Dismal, New Mexico

On a July 7th,1867, afternoon in New Mexico territory, fighting a dry sandpaper wind and with old sol blistering down hot enough to make a lizard sweat, prospector D. B. Adams wiped his furrowed forehead with a handkerchief and complained to himself, “Leave it to me to come to the most dismal place on the planet to search for gold.” But after finding his first chunks of the lustrous metal a few hours later, Adams staked his claim and settled here; when word of the strike got out, so did the usual stream of hopefuls and dreamers, the whores and the schemers.

After a pipeline was completed in 1880 that carried water to the mine from Buzzard Creek eight miles away, the town was incorporated, and despite the good fortune bestowed upon the area, the name Dismal stuck—there was no doubt among any of its new citizens that it was the most abysmal places on Earth, besides the more apropos appellation, Death Valley, was already taken.

Soon, the dusty Dismal streets and wooden boardwalks were bustling with a few thousand Dismal citizens who received their Dismal mail when the Dismal post office was established in 1882.  The mine yielded nearly $2,000,000 worth of gold before being tapped out and closed in 1918.

After mining died, the Dismal economy tanked; the stream of hopefuls and dreamers, the whores and the schemers drifted towards other get-rich-quick lures.  If tumbleweeds had been counted in the 1930 census, the town’s population would have been around five thousand; officially, sans the diaspores, its population was only 163. By the end of the decade, Dismal was fully vacated.

On a July 7th, 1947, afternoon, a few miles outside a New Mexico ghost town, fighting a dry sandpaper wind and with old sol blistering down hot enough to make a lizard sweat, a three-foot Grey wiped his elongated forehead with his handkerchief and complained to himself, “leave it to me to come to the most dismal place in the galaxy to synthesize silicon dioxide and selenite found in quartz that’s found in sand;” then after extracting the necessary propellants and pumping them into his UFO’s fuel tank, added: “Well, at least I can blow this earthly hellhole unlike the sister saucer that ran on empty, then crashed and burned at another dismal place called Roswell.”

By CraigE

From: United States