The John S. Cook and Company Bank in Rhyolite, Nevada, is a ruin of concrete and rusted steel that still stands three stories high in the Bullfrog Hills. Built in 1908 at the height of the town's prosperity, it outlasted the mines, the railroad, and most of the buildings around it. Rhyolite itself lasted about a decade.
In late 1904, the prospectors Shorty Harris and Ed Cross found gold in a wash in the Bullfrog Hills, in the Mojave Desert east of Death Valley. They named their claim the Original Bullfrog. The rush that followed opened a mining district and produced several townsites. One of them, Rhyolite, was surveyed in early 1905 on a hillside about five miles east of the original discovery. The town took its name from the rhyolite that carried the ore.
By early 1906 the town had electricity, piped water, a telephone exchange, and a grid of streets with brick business blocks. The Montgomery Shoshone Mine, a consolidation of nearby claims, became the district's main producer, and its mill stood on the edge of town. In 1907 Rhyolite was incorporated as a city. Population estimates from that year put the figure at 5,000 or more, counting not only the town itself but the surrounding camps.
The principal street ran roughly a mile through the townsite. It held general stores, boarding houses, saloons, a school, churches, and an opera house. The town's hospital, built by the mining district, served the camps.
Most of the gold in the Bullfrog district was locked in quartz and required a stamp mill to extract. The Montgomery Shoshone mill, a large timber structure below the mine, handled ore from the surrounding claims. Milling was expensive, and the town's economy was sensitive to the grade of ore and the cost of supplies. When both moved against the mines, the mills closed first.
The railroad town
Rhyolite's permanent setting came with the railroad. The Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad opened a line to the town in December 1906, and the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad reached the valley the following year. The depot, built in a mission style with a curved parapet and arched window openings, served both roads until the end of the boom. The building now stands restored at the north edge of the townsite.
At its peak, Rhyolite had two banks, an opera house, a school, several churches, and a daily newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. The three-story John S. Cook and Company Bank, completed in 1908 for a reported cost of $90,000, was the largest masonry building in the district. A saloonkeeper named Tom Kelly built a residence from about 30,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles; the Bottle House survived the town and later became a roadside curiosity.
The end of the boom
The decline came as the ores did. The national financial panic in 1907 slowed capital for new mining, but the deeper problem was geological. Ore bodies in the Bullfrog district were irregular and often low-grade, with expensive treatment needs. Production fell after 1909. The Montgomery Shoshone mine suspended operations, mills shut down, and the town lost its population as quickly as it had gained it. By the mid-1910s most businesses had closed, and the railroad was no longer solvent. Rhyolite's post office, which had opened in 1905, was discontinued in 1919.
Some buildings were dismantled for scrap lumber; others burned. The railroad tracks were eventually pulled up. The bank building and the depot were among the few structures that did not easily give up their materials. Beatty, a nearby town with a steadier mining history, survived; Rhyolite did not.
Today the Rhyolite townsite lies about four miles west of Beatty, along a road that enters Death Valley National Park. The ruins of the bank, the restored depot, and the Bottle House are preserved at the site. The surrounding land returns to the same open desert that held the discovery.
