The Open-Pit Mine: Beatty's Second Gold Boom

In the nineteen eighties, geologists identified ore deposits in the Bullfrog Hills near Beatty that had been missed during the original nineteen oh four gold rush. Modern open-pit mining and heap-leach processing could profitably extract gold from concentrations that would have been useless to the old hardrock miners, who needed rich surface ore to make their operations pay.

A new mining boom came to Beatty. The Barrick Gold Corporation, a Canadian mining company, acquired the Bullfrog mine property in nineteen ninety-four. At its peak, the open-pit operation employed hundreds of workers and drove Beatty's population to levels not seen since the original rush. A census in nineteen ninety counted one thousand six hundred twenty-three residents in Beatty, far more than the little desert town had held in decades.

Then the economics shifted. Gold prices fell, the most accessible ore was depleted, and the cost of extraction outweighed the returns. Barrick closed the mine in nineteen ninety-eight. The population fell back toward its pre-boom level, dropping to around eight hundred eighty by the twenty twenty census. The open pit sat empty in the hills to the west of town.

Beatty had survived one boom and bust in the early twentieth century. It survived a second one in the late twentieth. The town is still there.