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The Town Of Rawhide Nevada

The town of Rawhide Nevada was one of those town that sprang up in the middle of nowhere in Nevada. Unlike a lot of towns back in the day, Rawhide never really had a large mine that the town itself was built around. Instead, Rawhide was a town that was built up around several small mines and had it not been promoted it most likely would have never really existed at all.

It was in 1906 that Jim Swanson was out prospecting and made a discovery of some rich gold and silver near what would soon become known as Rawhide. Word got out about that discovery and so he joined by other prospectors and mines. Two of these men, Charles Holman and Scott McLeod, who also found some pretty good deposits near a place called Hooligan Hill. Scott McLeod had been prospecting over in a place called Buckskin earlier but got himself tossed out of the area over some legal wranglings and of course being bitter about all this he figured that naming area of the town Rawhide would be a way to say, "who needs buckskin when we got Rawhide."

Holman and Macleod worked their claims somewhat and then sold them to a group of big city investors and moved on. They didn't really go far though as they started to prospect over in a place called Stingaree Gulch where they found another rich deposit of gold and silver. They then sold these claims for even a whole lot more money and then left town to prospect elsewhere.

Of course like everywhere that there was gold, your going to get the big city investors and along with them you get the some of the more undesireables coming into town. Gun slingers, poker gamblers and stock promoters. Anything to make some easy money. One of the fellows was a man by the name of George Rice. George was a real slick salesman and con artist that came from the town of Goldfield and set out to promote the town as the land of riches. Come to Rawhide and invest, Land of gold. Well it worked. By 1908 there were about 7000 people living in Rawhide. Two years earlier the town didn't even exist. Old George, well he took the all the folks money for land and mine investments and then split out of town. By 1910 the population had drifted down to less than 500 as the gold ran out.

In 1908 there was a fire that ran through town and burned pretty much the whole town down. That was a driver for some to leave also as the mines that did produce were starting to run out of gold and silver. There was good grades of gold in Rawhide, just not a lot of it. A few of the towns folks stayed on and mined what little was left and tried to mill out the ore the best they could. By 1941 though there was hardly anyone left and the post office was officially closed. In the 1980's though there was some renewed interest in the area and a couple of mining companies got togethter and formed the Denton-Rawhide Mine. That mine became an open pit mine and ran until the early 2000's and once the ore ran out that mining operation closed down.







Rawhide in 1915


Rawhide in the 1950's