Best Historical Photos: 1900s Nevada Boom Towns

The first decade of the 1900s was an exciting time for the state of Nevada. Most mining rushes were over in the West, but Nevada had numerous new discoveries during this time. Mining booms occurred that resembled the great excitements of the 1860s and 1870s, and mining camps quickly developed into fantastic cities.

The greatest of these rushes were at Goldfield, Tonopah, Rawhide, and Rhyolite. The following are some before and after photos that illustrate the dramatic rise and fall of these great camps.

Goldfield, Nevada ca. 1907

Goldfield, Nevada was founded in 1902 after rich gold discoveries. The town grew from a tent camp to Nevada’s largest city in just a few years. The following photo illustrates the explosive growth that Goldfield experienced by 1907.

The next photo shows what Goldfield looked like just four years earlier in 1903. What was built in just a few years is almost impossible to believe.

Tonopah, Nevada 1903

Tonopah, Nevada was the site of a major silver discovery in 1900. The town became Nevada’s largest silver producer in the first decade of the 1900s. Thousands of people poured into the area in the first few years, making Tonopah Nevada’s first boom town of the new century.

Just a couple years earlier, Tonopah was a modest tent camp as shown in the following photo.

Rawhide, Nevada 1908

Discovery of gold in 1907 resulted in a mad rush to the new town of Rawhide, Nevada. The following photo was sent to us by William Redak who included the following text with the image:

“The inscription on the upper left was put there by my great uncle Arthur Sweet. Uncle Arch was a mining engineer who spent most of his life in mining towns in Nevada and Colorado, with a little time in Arizona and Mexico for good measure”

Not long after the photo above was taken, a fire devastated Rawhide.

As with most mining boom towns, fire was merely a temporary setback and Rawhide was quickly rebuilt.

Rhyolite, Nevada 1908

Rhyolite, Nevada was the location of a gold rush starting in 1905. By 1908, when the following photo was taken, Rhyolite had become a city of several thousand people.

Prosperity was short-lived for Rhyolite and by 1920 it was a ghost town. This 1923 photo shows the ruin of the Cook Bank building, Rhyolite’s most prominent structure (seen in the center of the photo above).

The Cook Bank building is one of the West’s most photographed ghost town structures. The following photo is a rare view of what the bank interior looked like during the boom years.

Today a few empty buildings and many ruins are all that is left of Rhyolite. The ghost town is a popular tourist destination.

The discovery of gold or silver in the West was usually followed by a rush of people attempting to arrive at the new district first to get established in mining or business. New mining camps were hastily constructed out of materials that could be easily transported over great distances and on difficult terrain. The most common early structure in these camps was the canvas tent.

Tents were used for both shelter and to operate early businesses in the camps. The entrepreneur with the tent could be in business weeks before his rivals who attempted to build a more elaborate structure, and those first few weeks were a lucrative time to be selling goods or services to the hundreds or even thousands of people pouring into a new camp.

One of the most popular businesses that were run out of tents were saloons and restaurants. Boom towns would have hundreds of new arrivals that were traveling with few supplies, and inevitably they would need food and entertainment.

Restaurants in tents were a common sight in early camps. The following image depicts the “Ja-Ha-Bich” restaurant in Jarbidge, Nevada. The sign on the establishment reads “Home made bread, pie, cake, and doughnuts.”

Although restaurants and saloons were the most common businesses run out of tents, just about every kind of business was run out of tents at one point or another. The following photo shows “Hawley Puckett Attorney at Law, Notary Public” ca. 1903 in Thunder Mountain, Idaho.

Another advantage of tents is that they could be packed up and moved to the next camp in the event that the rush to the current camp turned out to be a bust. Many mining rushes were the result of misinformation or outright fraud. People who’s only investment in the camp was a tent on the ground could pack up and move on to the next rush with little trouble.

Tent cities usually didn’t last more than a year. Any camp that proved to have rich enough mines to last longer than a season would usually transition to wood buildings fairly quickly. The following photo shows Rawhide, Nevada in transition from a large tent camp to a more permanent town with wood construction.

The 1920’s were the final days of the great mining era in the West. New discoveries were rare during this decade, but a few were made nonetheless. Even in 1927, at Nevada’s last rush at Weepah, the tent was the defining feature of the new camp.

Although often overlooked, the white canvas tent was an important tool in the settlement of new mining districts in the West. Luckily many photos of early tent camps were preserved so that we can witness the earliest development of these iconic camps.

The stagecoach has become an iconic symbol of the American West. In remote parts of the western frontier, the stagecoach was the only form of public transportation for years or decades before being replaced with trains or later roads and automobiles.

Stagecoaches were more than just transportation. The stages were an important source of camaraderie in the sparsely populated frontier as travelers would spend hours or days on the adventurous ride to some remote corner of the world.

The stage stations became the hub of many communities, providing a central gathering place and a much needed source of excitement.

Travel by Stagecoach in Colorado was especially daring and exciting as the narrow roads were often carved into the sides of mountains with high passes, hastily built bridges over deep ravines, and precipitous drops always just a few feet away.

 

After communities in Colorado had been established for some time, the well-off residents would often turn to the stagecoach for an adventurous day trip. Boulder Canyon between Boulder and Nederland was a popular route for a daytime excursion into the mountains.

While casual adventurers were able to enjoy short excursions purely as recreation, the realities of traveling by stagecoach were often very different. Many stage routes operated 24 hours a day, and weary travelers often spent days enduring the harsh conditions of the primitive stage routes.

In the book Ben Holladay the Stagecoach King, the discomfort of lengthy stagecoach  travel was described: “They were banged, beaten, and jolted, their heads were swollen and their faces bruised. Heads ached, nostrils were choked with sand, limbs were stiffened and bent with cramps.”

“Sometimes the disheartened travelers would leave the stage to rinse their mouths and dip their heads in some little creek, the water of which they did not dare to drink. Then, walking several miles ahead of the stage, they felt like new men again and forgot the discomforts of their ride in the brisk morning air while they looked on the beautiful prairie senery.”

The great rush to Cripple Creek in the early 1890s brought thousands of prospectors, miners, and businessmen to the new district. The stagecoach was the primary mode of transportation for most travelers and arrivals and departures were often scenes of great excitement and activity.

 

With the stagecoach being the vital link between many remote Colorado mining camps, one can imagine the variety of mountain scenes, interesting communities, and colorful characters that travelers would would have been witness to.

Despite the discomfort of the stagecoach compared to the luxury automobiles of the modern world, I would bet that most folks would be thrilled at the opportunity to go back in time and take a ride on these incredible frontier stage routes.