The Boom That Built Rhyolite, Nevada

Rhyolite sits on a wide flat of gravel and dust where the Bullfrog Hills let go of the Amargosa Desert. The paved road from Beatty to Death Valley runs past it. In early morning the light arrives sideways, turning the ruined walls the same pale color as the rhyolite that gave the town its name. There is a stone bank with its windows open to the sky. There is a railroad depot without a roof. There is a house made of bottles, its glass still catching the sun. There are foundations, gaps, and a scatter of broken glass and rusted tin that the wind keeps rearranging.

Rhyolite was named for the rock, not the other way around. The rock is volcanic, hard, and plentiful in these hills, and the builders used it for the buildings they meant to last. That decision is the reason anything still stands. The wood frames are gone. The canvas and cloth are gone. The last of the people are gone. But the stone walls hold their own weight, and the wind goes through the same doors it went through a century ago.

The place does not announce itself. It is quiet in the middle of a weekday, and a raven crosses from one ruin to the next. A doorway opens into a room with no floor. A rusted can has filled with sand. Heat comes off the ground, and where a wall throws shade, the shade is as solid as the wall. A stranger might take the townsite for a wide place in the road; a person who knows the desert knows otherwise. This is what a boom looks like after the boom moves on.

Gold and a Surveyor's Grid

Before the town there was the discovery. In 1904 Shorty Harris and Ed Cross found gold in the Bullfrog Hills, and the strike opened the district. Claims went down on every slope that showed color. Some held ore; some held only hope. The desert filled with men who had walked in with picks and bedrolls and the belief that the next outcrop was the one.

Rhyolite was built to hold them. The townsite was surveyed and laid out on the flat, with streets and lots. Tents gave way to frame construction, and frame construction gave way to stone. The town had a stock exchange, a newspaper, a school, a hospital, telephones, and electric lights. The railroad came through with a depot worth stopping at. A place that had been a camp became a place with schedules, addresses, and banks.

The engine behind it was the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, the district's principal producer. Ore went out of the ground, became ore cars, became money, and the money became foundations, storefronts, sidewalks, and the ordinary machinery of a town. Miners came off their shifts, ate in crowded kitchens, and sent part of their pay home. For a few years the desert did not seem to matter.

It did matter, of course. Water was short. Alkali dust wore at anything with a moving part. The summers were long and honest. But a gold town has a way of postponing those complaints, and Rhyolite did. The streets were wide enough to suggest confidence, and the buildings stayed close to the ground, aware of the wind that would one day have them.

A Panic, Then a Leaving

The trouble did not begin in Nevada. In 1907 a panic in the East froze credit, and a mining town on Eastern money felt it before long. Investors stopped wiring funds. The companies with low-grade ore and high hopes could not wait out the winter. The companies with ore still in the ground waited, but the ground does not write checks.

The Montgomery Shoshone held on for a while. Mines do not close in a day. But the money was gone, and then some of the men were gone. The bank locked its doors. The newspaper printed its last edition. The trains still ran, and what they carried shifted. At the depot, the platform that had been built for crowds was empty most of the day. A place that had been pulling people in began to let them out.

It took a few years to finish. Buildings were taken apart and carried away by anyone who could use the lumber. Windows and doors went to towns with a future. Machinery went to other mines. What no one could move was left to the weather. The desert moved through doorways, settled in corners, and turned the rest to gravel. By the end of the decade that started with the strike, Rhyolite was a set of walls on a gravel flat.

The People Who Stayed

Beatty, down the paved road, is a working town. The people who live there all year have jobs, schools, weather, and a long memory of the hills. They drive the Death Valley road on ordinary errands. They know the old townsite the way ranchers know an abandoned corral: it is part of the country, not a museum of it.

Rhyolite changes with the seasons, and the people who live beside it notice. Summer pins the desert down with heat. Winter runs cold off the mountains. Spring brings a few green things and takes them back. The ruins take all of it. In the long evenings the stone bank goes the color of the hills behind it, the light stacks itself against the Bullfrog Hills, and the road gets quiet. There are no lights in the old townsite at night, only the sky building down to the ridgeline.

There is nothing to mourn. A town got built, worked, spent its reason for being, and turned back to the country. The walls remain, the bottle glass remains, the desert remains. It is a Nevada story, and it is not over the way a story is over. The country is still here, doing what it always did.

Photos: logopop (CC BY-SA 3.0)