Eureka, Nevada: The Pittsburgh of the West

Silver and lead ore had been sitting in these hills since eighteen sixty-four, but no one could profitably separate them until a new smelter design arrived in eighteen sixty-nine. That breakthrough detonated a boom. By the eighteen seventies Eureka was home to fifty active mines, sixteen smelters, and roughly nine thousand people, making it the second-largest city in Nevada.

They called it the Pittsburgh of the West. The smelters ran on charcoal, and the charcoal required forests: crews cut five thousand acres of pinyon pine every year, stripping the land within a fifty-mile radius by eighteen seventy-eight. Italian immigrant workers who burned the wood into charcoal staged a violent labor uprising in that same period.

By the mid-eighteen eighties the ore was exhausted and the smelters went cold. The Victorian brick buildings you see today are what the boom left behind.