Beatty

Beatty was a hay ranch until the gold camps boomed around it, and then for a few wild years it called itself the Chicago of the West. Three "gold railroads" — the Las Vegas & Tonopah, the Bullfrog Goldfield, and the Tonopah & Tidewater — converged here between 1906 and 1907 to serve the strikes at Tonopah, Goldfield, and nearby Rhyolite. The strikes were short; the rails came up in 1942. Beatty outlasted all of them, the one town in the Bullfrog district still standing, and it survives now as the eastern gateway to Death Valley.

What the plaque says

Center of the Gold Railroads. Beatty was the center of three short-lived, so-called "gold" railroads that were spawned by early 1900s strikes in Tonopah, Goldfield and Rhyolite. The town was referred to as the "Chicago of the West". Between 1906 and 1907, railroad companies constructed the Las Vegas and Tonopah from Las Vegas through Beatty and Rhyolite to Goldfield, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad from Goldfield to Beatty and Rhyolite, and the Tonopah and Tidewater from Ludlow, California to Tonopah. The last of these used the Bullfrog Goldfield tracks to Beatty and Rhyolite until 1914. The rails were torn up at Beatty beginning on July 18, 1942. State Historical Marker No. 173.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beatty — 0.3 mi
  The town that water built and water kept — the Bullfrog boom's lone survivor, now Nevada's gateway to Death Valley, with wild burros wandering Main Street.
• Rhyolite — 4.1 mi
  The most complete ghost town in Nevada — a stone city with an opera house and a marble-stepped bank that rose and died inside a decade, now the most photographed ruin in the West.

More markers nearby

• Old Boundary — 6.8 mi