Nevada's Twentieth-Century Mining Boom: Tonopah, Goldfield, Ely

By Russell R. Elliott

Twenty years after the decline of the magnificent Comstock Lode, Nevada’s prosperity and population had diminished to such a degree that some popular articles questioned whether to deprive Nevada of her statehood. Then in the spring of 1900, a miner discovered silver in south-central Nevada. This casual find precipitated a spectacular latter-day mining boom that, among other things, helped to restore prosperity.
With its wealth of little-known historical data, Nevada's Twentieth-Century Mining Boom chronicles the classic pattern of gold and silver rushes and emphasizes the differences between Nevada's two boom periods, pointing to the stability of the second bonanza. The author also details the entrance of radical labor into the new camps and the violent strikes that followed at Goldfield, McGill, and Tonopah. This labor strife had a significant impact on Nevada mining for many years.  
The first in-depth study of Nevada’s latter-day boom period, this informative book gives balance to the history of mining in Nevada. Foreword by Jerome Edwards.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 1966
• ISBN: 9781943859542

Book preview

Railroads

Part One: The Gold Camps

1. The Discoveries

In the spring of 1900, James L. Butler, rancher, attorney, and sometime miner, while roaming the hills on one of his periodic prospecting trips, picked up some interesting-looking ore from an isolated region of southwestern Nevada thus starting the state’s second great mining boom.

Butler’s discovery came none too soon for the hundreds of Nevadans who for over twenty years had searched hopefully for just such a bonanza to replace the incomparable Comstock Lode whose production had fallen sharply after 1878. The Comstock wealth had brought thousands of people to Nevada and thereby had created the opportunity for territorial status and then statehood. It had furnished capital to build railroads, telegraph companies, hotels, banks, and assorted other buildings in California and elsewhere in the United States, and it had provided almost the sole sustenance for Nevada’s economy during its twenty-year boom. The importance of the Comstock Lode to the state of Nevada found no better testimonial than the economic void created by its decline.¹

Nevada was not allowed to suffer its twenty-year mining depression in silence. Newspapers and magazine articles appeared near the close of the century ridiculing the state and its people. The area was called a vast desert wasteland and a state only because the Civil War had produced the necessity for its being. Particularly irritating to many Easterners was the fact that Nevada, with a population of only forty thousand people, with its mines exhausted and little or no agriculture or industry to take their place, maintained a larger proportionate representation in Congress than any other state. One writer, unaware of the constitutional difficulties, went so far as to suggest that Nevada should be deprived of its statehood since it had so few people and so little economic reason to keep it in the Union.² Francis G. Newlands, Nevada’s only representative in Congress, tried to answer this and other criticisms of the state by blaming Nevada’s plight on the railroads which he noted had been such great state builders in other states, but had done little for Nevada, except to use it as a railroad bridge between Ogden and San Francisco.³

Fortunately for the future, Nevada’s hundreds of prospectors paid little attention to mineral statistics or talk of depression and continued to roam the state’s numerous mountain ranges in constant search for the bonanzas each one hoped to find. By 1900, the professional prospectors were joined by many like Butler who, during the long depression following the decline of the Comstock, turned to prospecting as a welcome diversion from farming the inhospitable land.

Jim Butler, a native of El Dorado County, California, had moved with his parents to central Nevada at a time when the mines of that region were entering a seemingly irreversible cycle of decline. After a few years spent in unrewarding mining activities, Butler married and settled on a small ranch in Monitor Valley near the once-thriving town of Belmont, county seat of Nye County. Butler’s background in the mining camps of California and Nevada, the periodic lack of activity on his ranch, and the Nevada environment, described as a land that is geology by day and astronomy at night,⁴ led him almost automatically into the nearby mountains on prospecting trips. By 1900 these trips had gained him a working knowledge of the geology of the region and a speaking acquaintance with the Indians settled there. It may have been from the latter that he heard stories about a rich mineral area southwest of Belmont in the San Antonio mountains. It is quite clear from his later remarks that he contemplated an early visit to the site, but a combination of official duties (he had been elected district attorney for Nye County in 1896) and ranching chores detained him until the spring of 1900. In the early part of May he left Belmont, presumably for a new and promising camp some eighty miles to the south known as the Southern Klondike. However, instead of going directly to that point, Butler went out of his way to visit the area in the San Antonio mountains which had been the subject of the Indian stories. It was while camping in the vicinity of some springs, called Tonopah by the natives,⁵ that Butler, on May 19, made the discovery which within a few years lifted Nevada from depression to booming prosperity.⁶

Although the discovery had been made in the middle of May, Butler did not return to the site until the latter part of August. Part of the delay was occasioned by his desire to prove the worth of the ore. A crude assay made at the Southern Klondike camp by a prospector named B. F. Higgs, while showing strong returns of silver and gold, did not satisfy Butler.⁷ Consequently, a detailed and accurate assay was necessary. Butler’s own resources were so limited that he could not obtain sufficient funds for such a project without making the discovery known to the public. He mentioned the problem to a young attorney friend, Tasker L. Oddie, then at Belmont in the interest of a client. Oddie, born in Brooklyn, New York, and trained for the law in what later became the Night Law School of New York University, had come to Nevada in 1898 to investigate certain mining and railroad interests for his employer, Anson Phelps Stokes. His work for Stokes completed, he decided to remain in Nevada and had established a small legal practice in the old mining camp of Austin. Oddie was quite happy to take the responsibility for obtaining a proper assay in return for a share in the Butler claims. However, Oddie’s financial resources were as limited as were those of Butler, so he took the ore to a schoolteacher friend, Walter Gayhart, who agreed to make the assays in return for part of Oddie’s interest in the still unrecorded Butler claims.⁸

The Gayhart assays, dated June 18, 1900, showed 640 ounces in silver and a value of $206 in gold per ton and so excited Oddie and Gayhart that they pressed Butler to return at once to the discovery site. Butler, however, as the following statement indicates, was in no hurry to locate and record the claims: I was absent from Belmont when the returns from the assay reached there, and when I did return to Belmont I had office duties to attend to, and also to harvest hay on my ranch so did not return to Tonopah to locate the mines until August 25, 1900.⁹ How this great mineral find remained a secret for over three months from date of discovery while Butler attended to his chores is a mystery uncommon in the history of the mining frontier.

Locating the claims, when the partners finally returned to the area, was a simple procedure. Not so simple, however, were the other problems facing the locators. Tonopah, as Butler named the new camp, was situated in an undeveloped region of Nye County, one of the largest counties in the United States with an area of 18,064 square miles. The population at the time of discovery was 1,140 whites.¹⁰ Few more inaccessible regions existed in Nevada. The nearest railroad connection was some sixty-three miles to the west at Sodaville, a small way station on the narrow-gage Carson and Colorado Railroad. This railroad had been planned hopefully by Darius O. Mills in the 1880’s to run from Mound House near the Carson River (ten miles east of Carson City) to Fort Mohave on the Colorado River. Unfortunately, construction of the railroad began just as Nevada entered her long depression period and the dream of reaching the Colorado River was soon discarded in favor of a plan to tap the Owens Valley region of California. The line barely was able to survive into the twentieth century by making triweekly trips from Carson City, Nevada, to Keeler, California, on the edge of Owens Lake. In spite of its shortcomings, the Carson and Colorado ultimately gave Tonopah its best and quickest connection with the outside world via the Central Pacific to San Francisco.¹¹

Tonopah’s inaccessibility was magnified by the lack of adequate water and timber. The annual rainfall of 4.83 inches provided little or no reserve for the hot summer months. The water from Tonopah Springs had to be supplemented almost at once from nearby mountain sources and carried to the boom area by burros. Large timber, so necessary for any major underground mining activity, was nonexistent. There was, however, an abundance of sagebrush and scrub trees, such as oak, piñon, and mountain mahogany, and this satisfied the need of the early settlers for fuel. A rigorous climate added to the difficulties of obtaining food, fuel, and water.

The above problems were caused by the location of the strike, but just as prohibitive to development was the lack of capital. The difficulties encountered by Butler and Oddie in trying to obtain money for the necessary exploratory work at the discovery site illustrate the depth of the mining depression in Nevada at the turn of the century. The partners finally borrowed $25.00 with which they purchased mining equipment and food supplies. Then, by promising a part interest in the locations to the county auditor and recorder, Wils Brougher, they obtained the use of his team and wagon. Thus outfitted, they began the journey to Tonopah.¹²

With picks and shovels for digging and a hand windlass for hoisting, the discoverers obtained two tons of ore which they hauled by wagon back to Belmont for shipment to Salt Lake City. From Belmont the ore was taken by freighter to Austin where it was transferred to the narrow-gage Nevada Central Railroad which connected with the Central Pacific at Battle Mountain. In due time Butler received a check for $500.00 for the two tons of ore.¹³ The net return, while showing the Tonopah ores could be worked for a profit, emphasized the high costs of transportation and reduction.

The profit from the first Tonopah production did more than buy needed equipment and supplies; it publicized the camp. By the spring of 1901, the new campsite was the center of a major mining rush, and as in most such rushes the newcomers soon found that the discoverers had located what appeared to be the best prospects. Consequently, they spread into the surrounding areas hoping to duplicate Butler’s success. Two of these prospectors, Harry Stimler and William Marsh, who had been grubstaked by Butler, located three claims on December 4, 1902, which became the center of a second boom area in southern Nevada.¹⁴

The Stimler-Marsh strike was made on Columbia Mountain, about thirty miles directly south of Tonopah in a region which had been prospected unsuccessfully many years earlier. Activities at the new camp, soon to be called Goldfield, were limited until a rich strike in January, 1904, drew thousands of fortune hunters to the new discovery site and created an explosion of excitement reminiscent of the earlier Comstock rush.¹⁵

The Goldfield boom was barely underway when a third major mineral strike was made some seventy miles to the south on the southern border of Nye County and just a few miles east of Death Valley, California. The ore find was made by Frank Shorty Harris and Ernest Cross on August 9, 1904.¹⁶ The new strike was in a region even more inaccessible than Tonopah and Goldfield. It was, according to an observer, the last outpost of the gold seeker in these regions.¹⁷ It was so inaccessible that the locators could do little but wait for the discovery to become known to the outside world. Such awareness was not long in coming, for the first ore from the new district, called the Bullfrog because the green coloring of the ore reminded the discoverers of a bullfrog, was very rich and attracted immediate interest at Tonopah and Goldfield. Within a few weeks the Bullfrog district was staked for nine miles in all directions from the sagebrush flats, including part of the desert to the tip of every summit in sight.¹⁸

The discovery of these three mining districts opened the entire southwestern part of the state to an era of prospecting activity that within a few years touched virtually every part of this vast Nevada desert. It would be repetitious to describe in detail the history of each of the hundred or more mineral discoveries that resulted from Butler’s discovery in 1900. Consequently, the first three districts opened will be used to illustrate the story of this twentieth-century mining boom, not only because they proved ultimately to be the most important, but also because each represents in its history a somewhat different sequence in mining camp development. Tonopah, where the initial discovery of rich ore was made, became the best producer. And when the boom was over its geographic location enabled it to become a supply center for surrounding livestock and mining interests as well as for nearby federal installations. It survives to the present day as a small but prosperous Nevada community. Goldfield, the second important discovery chronologically, had a short but intense production that made it the population and mining center of the state. Production declined rapidly after 1911, and by 1915 the town had lost most of its population. Goldfield remains on the maps today as a historic name on U. S. Highway 95 between Las Vegas and Reno and is saved from the stigma of ghost town mainly because it remains the county seat of Esmeralda County. Rhyolite, the main town of the Bullfrog district, in the short period of eleven years passed through the much too familiar mining town cycle of discovery, boom, and bust, and today is one of Nevada’s best examples of the real ghost town.

NOTES

¹ Bertrand F. Couch and Jay A. Carpenter, Nevada’s Metal and Mineral Production (1859–1940, Inclusive), (University of Nevada Geology and Mining Series, No. 38 [Reno: 1943]), pp. 13, 133.

² William E. Smythe, Shall Nevada Be Deprived of Statehood?, Forum, XXIII (April, 1897), 228–236.

³ Francis G. Newlands, The Future of Nevada, Independent, LIII (April 18, 1901), 885–888.

⁴ Richard G. Lillard, Desert Challenge, an Interpretation of Nevada (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1942), p. 107.

⁵ Tonopah means water brush in the limited vocabulary of the Paiute Indians. See Tonopah Daily Bonanza, Annual Review, December 20, 1913.

⁶ Butler wrote a long letter to Thomas Wren on November 19, 1902, explaining his part in the discovery of Tonopah. The May 19 date mentioned by Butler in this letter is accepted by historians as the date of the discovery. The letter is published in full in Thomas Wren, A History of the State of Nevada, Its Resources and People, (New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1904), p. 149.

⁷ Ibid. Butler’s letter indicates that the assay made by Higgs showed 395 ounces in silver and 15½ ounces in gold per ton. Butler noted that he returned to Tonopah to locate his claims on August 25, 1900. However, the locations were recorded on August 27. See the Tonopah Mining District Records, 1901–1905, (Nye County Recorder’s Vaults), Book A, pp. 17–25.

⁸ Leon H. Van Doren, Tasker L. Oddie in Nevada Politics, 1900–1914 (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Nevada, 1960), pp. 1–8.

⁹ Wren, Nevada, p. 149. Some writers maintain that the Gayhart assay was the first one made of the Butler ore and that Higgs refused to assay the ore handed to him by Butler at the Southern Klondike camp. It would appear that Butler’s own story which specifically mentions the Higgs assay discredits this viewpoint.

¹⁰ Report of the Surveyor-General, 1915–1916, in Appendix to the Journals of the Senate and Assembly (Carson City: 1917), pp. 18–21; Work Projects Administration, Inventory of the County Archives of Nevada, No. 12, Nye County (Reno: The Historical Records Survey Project, 1940), pp. 4–22.

¹¹ Ibid.; S. A. Knapp, Tonopah District, Nevada, Mining and Scientific Press, LXXXVIII (May 28, 1904), 364.

¹² Byrd Fanita Wall Sawyer, The Gold and Silver Rushes of Nevada, 1900–1910, (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1932) pp. 11–15; Staff Correspondence, Tonopah, Mining and Scientific Press, LXXXIII (November 9, 1901), 192; Editorial, Tonopah Mines, Nevada, Mining and Scientific Press, LXXXIII (November 9, 1901), 190.

¹³ Sawyer, Gold Rushes, pp. 12–15.

¹⁴ Records of Mining Locations, Esmeralda County Recorder’s Vaults, Book H, p. 493; Samuel P. Davis (ed.), The History of Nevada, (Reno: Elms Publishing Co., 1913) II, 860–870. The claims were located in the names of Kendall, Butler, Marsh, and Stimler.

¹⁵ Records of the Goldfield Mining District, Esmeralda County Recorder’s Vaults, Book A, pp. 1–1100.

¹⁶ Goldfield News, Second Annual Edition, February, 1907, p. 94; Rhyolite Herald, November 2, 1906; F. L. Ransome, Preliminary Account of Goldfield, Bullfrog and Other Mining Districts in Southern Nevada, with notes on the Manhattan District, (U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin, No. 303 [Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907]), p. 40.

¹⁷ R. D. Paine, Gold Camps of the Desert, Outing, XLVIII (June, 1906), 275.

¹⁸ C. L. Long, The Bullfrog District, Nevada, Mining and Scientific Press, XC (April 29, 1905), 273.

2. From Leasing to High