- "Take this camera. I want to document everything!"
- —Doc Brown
- "There, at the center of the new hole [blasted by Doc and Marty using dynamite], was a tunnel, leading into the hill and down. As they got closer, Marty could see it was a real mining tunnel, the ceiling supported by what looked like old railroad ties, with a pair of narrow railroad tracks running down into the darkness."
- —From Back to the Future Part III by Craig Shaw Gardner (quote, page 18)
The Delgado Mine, also referred to as the Delgado Silver Mine,[1] was a mine located next to the Boot Hill Cemetery.
History[]
By 1885, the Delgado Mine had been played out and there were no silver to be found anywhere in its shafts.[2]
Dr. Emmett Brown and Marty McFly arrived here on April 2, 1876 and discover that Edna Strickland stole from a miner while leaving him captive here. Doc and Marty leave the DeLorean time machine here while pursuing her into Hill Valley the next day.
As a boy, Emmett Brown explored the tunnels with the neighborhood kids, deliberately ignoring the posted DANGER and NO TRESPASSING signs. Stanford S. Strickland, being a killjoy, tattled on them, and young Emmett and the other kids were dragged out of the mine by their parents and the police. Emmett was severely reprimanded by his mother, who forbade him from listening to the radio for a whole week.[3]
Years later, the mine was where Doc, who was unable to fix the badly damaged DeLorean time machine due to lack of suitable replacement parts in 1885, had hidden the car for seventy years. Doc sent a letter to Marty in 1955 via several generations of Western Union to inform him of this, and also put an envelope containing repair instructions, alongside a rolled-up schematic diagram, in the DeLorean to enable Marty and his younger self to restore it to working order using 1955 components — including vacuum tubes — to replace the burnt-out time circuit control microchip.
Because the mine was sealed, Doc had to blow it open using dynamite so he and Marty could enter the shaft. On the way down, Doc told Marty that the tunnel reminded him of Journey to the Center of the Earth, a book he had read as a boy and which inspired him to become a scientist.
Marty and Doc discovered the DeLorean shrouded in a cloth within a murky and dark cavern behind a wall with Doc's initials on it. While analyzing the parts that failed when the car was struck by lightning, Doc claimed that the problem was the source of the part, Japan — to which Marty said that all the best stuff was made in Japan (at least in 1985).
After Marty traveled back to 1885, he and Doc camped out next to the mine on September 6 as they prepared to return to the future. As per Doc's plan, they released the DeLorean onto the railroad tracks in front of the mine that night and it was here their journey back to 1985 began after 'borrowing' the train and bringing it to the DeLorean.
Behind the scenes[]
- In an earlier draft, the Delgado Mine was specified to be near the Oak Park Cemetery instead of the Boot Hill Cemetery.
Appearances[]
- Paradox script
- Back to the Future Part III
- Back to the Future Part III novelization
- Back to the Future (IDW Publishing)
- DeLorean Time Machine: Doc Brown's Owner's Workshop Manual
References[]
- ↑ DeLorean Time Machine: Doc Brown's Owner's Workshop Manual: "Doc Brown's Journals: 1885", July 23, 1885; page 113.
- ↑ DeLorean Time Machine: Doc Brown's Owner's Workshop Manual: "Doc Brown's Journals: 1885", July 23, 1885; page 113.
- ↑ DeLorean Time Machine: Doc Brown's Owner's Workshop Manual: "Doc Brown's Journals: 1885", July 23, 1885; page 113.