The California gold rush stimulated prospecting throughout the western mountains, producing a succession of strikes. In 1858, gold was discovered near Pike’s Peak in Colorado. The next year, Nevada yielded an even richer prize — the Comstock Lode, the greatest single deposit of precious metals ever found in the U.S. The leading mining camp there, Virginia City, grew rapidly into the thriving metropolis immortalized in Mark Twain’s Roughing It, boasting an opera house, theatre, newspapers, stock exchange, saloons, dancehalls and gambling-houses. After the shallower deposits were exhausted, and the simple and inexpensive placer-mining techniques used by most miners rendered useless, California capitalists bought up the prospectors’ claims and installed deep-level quartz-mining machinery. In 1873, these “Silver Kings” struck the “Big Bonanza” 1,100 feet down. In 1874, gold was discovered on Sioux lands in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. Nearly overnight the ramshackle town of Deadwood became home to 15,000 miners. Mining towns also sprung up in Leadville (1877-silver), Cripple Creek (1891-gold), and Telluride, Colorado (1875-gold); Tombstone, Arizona (1877-silver); Couer d’Alene, Idaho (1833-gold); Butte, Montana (1882-copper); and elsewhere. Many towns survived after the mines ran out, but others became ghost towns.

Tags: California, Comstock Lode, Deadwood, ghost towns, Gold-rush