Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, Nevada, United States. It is in the Bullfrog Hills, about northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern boundary of Death Valley National Park.
The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region's biggest producer, the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure, including piped water, electric lines and railroad transportation, that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town's peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study's findings proved unfavorable, the company's stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite's population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were salvaged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
Names
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common. The Amargosa River, which flows through nearby Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."McCracken, History, p. 29. The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.
"Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district's other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.McCracken, History, p. 37. The name persisted and, decades later, was given to the short-lived Bullfrog County.
Beatty is named after "Old Man" Montillus (Montillion) Murray Beatty, a Civil War veteran and miner who bought a ranch along the Amargosa River just north of what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.McCracken, History, pp. 21–22. "Shoshone" in "Montgomery-Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.McCracken, History, pp. 7–10.
Geology The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region's Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. Map 112, which accompanies the text, shows a study-area boundary extending to near Rhyolite and including the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine. The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flowsRansome, p. 43. that built to a combined thickness of about above the more ancient rock.Ransome, p. 50.
After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks. Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.Ransome, pp. 42, 51. Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.Ransome, p. 54.
Geography and climate Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about northwest of Las Vegas, it is about south of Goldfield, and south of Tonopah. Roughly to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.
Bordered on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at above sea level. The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.McCracken History, p. 47. Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to above sea level about northwest of Rhyolite.McCracken, History, p. 3. The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.McCracken, History, p. 5. Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.McCracken, History, p. xiv. Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about northeast of Rhyolite.
Nevada's main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than of water a year.
Beatty, about lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is and the average low is . December and January are the coolest months with an average high of and an average low of in December and in January. Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.
History Boom
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.Lingenfelter, p. 203. Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to $3,000 a ton,Lingenfelter, p. 204. or about $ a ton in dollars when adjusted for inflation. Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.Lingenfelter, pp. 204–07.
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.Lingenfelter, p. 210. It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as $16,000 a ton,Lingenfelter, p. 208. equivalent to $ a ton in . Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.Lingenfelter, p. 215. Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.Lingenfelter, p. 218. Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.Lingenfelter, pp. 222–24. Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about $130,000, equivalent to about $ in . About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion. Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada's Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain". Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".Patera, p. 2. The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.