Tonopah: The Silver Strike That Saved Nevada

In nineteen hundred, Nevada was in crisis. The Comstock Lode had given out. The state's population had fallen. There was serious talk in Congress about revoking Nevada's statehood and folding it back into a territory. Then in May of nineteen hundred, a rancher named Jim Butler threw a rock at a wayward burro on a desert hillside, or so the story goes, and cracked open a piece of ore that turned out to be almost pure silver.

The town of Tonopah erupted around that hill. Within a decade it had produced more than one hundred million dollars in silver, triggered the discovery of gold at Goldfield to the south, and launched a broader Nevada mining revival that brought Reno and Las Vegas back to life. Nevada's twentieth century begins, in a real sense, at the hill Jim Butler threw a rock at. Tonopah today has a population of around two thousand and serves as the Nye County seat. Above it, the Air Force tests classified aircraft at the Tonopah Test Range, which is why the skies here sometimes do things that require no explanation.