Panamint City: Rich Ore, Outlaw Reputation, One Flash Flood

In eighteen seventy-two, silver was discovered in the Panamint Range above Death Valley, and within two years somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand people had moved to a canyon above six thousand feet elevation to extract it. The canyon was called Surprise Canyon, and the town that grew there was Panamint City, and by every account it was among the roughest mining camps in the American West.

The ore was genuinely rich. The Wells Fargo office was real. The multiple saloons were certainly real. What was also real was that the nearest law enforcement was so far away as to be functionally irrelevant, and Panamint City had attracted a population that found this arrangement convenient. The historian Jan MacKell Collins, who has written in specific detail about Panamint City, titled her account of the place Remote, Hot, and Wicked. The description holds.

Senator William Stewart of Nevada, who had an interest in the Panamint mines, reportedly advised the mine operators that the only way to safely ship their silver was to cast it into balls too heavy to lift and carry off on horseback. The nearest law being what it was, the silver would be safer if no thief could physically move it. Whether the advice was followed, the sources do not confirm.

The town lasted approximately two years. In eighteen seventy-six, a flash flood roared down Surprise Canyon. It destroyed most of Panamint City in a single night. What the flood left, the desert finished. Panamint City was abandoned.

Today the ruins are accessible only by a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle and a strenuous hike into the Death Valley Wilderness. The canyon walls are steep, the road is rough, and the destination is a scatter of stone foundations, a mill chimney, a few walls still standing at elevation in the Panamints. The flood spared nothing worth saving and destroyed everything worth visiting, which is, in a certain sense, the Panamint City story entire.

What the silver produced while it lasted is unrecorded in any way a visitor can see. What the flash flood produced in a single night is what remains.