‘Cursed’ Ghost Town May Offer Haven for Homeless Animals

In the old Dry Gulch Saloon, crooked nails jut out from a pistol rack reading, “Check Guns Here.” Plywood over the broken windows doesn’t stop the high desert wind from whistling through.

It’s a cold place. Some people believe it’s a cursed place.

But to animal lovers hoping to save the lives of hundreds of stray dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, pigs and snakes, it represents hope.

They’ve purchased much of what remains of this Wild West ghost town and plan to turn it into one big, no-kill animal shelter.

“It just improves their quality of life because they will have so much more space,” said Rita King, head of the Animal Rescue League, which currently has 311 animals crammed in a warehouse on the edge of Bend.

Except for a few dogs and black rabbits that have already moved into a corner of the saloon, Millican has no population to speak of.

This dot on the highway 25 miles east of Bend isn’t much more than a gutted gas station, a Dr. Pepper sign and a row of turn-of-the-century wooden buildings brought in from an earlier settlement. Littering this barren ground are the remains of a failed flea market: a broken exercise bike, a dented satellite dish and a pile of old tires.

As she walks through the saloon, King explains, “Every owner who has owned this has died a violent death, and it’s all been gunshots.”

Outside, King picks her way through the row of buildings, pointing out more signs from Millican’s troubled past. There’s the jail and the gallows where an original resident, Bill Millican, was hanged for stealing horses in 1888.

“We took the noose down,” she said.

Bruce Resnick didn’t believe the property was cursed when he bought it in April for an undisclosed price. Resnick, a manufactured home dealer, and his wife, Tracy, a rescue league volunteer, donated two of the town’s 80 acres to the league in hopes of giving the animals more breathing room.

Still, it will take several months and hundreds of thousands of donated dollars to turn Millican into a pet paradise. There’s a lot of garbage to haul away, and someone will have to build a high fence to keep the coyotes out.

The league may bring in an airplane hangar, also donated by Resnick, to house its dog pens, cat cages and grooming and exercise areas. The gas station garage bays will be converted into a veterinary clinic. Eventually the league wants to turn the whole complex into an adoption center, with private areas where families can get to know a new dog or cat.

“It will probably look like a tourist attraction,” King said. “There’s a silent motive for that. You want people to stop and find out what you’re about.”

The Animal Rescue League was founded two years ago by people who had been involved with the Humane Society of Central Oregon and were disturbed that healthy animals that could have made good pets were being destroyed simply because there wasn’t enough space to keep them.

King, a veterinary technician, once ran the humane society’s thrift store.

“They only have 13 dog runs,” she said. “They only have eight cat cages. There, the ninth cat to come in is dead.”

Inside the Animal Rescue League shelter, the smell of pine cleaner covers the animal odors coming from the small cages.

“I tell people, when they come in and say, ‘It’s so sad,’ this is a happy place,” Tracy Resnick said. “A lot of animals get their own families. A lot of animals get adopted.”

The Animal Rescue League doesn’t save every animal it gets. They euthanize those that are suffering with terminal illnesses and those who were not fed for so long that their organs have shut down. King said that last year, out of 4,100 animals that came through the shelter, 3,989 were adopted and 89 destroyed.

King said her shelter is unique in Deschutes County. “We deal with ferals. We deal with the old ones. We deal with ones that bite.”

Jamie Kanski, executive director of the Humane Society of Redmond, said no organization could possibly house all the unwanted animals in central Oregon. In her view, the 600 animals currently in the Animal Rescue League’s shelter or foster homes would just be warehoused in Millican.

“I don’t see how 600 animals can be walked and socialized,” Kanski said. “I personally believe that’s not a good quality of life for an animal.”

King countered that she takes in no more animals than she has space for, and the average animal is adopted within 60 days.

But she acknowledged that promising not to kill healthy animals creates its own set of problems.

“I can go home at night and find 30 animals on the porch in the morning,” she said.

Cynthia Cameron, a former shelter director for the Humane Society of Central Oregon, said she doubts King can pull it off. “With the resources she has, I think it’s a pipe dream,” she said.

But it’s a dream shared by a number of volunteers--many of them jail inmates on work release--who believe that no animal should be killed just because there is no space.

That idea seems to be the driving force behind 40 volunteer-hour weeks in which the work is nothing more glamorous than caring for a dog with mange or clearing out broken bottles in the deserted town.

King’s goal is to one day turn Millican into a place where unwanted animals can get 24-hour veterinary care, where people can bring in their misbehaving pets for training, or farmers can shelter their livestock after a disaster.

As for the Millican curse, King sees this place a little differently.

“It was actually a godsend.”