The Tar Below Six Mile Canyon

It began with an offhand remark, just a passing recollection from John Bowie during a September 1946 tour of Six Mile Canyon. The Nevada Magazine reporter had followed him down the slope east of Virginia City, where the canyon twisted like a scar between the hills.

Bowie was pointing out ghosts: the sites of mills, shafts, and boardinghouses long since erased by brush and erosion.

“The tar works were next,” Bowie said, gesturing toward a level patch of slope where a dilapidated fence clung to the earth. “A thriving business in the old days. They made tar and extracted cleaning fluid they sold to the mills. Five dollars a can.”

That was all the article said. No names. No dates. Just a forgotten enterprise, the “tar works.”

But for some reason, that brief note took hold of me. It festered, like a splinter in the mind, and I began looking into it.

How was tar made in the 1870s? What pines did they use, and what byproducts came from the process? Simple things, at first.

Destructive distillation, pine sap, turpentine, charcoal. Ordinary industry, and yet something about it felt wrong. Every mention I found of tar-making in the Comstock ended abruptly, as though the records themselves recoiled.

No advertisements. No names of owners or workers.

No ledgers, though such a thriving operation should have left something behind. Even the Sanborn fire maps from the 1880s, the most meticulous documents of their kind, showed a blank space where Bowie said the tar works had stood.

A void.

In 2022, I found myself standing near that same slope again, summoned by county officials during the construction of the new sewer plant. One of the excavators had struck something strange, a dense, tar-like deposit that oozed up through the disturbed soil, black and oily, with an odor sharp as burnt pine and sweet as rot.

It coated the shovel. It clung to boots.

And though the crew scraped and shoveled at it, it would not lessen. Beneath the top layer, more of it seemed to well up, sluggish and alive.

The foreman thought it might be an old motor oil dump from decades before. Reasonable enough, but the color was wrong, too dark, almost lightless, as if it absorbed the day.

And the smell. God, the smell.

The EPA came. They took samples, shrugged, and declared it inconclusive. Hydrocarbons, yes, but no clear source.

No petroleum signature, no solvent trace. Just carbon compounds in impossible ratios, and something they couldn’t classify at all.

“Cover it,” they said. “Pour concrete. Build over it. Keep an eye out for seepage.”

And that’s how the sewer plant came to stand at the top of Six Mile Canyon. I told myself that was the end of it, another Comstock mystery, sealed away.

But sometimes, when the nights are still, and the wind slips through the sage, I drive up there and park by the chain-link fence. The plant hums softly in the dark, its sodium lights reflecting off the canyon walls. If I leave the engine off, I can hear a faint sound beneath the machinery, a slow, bubbling hiss, like breath moving through syrup.

The plant’s operators have reported strange problems over the years. Pumps that clog with oily residue.

A smell that seeps from the drains, metallic and sweet. At times, an oily sheen appears on the wastewater ponds even though the chemistry checks out clean.

Last spring, one of the workers found black streaks climbing the inside of the concrete foundation, streaks that hadn’t been there the week before. They ran upward, not downward, as if gravity had reversed.

I went back to Bowie’s 1946 quote again, hunting for what I might have missed. “They made tar and extracted cleaning fluid.”

Cleaning fluid. The phrase nagged at me. The men expected tar, but what were they cleaning?

The old Comstock miners were no chemists, but they knew their materials. If the tar works were also extracting something, it was likely through distillation, separating volatile elements from the heavy base.

But what if the workers hadn’t understood what they’d released? What if they’d found something alive within the resin, something locked inside the heart of the ancient pines?

Destructive distillation, they called it, a destruction of life to release what hid inside.

Maybe the trees of the Comstock had drawn up more than sap. Perhaps they’d rooted into something older beneath the canyon itself.

I think that’s what the tar was: the residue of that contact, a secretion, a boundary, a warning.

The old tar works men had burned the trees and broken the seal, and what came out was never meant to breathe the air again. They buried it under concrete now, a gray lid over a black throat, but concrete cracks.

Everything cracks.

I sometimes dream of that bubbling sound, growing louder, until the walls of the sewer plant burst outward and the ground begins to pulse, slick and alive, exhaling that same pine-sweet odor. I dream of the old mills catching fire again, one by one, black smoke rolling up from the canyon as if the 1870s had never ended.

And in those dreams, I see figures moving in the tar, long-limbed, glistening, their eyes like knots in burned wood. They whisper the same thing over and over, in voices like creaking timber, “We were never gone. You only covered us.”