Rhyolite, Nevada: The Gold Rush Boomtown That Emptied in a Decade

On August 9, 1904, two prospectors, Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, found gold in the hills of southwestern Nevada, on the edge of the Death Valley country. The ore was spotted green, and they named their claim the Bullfrog. Word spread, and within months a gold rush was on. More than 2,000 mining claims were staked across the district. Several rival towns sprang up. The one that won was Rhyolite, platted in January 1905 and named for the silica-rich volcanic rock in the area. It sat in a sheltered basin near the district's biggest producer, the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine. In 1906, the steel magnate Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery-Shoshone and invested heavily, bringing piped water, electric lines and railroads that served the town as well as the mine. Rhyolite grew into a real city almost overnight. By 1907 it had concrete sidewalks, electric streetlights, telephones, a hospital, a school, an opera house, banks and a stock exchange. On May 22, 1907, the Bullfrog-Goldfield Railroad reached town. At its peak in 1907 and 1908, scholarly estimates put the population at between 3,500 and 5,000. The fall came almost as fast. The national financial Panic of 1907 made it much harder to raise money for mines. In 1908, worried investors in the Montgomery-Shoshone ordered an independent study, which found the mine was overvalued, and its stock crashed. The mine's high-grade ore was running low, and the lower-grade ore wasn't worth mining at the time. All three of Rhyolite's banks closed by March 1910, and by that year only about 611 residents remained. On March 14, 1911, the directors voted to close the Montgomery-Shoshone mine and mill. Within weeks, the town newspaper stopped publishing. The power was shut off around 1916, the post office closed in 1919, and the 1920 census counted just 14 residents. The buildings were stripped or left to the desert, but some survived. The three-story Cook Bank Building still stands as a dramatic shell. So does the Tom Kelly Bottle House, built by miner Tom Kelly in 1906 from about 50,000 glass bottles set in mud. Paramount Pictures restored it in 1925, when Rhyolite began to be used as a filming location. In 2003, the federal government withdrew 277 acres around the site from mining to protect it. Today, the town's ruins stand in the desert, and visitors on their way into Death Valley stop to walk through them.