Original Contents
• Luggage tag
• Tie clasp
• SCE key chain
• Log book
• Seagram’s rain bonnet
NOTE: The description depicted below is NOT related to the Cemetery cache. It’s only included for the history of Aurora. The Cemetery is close by.
Aurora is located 23 miles SW of Hawthorne Nevada. (Mineral County) Aurora, founded in 1860 when gold and silver were discovered there, has had almost as many lives as a cat. The initial boom, which lasted until 1869, yielded close to $30,000,000 in ore. A second and smaller boom lasted from the late 1870s to 1882. The town was rejuvenated again in the early 1900s, and served several hundred people through World War I. By 1919, Aurora was pretty much dead. In 1946, most of the buildings in the town were leveled for their bricks. There is almost nothing left of the original town now.
Aurora was a rough camp, located in an isolated area on the California/Nevada border. Prior to 1863, the border was disputed, and Aurora citizens voted in elections for both California and Nevada! (This was remedied in 1863, when a survey indicated that Aurora was really in Nevada). At its high point in the 1860s, Aurora had 16 mills, 21 saloons, 12 hotels, and two newspapers. (A later newspaper was named, amusingly enough, the Aurora Borealis). Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) worked in Aurora for a short time in 1862 as a miner and laborer.
Aurora will probably always be connected with nearby Bodie, California. A tortuous 15-mile mining road connects the two town sites. At the Aurora end, there are large signs which state encouraging things like "Road to Bodie closed", and "Four wheel drive vehicles only - Enter at your own risk".
Aurora is once again an active mining area. A group called the Aurora Partnership is conducting strip-mining operations on the once deserted site.