The town of Virginia City stands on top of the richest silver strike in American history, on streets that were laid out for twenty-five thousand people and now hold fewer than a thousand. That imbalance — a grand infrastructure draped over a fraction of the crowd it was built for — is the most Nevada thing there is. This is a state that was founded on a boom, and it has been booming and busting ever since, in a rhythm so regular it might as well be the climate.
The lode that made a state
In 1859, prospectors working the slopes of Mount Davidson hit a vein of decomposed blue-gray rock that fouled their gold pans and turned out, on assay, to be nearly solid silver. It became known as the Comstock Lode, after one of the men who talked his way onto the claim, and it was the first great silver deposit found in the United States. Virginia City boomed almost overnight; within a generation the Comstock had thrown off hundreds of millions of dollars in silver and gold, helped build San Francisco, and generated enough wealth — and enough Union loyalty — that Abraham Lincoln rushed Nevada into statehood in 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, before it had anywhere near the population to qualify. Nevada is nicknamed the Battle Born State for it. The silver came out of the ground by hand, in the dark, and you can still walk into the workings: the Chollar Mine runs four hundred feet of original timbered tunnel straight into the hill beneath C Street.
So much bullion poured off the Comstock that the government built a mint to coin it on the spot rather than risk the wagon road to San Francisco. The mint at Carson City struck silver and gold from 1870 until the lode gave out in 1893, stamping each coin with a small "CC" that collectors still chase. Then the ore ran thin, the mines flooded and closed, and the Comstock did what Nevada booms do. It emptied out.
The rush that saved the state, and the ones that didn't
By 1900 the whole state was in a slump so deep that people wondered aloud whether it would survive. Then a rancher named Jim Butler, camped at a spring the Shoshone called Tonopah, picked up a heavy chunk of rock — the story goes he meant to throw it at a stray mule — and found he was holding silver. Tonopah became the Queen of the Silver Camps, the strike that pulled Nevada out of its grave, and unlike almost every camp around it, it never quite died; a couple of thousand people still live there, under some of the darkest skies in the country.
Tonopah's luck lit the fuse on a decade of rushes across the southern desert. Thirty miles south, gold turned up at Goldfield in 1902, and within five years it was the largest city in Nevada — better than twenty thousand people, a hotel said to be the finest between San Francisco and Kansas City, the Earp brothers about town. Today a few hundred people live among its stone husks. West toward Death Valley, Rhyolite rose in 1905 as a proper little city — concrete sidewalks, electric light, an opera house, a three-story bank faced in marble — and was all but dead by 1911, undone by the Panic of 1907 and mines that had been oversold. By 1920 it held twenty-four people. It is now the most photographed ruin in the West. Up in the eastern hills, Pioche boomed on silver in the 1870s with a reputation so violent that legend claims seventy-five men filled its Boot Hill before anyone in the camp died of natural causes.
Each of these places burned the desert around it for fuel. At Ward Charcoal Ovens, south of Ely, six great stone beehive kilns still stand in a row — the intact relic of an industry that stripped whole mountainsides of piñon and juniper to feed the smelters, then went cold when the mines did.
The longest bust
Nothing on the Nevada calendar runs longer than a bust. Drive the empty middle of the state and you pass a hundred versions of it — a stone wall, a headframe, a graveyard fenced off in the sage. The purest of them may be Berlin-Ichthyosaur, a gold camp that died in 1911 and has been left ever since in what the state park calls "arrested decay," its cabins and mill simply standing where the last resident walked away. And beside the dead town, in the same protected quiet, lies a bust older than the human mind can hold: a quarry of ichthyosaurs — fifty-foot marine reptiles, Nevada's state fossil — that swam in a warm sea over central Nevada some two hundred and twenty-five million years ago and settled into the mud to die. A sea became a desert; a boomtown became a ghost. It is the same story told at two wildly different speeds.
Back again, and invisible
Here is the twist the ghost towns don't prepare you for: the boom never actually ended. It just went invisible. In 1961, geologists working a stretch of unremarkable rock near Carlin — chasing a hunch that gold could hide in ordinary sedimentary stone as particles too small to see — proved that hills a century of prospectors had walked straight over held one of the richest gold deposits on earth. The Carlin Trend gave its name to a whole class of "invisible" gold, and today Nevada produces the lion's share of all the gold mined in the United States, most of it dug from enormous open pits strung along that trend. You can drive through Carlin and see almost none of it. There are no glittering veins, no Boot Hill, no opera house — just a working town and, out past it, the largest gold complex in the country pulling metal from rock that looks like nothing at all. The richest strike in Nevada history is happening right now, and it doesn't even look like a boom.