Searchlight: The Camp That Didn't Fail
Nevada
The name Searchlight is said to come from the first prospector who needed a searchlight to find gold out here in the Mojave in eighteen ninety-seven. Whatever the origin, the gold was real. Between nineteen oh seven and nineteen ten, the mines produced seven million dollars in ore, and the town hit a population of fifteen hundred.
The railroad arrived in nineteen oh two and connected the district to the wider world, but the veins ran thin and Searchlight faded. By the nineteen thirties it was a ghost of itself, population under one hundred.
The most famous person born here is Harry Reid, who came into the world in nineteen thirty-nine, the son of a hard-rock miner. He grew up poor in a town with no high school, took a bus to Henderson to attend classes, and eventually made it to Washington as a congressman, then senator, then Senate Majority Leader, the first Nevadan ever to hold that position. He later wrote a book about his hometown called Searchlight: The Camp That Didn't Fail.
