Shorty Harris and the Bullfrog: The Gold Strike That Made a Town
Near Beatty, Nevada
On the morning of August ninth, nineteen oh four, a short, sun-weathered prospector named Frank Harris was wandering through a desert hillside about five miles from the Amargosa River ranch where Montillus Beatty lived. Harris, who everyone called Shorty, had come to the hills of southern Nevada with a partner named Ernest Cross. Cross was back at camp cooking breakfast while Harris followed their burros across the slope.
On the hillside, Harris noticed a ledge of rock with copper stains on it. He broke off a piece with his pick. When he saw chunks of gold embedded in the surface, large enough to spot at arm's length, he understood that he had found something significant.
Harris walked the ore samples back to show Cross. They named the outcropping the Bullfrog Mine, because the greenish mottled rock reminded Harris of a bullfrog's skin. A sample assayed at seven hundred dollars per ton, which was extraordinarily rich surface ore.
The two men filed their claim and then, in the manner of prospectors who could not keep a secret, began talking. Within a week, more than a thousand men were camped around the claim. Within months, a city of several thousand people had materialized in the desert hills four miles to the west, and that city was called Rhyolite. The Bullfrog Mining District became one of the most famous gold rushes in the history of the American Southwest.
Shorty Harris did not do well out of his own discovery. He sold his share of the Bullfrog Mine for one thousand dollars and a mule to a man named J. W. McGaliard. His partner Cross was wiser, selling his share for twenty-five thousand dollars and buying a ranch in California. Harris went on to make other strikes in the desert over the following years and sold each of them for far less than it was worth.
He became a legend not because he got rich, but because he knew the desert the way almost no one else did, and because he found gold there when everyone else had moved on. His headstone in Death Valley National Park reads, in his own words, single blanket jackass prospector.
