It was back in early summer of 1904 that two prospectors, Frank Harris and Eddy Cross happened to find a gold deposit way out in the Amargosa Range between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. The ore samples they found were very rich. A local assayer said the ore was valued at $700 a ton. It was the richest ore he had ever seen. Soon word got out as usual and next thing you know people were making their way to the area to get in on the action. By the winter of the same year there were about 1000 people in the area living in tents and stone cobbled huts.
Before long there were about eight different gold camps in this area with about 5000 people between them all. There were lots of small mines manned by a couple of men as well as larger mining operations. Of course along with the prospector and miners, there are the merchants who are eager to cash in also. A lot of these merchants decided to set up their own small town in one of the many gold camps. Water wout here was scarce so some one of the ways to attract business was to offer water to. Some of the merchants sold water by the barrel while others resorted to giving away water as a means of getting customers.
Out the eight different camps, two of them were more prominant. Those being the town of Bullfrog and the other being Amargosa. However even though they were larger towns at the time they had no water so these towns ended up moving. There was talk about having water piped to these towns but the cost was too much. Meanwhile there was another town getting started a few miles away. This town was Ryolite and so people moved closer there and Bullfrog townsite was started all over again. The town of Amargosa died where it was at as people from there moved to the new Bullfrog townsite.
Soon Bullfrog was a bustling place. The town had a post office, telegraph service and even had telephones as well as a newspaper. There was a regular stage coach service that you could go to Tonopah. The town had a few hotels and a couple of saloons as well as the regular merchants. At this new location, Bullfrog had piped in water so people were eager to build here. US Senator, William Stewart even had a house here where he had his law practice. As time went on, the town of Bullfrog merged with Rhyolite.
One of the larger mines in the area was the Montgomery Shoshone Mine near Rhyolite. This mine also had a large mill for processing ore. This mill was a high production mill and the owner, Bob Montgomery would boast to everyone telling them he could crush out $10,000 a day from the ore at his mine. This mine and mills wss later sold to Charles Schwab in 1906 for the price of 2 million dollars.
In 1907 there was a financial panic throughtout the country and some of the mines closed down. Others had already closed because of lower grade ore. At this time people started to move into neighboring Rhyolite because of more modern living conditions and the mills were still working. However it wouldn't be that many years later that even Rhyolite would see it's doors close as well.
