Rawhide

A boom built on promotion

Rawhide is in Mineral County. Western Mining History says prospector Jim Swanson found gold and silver there in December 1906. Charley Holman and Scotty McLeod found more deposits soon after on Hooligan Hill. The camp was settled in 1907. The Mineral County Museum says it began in September 1907 as a tent camp and grew to roughly 10,000 people in about eight months.

The sources do not agree on the peak population. Destination 4x4 puts it at roughly 7,000 to 8,000 by mid-1908. The Nevada Mining Association says about 7,000 within a year of founding. Western Mining History gives about 7,000 in one place and about 5,000 in another. The museum’s 10,000 is the highest figure.

The ore did not match the publicity. The Nevada Mining Association says the ore was high grade, but there was not much of it. The museum says the town had only several small mines and that speculators mostly sold stock. George Graham Rice, a promoter who had worked in Goldfield, advertised the district heavily. The Nevada Mining Association calls him a notorious swindler, and the museum says he had a record of swindling. Destination 4x4 calls him the “Jackal of Wall Street” and says he hyped the district aggressively. The museum cites Nevada Bureau of Mines figures of $1,287,246 in combined metals for 1908 to 1916.

Water was a constant problem. The museum says it was hauled in, mostly from Dead Horse Wells, at five cents a gallon, and that a railroad was planned but never built.

Prize-fight promoter Tex Rickard ran a saloon called the Northern, according to the museum. Western Mining History says he came to set up legitimate businesses and profit from the boom.

Decline

Destination 4x4 and Western Mining History both date a fire to September 1908 and a flood to September 1909. The Nevada Mining Association gives 1908 and the following year. The museum also mentions an influenza epidemic but gives no dates. By January 1909 the museum counts only 2,000 people. The other sources put the population below 500 by late 1910. The post office closed in 1941, according to Destination 4x4, which records 32 residents in the 1940 census.

Anna (or Anne) Rechel is named by the museum as the last known resident. Western Mining History says she was the only true resident by the 1960s, apart from occasional mine workers. Destination 4x4 says she died in 1967 while also saying she left in the late 1960s, so its own dates do not fit together cleanly. The museum and Western Mining History both say visitors could still find standing buildings, including her house, from 1967 to the early 1980s.

What is there now

Open-pit mining began in the late 1980s. The museum says that operation ran about 20 years and closed in 2002 to 2003, and that its pit took over the original townsite. Western Mining History names it the Denton-Rawhide Mine and says it destroyed the town site. The museum adds that the pit has been permitted as a landfill. Western Mining History says that as of March 2008 the landfill was not yet operating. Western Mining History says the stone jail was moved to Hawthorne and still stands there.

The museum and Western Mining History say nothing of the original town remains. Destination 4x4 calls the site inaccessible to casual visitors. None of the sources gives public access directions, and a mine and landfill site is not open ground. Check with the Bureau of Land Management before planning a trip, and leave any artifacts where they are.