Nevada’s First Gold Discovery

Nevada's mining history begins here, a decade before the Comstock made the territory famous. In July 1849, Abner Blackburn—a former member of the Mormon Battalion waiting out the Sierra snow—panned the first gold found in what is now Nevada at the mouth of Gold Canyon. William Prouse made a second strike up the canyon the next spring. By 1851 some two hundred placer miners worked the gravels, and the camp never emptied, making it the state's oldest continuously settled non-Native ground. A stone monument marks the spot today.

What the plaque says

In July 1849, Abner Blackburn, a former member of the Mormon Battalion, made the first gold discovery in what is now Nevada near this site (see the canyon to the right). William Prouse, a member of a passing emigrant party, made a second discovery further up Gold Canyon in May 1850. The discoverers of these placer gold deposits believed the promised riches of California to be greater. Most emigrants consequently continued their westward journeys, but a few returned after finding most of California’s Motherlode creeks and rivers already claimed. By the spring of 1851, some 200 placer miners, including James “Old Virginny” Finney, were working in the area. The continuous occupation of Gold Canyon’s mouth makes this site Nevada’s first non-Native American settlement. Dayton, also known as Chinatown, became a mineral milling, commercial, and agricultural center after prospectors and placer miners worked their way up Gold Creek. This monument commemorates the 150th anniversary of the discovery of gold and the thousands of pioneers who passed near this site.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chollar Mine — 5.6 mi
  A real Comstock silver mine you can still walk into—four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel under C Street, where the work that built a state was done by hand, in the dark
• Virginia City — 6.0 mi
  The boomtown that sits on top of the richest silver strike in America—fewer than a thousand people now, on streets built for twenty-five thousand
• Carson City — 11 mi
  The capital one man platted before there was a territory—where the Comstock's silver became coin at a U.S. Mint and a small sandstone city that has run Nevada ever since
• Stewart Indian School — 12 mi
  The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices

More markers nearby

• Hall’s Station — steps away
• Union Hotel & Post Office — steps away
• Dayton — steps away
• Dayton Chinatown — steps away