Oatman and the Wild Burros of Route Sixty-Six

Oatman sits in the Black Mountains of western Arizona at the end of a stretch of Route Sixty-Six that winds through switchbacks steep enough that modern trucks avoid it. The road alone tells you something about the people who chose to live out here. In the nineteen twenties, they were coming for gold.

The Oatman gold district produced somewhere in the range of forty million dollars in ore during its boom years, and at its peak the town held a population in the thousands. Hotels, brothels, a bus line, a movie theater. The Oatman Hotel advertises that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their wedding night there in nineteen thirty-nine, though historical accounts say the couple returned directly to Los Angeles after the wedding and did not honeymoon until much later.

When the mines played out, the people left. When Route Sixty-Six was rerouted around nineteen fifty-three to bypass the mountain switchbacks, the remaining economic logic went with it. The highway that had kept the town alive moved to flatter ground. Oatman became a ghost town.

The burros stayed.

When the mining operations closed, the owners released their pack animals rather than transport them. The burros, which are adapted to desert terrain and require less water than horses, survived in the Black Mountains and reproduced. Their descendants have been walking Oatman's main street ever since, approaching tourists for handouts, blocking traffic with complete confidence, and occasionally entering the stores if a door is left open. The town that had no economic reason to exist discovered that wild burros on a surviving stretch of Route Sixty-Six constituted, in fact, a reason. The animals that were left behind became the attraction.