Rhyolite, queen of the desert - gold mining town in Amargosa Desert, Nevada - Western Wanderings

Sunset, March, 1995 by Peter Fish

It was late afternoon when Claudia Reidhead led me down Golden Street. A low sun polished the concrete pillars of the John Cook Bank Building and gilded the cut-stone facade of the Porter Brothers Store. "They built to last," Claudia said. "Rhyolite was going to be the queen city of the West."

The West is littered with the skeletons of settlements that dreamed of becoming queen cities. But Rhyolite gave it a better go than most. The name comes from a volcanic rock, the lava form of granite in which gold is sometimes found. Gold was what Shorty Harris and Ed Cross sought--and struck--in 1904, when they carried their picks and shovels to this corner of Nevada's Amargosa Desert, 115 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"The hills fairly shook under the pressure of giant powder, while every blast struck home renewed hone and confidence in every breast." Thus crowed the Rhyolite Herald in 1905, as the Bull-frog and Denver and Montgomery Shoshone mines ground into production and miners poured into town by the thousands. At first, canvas was the favored building material, but soon it became clear that the city required more noble structures. And so rose the Cook Bank Building, the sumptuous Southern Hotel, and the Las Vegas and Tonopah railroad depot, one of the handsomest in Nevada. Other town landmarks were impressive in more peculiar ways, such as John Kelley's house, built from more than 50,000 beer and patent medicine bottles.

Then it all went south. Speed characterizes the history of the American West, with towns and industries rising and falling in the blink of an eye. But even by Western standards, Rhyolite's passage from boomtown to ghost town was brutally swift. At its peak, in 1907, the town numbered 3,500 people and supported three banks, 50 saloons, eight physicians, and two undertakers. By 1910 its population had dwindled to less than 700. The Cook Bank closed that same year, and the Rhyolite Herald published its final issue the next spring. Blame was laid on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which lured away capital to rebuild the city, and on the nationwide financial panic of 1907. But in truth, Rhyolite and towns like it were always high-risk gambles, wagers made in the desert against fierce odds. Rhyolite had gold, but little water; the rival mining camp of Beatty, as it turned out, had both. And so Beatty lived while Rhyolite withered.

Through the decades, a few holdouts holed up in some of the houses, and the mines were still profitably worked. But building by building, Rhyolite began to disappear. Even a town built to last could not survive abandonment indefinitely, survive the extremes of the desert climate, the forays by scavengers and vandals. By 1990, the Bureau of Land Management, which owns most of the land on which Rhyolite stands, warned that the Bottle House and the other last vestiges of Rhyolite were about to crumble into dust.

And then people said, Wait--not yet. That's how Claudia Reidhead felt, anyway. A prospector's daughter, she had grown up in Beatty, then married and moved away and returned. When she came back, she looked around and "realized that a lot of the things I l had grown up with weren't there anymore." Rhyolite was about to join those vanished memories. Fascinated by the town's history, she began visiting every day, usually accompanied by her three-legged dog, Pecos, hoping their combined presence would discourage further vandalism. She searched old newspapers for Rhyolite successes and scandals, paced Golden, Amargosa, and Main streets trying to determine what buildings had stood where.

Claudia was not the town's only defender. Kari Coughlin, an energetic ranger at nearby Death Valley National Park, formed the Friends of the Rhyolite. It's mission: to stabilize the remaining buildings. "We had architectural historians come out," she says. "They told us that for buildings like the Cook Bank Building and the Porter Brothers Store, we had at most two years."

Rhyolite also landed another, more exotic booster. Belgian artist Albert Szukalski was so struck by the town's austere beauty that he bought about 8 acres and established a sculpture garden. Now when you walk down past the old school, you're met by a giant yellow, red, and shocking-pink cubist nude called Lady Desert, a rusted steel tribute to prospector Shorty Harris (accompanied by a penguin), and a haunting Last Supper in which the disciples' white robes seem to echo the folds of the surrounding hills. The emphatic presence of so much art in such an unexpected place makes some visitors laugh out loud. It seems to prove that Rhyolite might have a new life ahead of it, albeit one that the original, penguinless Shorty could not have imagined.

If you can make it to town the weekend of March 18 and 19, you'll hit the Friends' fourth annual Rhyolite Festival, with games, gold mining, mock gunfights, and a parade. If you visit some other day, you'll probably still have a good time. You might even run into Claudia and Pecos.

"There are so many stories out here, so many stories," Claudia says. "There are dreamers who made their dreams come true, and dreamers whose dreams fell through the bottom of a mine shaft. Rhyolite symbolizes hard work, Rhyolite symbolizes reward. Everything that's good and bad in life is symbolized in a ghost town."