The California Gold Rush created hundreds of camps like Second Garrotte across the Sierra foothills. Miners arrived in 1849, drawn by rich placer deposits that could be worked with simple tools -- pans, rockers, sluice boxes set in creek beds to catch flakes of gold as water washed over gravel. Law was scarce. Courts were distant or nonexistent. What passed for justice often came from the community itself, improvised and immediate. It was in this context that the hanging tree entered the story. Whether it served as gallows for thirty men, two, or none, the tree became the defining symbol of Second Garrotte -- the thing that separated it from every other anonymous gulch camp. Somebody decided the tree mattered, and the name stuck.

The hanging tree stood on property owned by John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain, early settlers who became prominent enough figures in local history to earn their own biographical entry. Their denial that any hangings occurred on their land introduces a layer of uncertainty that the California Historical Landmark plaque, placed in 1950, diplomatically navigates. The marker, California Historical Landmark No. 460, reads that the tree 'is reported to have been instrumental in the death of a number of lawbreakers during the heyday of this locality.' That careful phrasing -- 'is reported to have been' -- acknowledges the legend without endorsing it. Part of the tree still stood when the marker was erected, a gnarled piece of evidence that could neither confirm nor deny the stories attached to it. The plaque was placed on September 15, 1950, by the California Centennials Commission working with Charles G. Hall Post No. 3668 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at 20450 Old State Route 120.

The historical marker describes Second Garrotte as 'a sizable settlement' built on a 'rich placer location.' For a time, it was real: cabins, stores, the infrastructure of a working mining camp fed by the streams and gullies of the basin. Miners had spread east from Big Oak Flat and Groveland, following the gold as it appeared in new drainages. But placer mining is extractive by nature -- once the easy gold washes out, there is little reason to stay. Second Garrotte followed the trajectory of most Gold Rush camps. The population dwindled as claims played out. Buildings deteriorated. The forest reclaimed its ground. Today almost nothing remains above ground to mark where hundreds of people once lived, argued, worked, and -- if the legends are to be believed -- occasionally hanged one another.

Second Garrotte is one of dozens of ghost towns scattered across Tuolumne County, part of a broader geography of abandonment that traces the arc of the Gold Rush from frenzy to silence. Some of its neighbors -- Groveland, Big Oak Flat, Columbia -- survived by reinventing themselves as tourist stops or residential communities. Second Garrotte did not. What remains is a historical marker beside a road, a name on a map, and a story that changes depending on who tells it. The site sits along Old State Route 120, bypassed by the modern highway that funnels Yosemite-bound traffic past without stopping. In a landscape where Yosemite draws four million visitors a year, Second Garrotte is the kind of place you pass through without knowing it was ever there -- a footnote in the foothills, remembered only by its most lurid detail, the tree where something may or may not have happened.