerro Gordo trade is invaluable. What Los Angeles now is, is mainly due to it. It is the silver cord that binds our present existence. Should it be unfortunately severed, we would inevitably collapse.”

In its heyday, Cerro Gordo had 4,000 residents and 500 buildings, including seven saloons and three brothels, though it never had a church or schoolhouse.

“I used to watch ‘Gunsmoke’ as a kid,” Underwood says. “My grandfather had dementia and would watch it on repeat.”

“Now, I’m here in this old mining town. There was a murder a week here and rumors that Butch Cassidy hid out in the hotel, and fortunes were gained and people died,” he says. “It’s like living that childhood fantasy.”

Brent Underwood in Cerro Gordo, Calif.

Brent Underwood in Cerro Gordo, Calif.

Brent Underwood / Courtesy

It was the closest real-life town to Hollywood’s Wild West. Shootouts were common. No one escaped the bloodshed. Two children died after getting trapped in a steamer trunk; and when 30 immigrant miners from China were entombed in a collapsed mine shaft, no one went down to retrieve the bodies.

In 1874, the LA Evening Express described it as a “disagreeable burg, full of stout, warm-hearted go-ahead men who are tearing fortunes out of the bowels of the earth.”

By 1880, only a decade after its rowdy peak, the silver ran dry and the smelters were shuttered. A fire ravaged the saloons, brothels and main mineshaft, and the boom turned to bust. By the 1890s, “Fat Hill” had gone to the ghosts.

The last reported gunfight in Cerro Gordo occurred on Dec. 29, 1892. French-Canadian engineer and former postmaster of the town Billy Crapo shot and killed the new postmaster Henry Boland and a friend over an election dispute as they walked by his house next to the American Hotel.

A posse left Keeler, the town nine miles down the hill, the next morning to find Crapo and claim the $500 price on his head.

Billy Crapo reward notice.

Billy Crapo reward notice.

In the 1910s, the town enjoyed a brief second boom when zinc was discovered in the hills, but by 1938, the last resident left, and Cerro Gordo sat still on the mountain, uninhabited for more than half a century.

Underwood, 32, is a son of schoolteachers, born and raised in Tampa, Florida.

While he has become known as a mine shaft explorer, cabin rebuilder and ghost town heir, his background is in marketing, banking and publicity stunts.

In 2016, Underwood published a photo of his foot on Amazon to show how few sales it took to become a “#1 Best Seller” on the site. The stunt was widely covered in the press, and Amazon later said they were changing their algorithm because of the publication.

He was running a highly rated hostel in Austin, Texas, when the opportunity arose to buy Cerro Gordo.

Underwood and his business partner Jon Bier, founder of a boutique PR agency, bought the entire town for $1.4 million. The purchase included 336 acres and 22 buildings, the most historic of which was the town’s ornate centerpiece, the American Hotel, said to be the oldest hotel in California east of the Sierra Nevada.

CNBC reported that the new owners would likely turn the town into a retreat center for conferences, workshop events and film shoots.

Some in the community were wary of a millennial outsider with a background in marketing stunts buying up the entire town. Social media posts at the time vilified Underwood as a trust-funder hobbyist taking over the town on a whim.

“It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, I’m not flipping the place. I’m like, here,” he says. “When we bought the town we were very much outsiders moving into a very proud part of the country. Everyone in Owens Valley has a history or story about Cerro Gordo. But everyone sat on the sidelines and watched.”

Underwood traveled to the town at the start of the pandemic, for what was intended to be a short trip, after shutdown forced the closure of the hostel in Austin.

He has a knack for making headlines, and his story was told widely after a snowstorm on the mountain isolated him there for months instead of weeks.

“Brent Underwood, trapped in a town with only ghosts for company,” a Guardian headline read. “Man forced to quarantine in ghost town with gruesome past,” led the New York Post.

“I’m from Florida and Texas, I’m not used to snow. I came in my little truck and got stuck,” he says, “Now it’s been 10 months and I’m still standing in this cabin.”

Underwood says that the enforced longevity of that first stay enabled him to feel at home in the ghost town.

“During that time there was a change in myself. There’s no running water here, everything is different, and you’re very aware of that for the first week, but then there’s a hump and I started getting a little more comfortable,” he says. “I found all these new passions and interests that I didn’t know I had.”

Those passions include photographing the stars, exploring dangerous long-abandoned mine shafts for treasure, searching for elusive $100,000 original Levis and becoming a YouTube and TikTok star.
 
This post of Underwood rifling through broken bottles before finding a full bottle of whiskey has nearly 12 million views.

@brentwunderwood

Finding a huge stash of 1800s liquor bottles in a hillside! #abandoned #fyp #treasurehunt

♬ Indiana Jones Theme – 90s Dance Music

His first video, “I Spent My Life Savings On An Abandoned Ghost Town,” has amassed more than 6 million views.

“It’s so creative and fun to connect with everyone. I get to chat with everyone from all over the world about something I love,” Brent says. “The majority of viewers seem to be families and I love that, it’s sparking people to explore things with their kids and go down rabbit holes.”

I ask him if he’s monetized his rise to social media stardom.

“I must have mentioned Levi’s a hundred times, I tried to get them to sponsor me but it didn’t happen. I stood in here in Levi’s right now that I bought myself,” he laughs. Underwood did say that he recently started adding ads to his YouTube channel.

@brentwunderwood

Finding old jeans in an abandoned mine #abandoned #fyp #abandonedplaces #adventure

♬ Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (Movie Main Theme) – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

Underwood is building a museum in the town to showcase all his finds.

“Everything I find I add to the museum here, I take that very seriously,” he says. “I see it as a race against time, these mines will collapse, and everything in them will dissolve and turn to dust.”

He is also aware that they may collapse while he is in them, though that hasn’t stopped him yet. “My reminder that I’m going to die every day is the graveyard here and the miners below me,” he says, “it’s weirdly motivating.”

The winding mountain path, known as Yellow Grade Road, from Lone Pine to Cerro Gordo switches back and forth as it climbs the hill, cutting through stacks of rusty rock and sand. From the town it’s possible to see visitors arriving long before they make it up to the first cabin.

These visitors have become more frequent since Underwood started documenting his adventure online.

“I’m the only person living here full time, but we get volunteers to help with certain projects. There’s a man in the high desert with a mobile concrete plant that he’s offered to bring over so we can use the sand here, rather than bring it up the mountain,” Underwood says.

As if getting stuck in a ghost town during a pandemic and becoming a viral hit wasn’t enough, Underwood’s story took another headline-grabbing turn last summer when Cerro Gordo was met again with fire and fury.

On June 15, 2020, the midsummer heat warmed Death Valley to a typical 100 degrees and a fierce wind blew off Mount Inyo peak from the north.

And exactly 149 years after it opened, the American Hotel in Cerro Gordo burnt to the ground.

“It was probably the most devastating day of my life,” Underwood recalls. “I couldn’t even talk about it for the first few weeks. You are literally watching your life savings and hopes and dreams burn in front of you.”

Underwood woke at 3 a.m. to see the hotel, the ice house and Billy Crapo’s home all engulfed in flames, fueled by furious winds. The propane tanks in the hotel then exploded, laying waste to the plot.

The Crapo House and the American Hotel, Cerro Gordo, Calif., before the fire.

The Crapo House and the American Hotel, Cerro Gordo, Calif., before the fire.

Brent Underwood / Courtesy

He believes the cause of the fire was likely electrical, with centuries-old wiring running through desert-baked wooden walls insulated with old newspaper.

“It was a bad combination,” he says. Although he also speculated that it may have been caused by a ghost, and reported that a “shadowy apparition” was seen the night before in the hotel kitchen.

The Lone Pine Fire Department did not reveal the conclusion of the investigation into the fire to SFGATE, though it is believed to have not ignited in the American Hotel itself, but in Crapo’s house next door.

Underwood set up a GoFundMe the morning after the fire asking for $500,000 to rebuild the American Hotel.

“We really need help,” the fundraiser pled. “… We have the original plans and blueprints for the hotel and what we are planning on doing with the raised funds is make it better than ever, bring it back to a version of the glory days. No, it won’t be original wood, but it will be the original design and up to modern code, so people can actually stay in the American Hotel.”

The fundraiser also likens the hotel’s restoration to that of one of the wonders of the world.

“Many historical relics, like Machu Picchu in Peru, are partly restored and partly original, which makes visiting and celebrating history and culture easier.”

The GoFundMe is currently at about $86,000.

“What am I going to do? Go back to Austin with my tail between my legs?” Underwood says. “I became borderline obsessed with making sure that the American Hotel will stand here again, and that gave me a guiding light and kept me here.”

Cerro Gordo, Calif.

Cerro Gordo, Calif.

Brent Underwood / Courtesy

I ask Underwood if, outside of ghost stories, he believes that there is a dark fate looming over people like him who try to make their home in the town.

“No one is going to escape death. So what are you going to do with the time you are given? It’s forced me to confront the question — what do I want to do? What do I want to accomplish in my life? I’ve become more comfortable over these 10 months with the answer to that being Cerro Gordo.”

Underwood thinks about dying a lot. Though in his early 30s, he sometimes sounds like an old scarred cowboy entering his final years, reckoning with death. I ask him if the isolation welcomes those existential thoughts before their time.

“Maybe. When I was in Austin I’d keep busy to avoid sitting with thoughts like that,” he says. “I’d keep busy with random stuff. Up here I don’t have that. I can’t just go to the store to distract myself, it’s a three-hour round trip. So I get … or have, I don’t know if it’s ‘get’ or ‘have,'” he thinks for a moment, “I get to sit with those thoughts.”

Underwood doesn’t have too much time to think over the coming months, after repeatedly telling his millions of viewers and subscribers that he plans on opening the rebuilt American Hotel and the town to visitors in August 2021.

“Now millions of people know that’s my intention, it’s holding me accountable,” he laughs.

A cynical mind may see the last year as nothing more than a perfectly executed marketing campaign. Millions of people across the world are counting down the days to the opening of a very Instagrammable six-room hotel in the middle of nowhere. (Underwood also plans on setting up campsites and smaller cabins for visitors.)

Though Underwood has mixed feelings about his town opening to outsiders.

“I’ve grown to love Cerro Gordo and my life up here. Part of that is me being alone,” he says, realizing that his goal may end all that.

“I’m striving towards this goal to open it up to everybody and then my life will fundamentally change. So I think about that a lot. I’m working towards this thing I’ve made public. How will my life change this summer?” He says, “I will no longer be able to explode dynamite wherever I want on any given Wednesday.”

Underwood finds it easier to imagine dying in Cerro Gordo than a life after the ghost town.

“When will Cerro Gordo be done? I don’t think it will ever be done. I could do this for the rest of my life.”

A town forever defined by greed, murder and fire maybe has a way of holding you in its grip. In the shifting sands of the high desert, you’re only a hero in Cerro Gordo until you’re not.

As the posse made their way up the Yellow Grade Road to find murderous Billy Crapo in 1892, the newspapers reported that the fugitive would be “a hard man to take.”

“Nothing has been heard of Crapo since he disappeared from Cerro Gordo,” the Inyo Independent wrote. “He is as completely lost as if he had gone into a tunnel and pulled the hole in after him.”

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