Casa Diablo, California

Casa Diablo is a location in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Mono County, eastern California, USA. Casa Diablo Hot Springs was named “House of the Devil”, by early explorers, for its boiling hot springs, rising steam and geysers.

Native settlement

This locale is noted as a Native American mining and manufacturing site specializing in obsidian materials. Use of materials from this site is noted at least as early as the Millingstone Horizon. Peoples as distant as the coastal Chumash people traded for material from this Obsidian source.

Later settlements

Casa Diablo became a stage stop along the Bishop Creek to Bodie stagecoach route in 1878. It was a relay station for the route to the mining camps of Mammoth City, Mill City, Mineral Peak and Pine City. In 1881, Casa Diablo stage station ceased operating and was later used for other business as a trading post, a seasonal resort, a tavern, a gas station, a grocery store, a hardware store and a lumber yard. In 1983, it was transformed into a geothermal electric generating plant.

See also

• Mono tribe
• Projectile point
• Obsidian hydration

References

• Kathleen L. Hull (2001) Reasserting the Utility of Obsidian Hydration Dating: A Temperature-Dependent Empirical Approach to Practical Temporal Resolution with Archaeological Obsidians, Academic Press.
• C.Michael Hogan (2008) Morro Creek, The Megalithic Portal, ed. by A. Burnham [1]