Goldfield Century: Nevada Boomtown
- ISBN-10
- 1949971279
- ISBN-13
- 9781949971279
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2021-12-17
- Author
- Stephen H. Provost
Description
Goldfield, Nevada, isn't much of a city these days. With somewhere around 200 or 300 residents, it's home to a couple of small motels, two saloons, a Dinky Diner (that's what it's called), and not even a single gas station - unless you count the handful of abandoned stations and garages in town.There are a lot of abandoned buildings there, because at one time, Goldfield WAS a city. And not just any city, but the largest city in Nevada. Back in 1906, more than 20,000 people lived there, compared with maybe half that many in Reno. Goldfield hadn't even existed four years earlier, but it got very big very fast thanks to the discovery of gold in the area. It didn't stay that way long, though. Like other boomtowns, the mines eventually dried up, and most of the townsfolk moved on, looking for greener (or more golden) pastures. But during its heyday, Goldfield had it all: saloons and tycoons, gunmen and prospectors, the fanciest hotel between Kansas City and San Francisco, and even a deputy named Earp. It also had boxing's biggest promoter: a local saloon owner named Tex Ricard who later owned Madison Square Garden but got his start staging the first "fight of the century" right there in Goldfield.A bicycle messenger named Jim Casey got his start in Goldfield, too. He went on to start a company called UPS. Illustrated with more than 150 images, "Goldfield Century" is the story of a Nevada boomtown, and not just any boomtown, but one of the last and one of the biggest. Goldfield was at the center of a region consumed by gold fever, where fortunes were made and lost in mines and saloon tables from Tonopah south to Beatty and Rhyolite - once a city of 8,000 people, but now a ghost town of crumbling buildings. Take a trip through the glory days of the Nevada frontier at the turn of the 20th century, when the bonanzas were big, the talk was bigger, the booms were unbelievable, and the busts were inevitable. Relive the Goldfield century.
