Bodie sits at roughly 8,375 feet in the high desert east of the Sierra Nevada, in Mono County, California. It originated with a gold discovery in 1859 by a prospecting party that included Waterman S. Bodey (also spelled Body), who died in a blizzard later that winter and never saw the camp that bore a misspelled version of his name. For nearly two decades the site remained a marginal placer and lode prospect, but a profitable strike in 1876 and the consolidation of holdings under the Standard Consolidated Mining Company transformed it almost overnight into one of the most notorious boomtowns of the American West.
At its 1879–1880 peak, Bodie held somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 residents in an estimated 2,000 buildings, served by a main street roughly a mile long lined with some 65 saloons, along with breweries, gambling halls, opium dens, a red-light district, two banks, several newspapers, a Chinatown, and dozens of mining companies. The district’s mines ultimately produced on the order of $34 million in gold and silver over their working life. Bodie’s reputation for violence — frequent shootings, stage robberies, and barroom killings — made “the Bad Man from Bodie” a stock figure in period journalism, though much of the lurid imagery was exaggerated for distant readers.
The boom was brief. The richest near-surface and shallow ore was largely worked out by the early 1880s, and the mobile mining population began draining toward newer strikes almost as quickly as it had arrived. A fire in 1892 destroyed a large share of the business district, and a far more devastating fire in 1932 — reportedly started by a young boy playing with matches — leveled most of what remained of the commercial center. Mining continued intermittently on a reduced scale until the federal War Production Board’s Order L-208 closed nonessential gold mines in 1942, ending Bodie as a functioning community.
California acquired the surviving townsite and made it Bodie State Historic Park in 1962; it had been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. Today the state maintains roughly 110 surviving structures in a deliberate condition called “arrested decay” — stabilized against collapse but neither restored nor cosmetically improved — and the park draws on the order of 200,000 visitors a year, making it one of the best-preserved authentic ghost towns in the United States.
Rhyolite rose almost overnight on the edge of the Bullfrog mining district in southern Nevada, on the eastern flank of the Amargosa Desert near Death Valley, after prospectors Frank “Shorty” Harris and Ernest “Ed” Cross found gold-bearing quartz there in August 1904. Within two years a tent camp had become a substantial town of concrete and stone, complete with electric light, piped water, a stock exchange, telephone service, three competing railroads, and a population that by 1907–1908 may have reached around 5,000.
The town’s confidence was extraordinary and largely borrowed. Its centerpiece mine, the Montgomery Shoshone, attracted the attention of the steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, who acquired it in 1906, and the speculative excitement his name generated drove much of Rhyolite’s construction — three-story commercial blocks, a grand concrete depot, and the eccentric Tom Kelly Bottle House built from some 50,000 beer and liquor bottles in 1906.
The collapse came as fast as the rise. The nationwide financial Panic of 1907 froze the outside investment capital on which Rhyolite’s economy entirely depended, and at the same moment the Montgomery Shoshone mine proved far less rich than the speculation surrounding it had promised. Banks failed, mines shut, and residents left in waves; the Montgomery Shoshone closed in 1911, and the town’s electric power was finally switched off in 1916.
Rhyolite stands today as one of the most photographed ruins in the American West — a skeletal three-story bank, the surviving railroad depot, the bottle house, and scattered concrete walls on Bureau of Land Management land just east of Death Valley National Park, with the adjacent Goldwell Open Air Museum adding a striking collection of outdoor sculpture.
Kennecott was a self-contained copper-milling town built deep in Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains to process some of the richest copper ore ever discovered. The deposit was found in 1900, when prospectors Jack Smith and Clarence Warner spotted a green stain — the Bonanza outcrop — high on a ridge above the Kennicott Glacier. The find drew the attention and capital of the Alaska Syndicate, formed in 1906 by the Guggenheim family and financier J.P. Morgan, who organized the Kennecott Mines Company to develop it.
Reaching the ore required extraordinary infrastructure for so remote a place. The syndicate financed the 196-mile Copper River and Northwestern Railway, completed in 1911, to carry concentrate from the mountains to the port of Cordova on the Gulf of Alaska, and built a towering, multi-level concentration mill beside the mines along with company housing, a hospital, a school, a store, and a recreation hall. Between 1911 and 1938 the operation processed over 4.6 million tons of ore yielding roughly 1.18 billion pounds of copper, plus significant silver, with gross revenues above $200 million — making it one of the most profitable mining ventures of its era.
Kennecott’s economics depended on exceptionally high-grade ore, some of it among the purest copper ever mined. By the late 1930s those rich bodies were largely worked out, and ordinary ore could not pay for so remote an operation. The mine closed in November 1938, and the company withdrew with startling speed; the last train left the rails of the Copper River and Northwestern in November 1938, and the town was abandoned almost immediately, its red mill buildings left standing in the wilderness.
Today the distinctive red-and-white mill and many of the surrounding wooden structures survive within Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and largely acquired by the National Park Service beginning in the late 1990s, Kennecott has been stabilized and partly restored as one of the best-preserved early-twentieth-century industrial sites in the United States.
St. Elmo was platted in 1880 by Griffith Evans and Charles Seitz high in Chalk Creek Canyon in the Sawatch Range, about 20 miles southwest of Buena Vista in Chaffee County, Colorado, at an elevation near 10,000 feet. Prospecting in the canyon dated to the early 1870s, and the discovery of the rich Mary Murphy lode south of the future townsite gave the Chalk Creek mining district its anchor. The town was first surveyed as “Forest City,” but the U.S. Post Office rejected the name because a Forest City already existed in California; Evans, reportedly reading the popular novel “St. Elmo,” supplied the substitute.
The town’s fortunes were bound to the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad, a Colorado narrow-gauge line that reached Chalk Creek in 1881 and continued up the canyon toward the Alpine Tunnel beneath the Continental Divide. With rail service, St. Elmo became a busy outfitting point — at its 1880s peak the community held roughly 2,000 people, with a main street of five hotels, mercantiles, saloons, dance halls, a telegraph office, a schoolhouse, and a newspaper. The Mary Murphy Mine, the district’s richest producer — extracting between 70 and 100 tons of ore daily and employing more than 250 men at its height — was the economic backbone, and St. Elmo prospered as the place miners came to resupply, ship ore, and spend their wages.
Decline tracked the mines. Output in the Chalk Creek district fell through the early 1900s, and the dwindling traffic could not sustain the railroad. When the line up Chalk Creek was discontinued in 1922 — residents fought the closure unsuccessfully as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, and the last train ran in 1926 — St. Elmo lost the lifeline that had justified its existence as a supply town. The Mary Murphy itself closed in 1925, and residents departed in the years that followed, leaving the Stark family — Anton, Anna, and their children, who ran the Home Comfort Hotel, store, telegraph office, and post office — among the last to keep the lights on.
Unlike camps that burned or collapsed entirely, St. Elmo survived largely intact because a small number of caretakers stayed on and later owners and a preservation group maintained the wooden buildings. The townsite and surrounding district were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Today St. Elmo is widely cited among the best-preserved ghost towns in Colorado, with dozens of original structures still lining the street and a general store that reopens seasonally for the many visitors who reach it by the Chalk Creek road.
Garnet sits in the Garnet Range of western Montana, northeast of Missoula, where prospectors had worked placer gold along the gulches since the 1860s before the hard-rock boom of the mid-1890s gave rise to the town. The settlement coalesced in 1895 around a stamp mill built at First Chance Gulch — reportedly by Dr. Armistead Mitchell, for whom the camp was first named Mitchell — and was renamed Garnet in 1897 after the garnet stones found in the surrounding range. Within a few years it became the commercial center for a cluster of hard-rock mines high in the timbered mountains.
The town’s growth was rapid. The rich strike made by prospector Sam Ritchey at his Nancy Hanks Mine — named for Abraham Lincoln’s mother — west of town helped touch off the rush, and by January 1898 nearly a thousand people lived in Garnet. The town carried four stores, four hotels, three livery stables, a school, a doctor’s office, an assay office, a union hall, and some thirteen saloons. The merchant Frank A. Davey, whose store opened around 1898 and sold everything from dry goods and jewelry to mining tools and meat, became one of the town’s enduring figures. For a brief period Garnet was a busy, family-oriented mining community rather than a rough transient camp.
Garnet’s gold, however, was relatively shallow and the rich ore did not last. By 1900 the population had fallen to about 300, and by 1905 many of the mines were abandoned and only around 150 people remained; in all, roughly $950,000 in gold was recovered from the district’s mines by about 1917. A fire in 1912 destroyed much of the commercial district, and with the town already shrinking there was little will or money to rebuild what had burned. Garnet slipped toward ghost-town status well before the First World War.
A brief revival came in the 1930s, when higher Depression-era gold prices drew a small number of miners back to rework the old ground, but the resurgence was modest and short-lived, and the town was largely empty again by the 1940s as remaining residents left for wartime jobs. Since 1970 Garnet has been administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management together with the volunteer Garnet Preservation Association; more than thirty structures survive, the site draws on the order of 16,000 visitors a year, and it is promoted as Montana’s best-preserved ghost town.
Terlingua grew up in the first years of the 20th century around rich deposits of cinnabar — mercury sulfide ore — in the remote Chihuahuan Desert of far West Texas, near the Rio Grande and the rugged country that would later become Big Bend National Park. The dominant operator was the Chisos Mining Company, organized in 1903 by Chicago businessman Howard E. Perry — who had acquired the cinnabar-bearing land as payment of a debt — whose mines and reduction furnaces turned the district into the largest single mercury, or quicksilver, producer in the United States.
For roughly four decades the Terlingua Quicksilver District supplied a strategic but narrow commodity used in detonators, instruments, and industrial processes. Production peaked at about 7,200 flasks in 1917, and by 1922 the district accounted for roughly 40 percent of all quicksilver mined in the United States. Around the mines Perry built a classic company town: a store, a school, housing, offices, and his own hilltop mansion, sustaining a population variously estimated in the low thousands during the 1910s and 1920s in one of the most isolated inhabited corners of Texas.
The town’s fortunes, however, rose and fell with a single volatile metal. When mercury prices fell back from their wartime peaks and the most accessible high-grade ore was worked out, the Chisos Mining Company declared insolvency on October 1, 1942. The mines passed to the Esperado Mining Company, which shut them down by the end of World War II, and the population scattered. Terlingua became a genuine ghost town — stone ruins, a hillside cemetery, and abandoned mine workings baking in the desert.
Unlike many mercury camps, Terlingua found a second life. From the 1960s onward — anchored by the famous Terlingua chili cook-off first held in 1967 — the ghost town reinvented itself as a desert tourism, arts, and music outpost serving visitors to Big Bend. Today a small revived community of residents, restaurants, lodging, and outfitters occupies the same ground, so that Terlingua is at once a preserved set of mining ruins and a living, if eccentric, settlement.
Oatman sits high in the Black Mountains of Mohave County in western Arizona, a former gold camp named for Olive Oatman, the young woman captured by Native Americans in the 1850s and later released near the area. The settlement that grew on the site exploded after a major gold discovery in 1915, when the United Eastern Mining Company opened ore bodies that would yield millions of dollars in gold over the following decade.
At its peak the town grew explosively — by some accounts to more than 3,500 people within a year of the strike, with later estimates running far higher — supporting a main street of hotels, stores, and saloons that served the miners working the surrounding Black Mountains. The richest ore, however, was finite. The United Eastern mine — the district’s largest producer, which yielded some $13.6 million in gold — closed in 1924 as its best ground was exhausted, and what gold mining remained was largely shut down during World War II by federal War Production Board order L-208, which halted non-essential gold operations in 1942.
What saved Oatman from immediate oblivion was its position on U.S. Route 66, which threaded over Sitgreaves Pass and through the town’s main street. Traffic from cross-country motorists kept its businesses alive even after the mines went quiet — until 1953, when a realignment of Route 66 (later subsumed into Interstate 40) bypassed the difficult mountain grade and diverted nearly all through-traffic away from the town, very nearly finishing it off.
Oatman clung to life and, from the latter 20th century onward, reinvented itself as a Wild-West heritage and Route 66 nostalgia destination. Today it is a small but lively tourist town of about 102 residents (2020 census), famous for the wild burros — descendants of the pack animals miners turned loose — that wander its main street, staged gunfight reenactments, and original buildings repurposed as shops and saloons. Drawing on the order of half a million visitors a year, it is best described not as a fully dead ghost town but as a near-abandoned mining town revived by tourism.