Boom and Bust, Over and Over, Nevada's Ghost Town Geography

Nevada has more ghost towns than any other state, somewhere between three hundred and six hundred, depending on how loosely you define the term. The number matters less than the pattern. Almost every one of them was built in a decade and abandoned in the next.

The formula repeated with almost mechanical regularity. A prospector found a promising outcrop. Word spread.

Men flooded in from California and Utah and wherever else they had most recently failed to strike it rich. Tents became wooden buildings. A mill went up.

A bank followed, then a newspaper, then a church that doubled as a brothel on alternate evenings. The population peaked at a few hundred or a few thousand. Then the ore played out, or the price collapsed, or the water ran dry, or the railroad passed twenty miles to the north and the whole logic of the place evaporated.

Eureka, in central Nevada, produced sixty million dollars in lead-silver ore in the eighteen seventies and called itself the Pittsburgh of the West. By nineteen ten, fewer than seven hundred people remained. Belmont, in Nye County, held the county seat until nineteen oh five, when the seat moved to Tonopah and the courthouse was left behind.

Aurora, on the California-Nevada border, was so rich and so contested that both states claimed it simultaneously and sent tax collectors from different directions. A boundary survey settled the question. Aurora was in Nevada.

The ghost towns are not failures. They are evidence. Evidence that Nevada has always been a transactional state, a place people came to extract something and left when the extraction was complete.

Silver. Gold. Lead.

Copper. Water rights. Cheap divorces.

Nuclear test results. The landscape absorbs it all and outlasts it all. Drive slowly through what looks like empty desert.

Most of it was full of people once, and the tailings piles and foundation stones are still there if you know how to look.