Old Man Beatty: The Rancher the Town Was Named For

The town of Beatty is named for a man who never expected to have a town named for him. Montillus Murray Beatty, who was known to his neighbors simply as Old Man Beatty, was a Civil War veteran who had drifted westward and eventually settled in a stone cabin along the Amargosa River in the eighteen nineties, acquiring a ranch that an earlier settler named Landers had built.

Beatty raised cattle and took in travelers. The Amargosa River valley lay on routes traveled by prospectors and freighters moving between Nevada and California, and the ranch at the spring was a natural stopping point. Old Man Beatty provided water, feed for animals, and sometimes a place to sleep. He was part of the informal network of ranches and way stations that made travel through the desert possible.

In nineteen oh five, when the gold rush in the Bullfrog Hills had transformed the valley from a quiet desert corridor into a booming supply district, Beatty became the first postmaster of the growing community gathering around his ranch. The men who platted the town gave it his name. Bob Montgomery, the mining entrepreneur behind the Montgomery Hotel that anchored the new town, is said to have chosen to honor the old rancher rather than name the settlement after himself.

Montillus Beatty lived to see his name carried by the town. The stone cabin he had inherited from Landers, the first fixed structure at what became the Beatty townsite, was gone well before he was.