Rhyolite, Nevada

I have been asked a lot of times what we used to do for our relaxation and rest periods when we weren't on the road, traveling as much as 15,000 miles a month. Those roads were long and lonely, except for the great friendships we had among the guys and gals that made our business a big family.

I had a nostalgic kind of attitude about this great country, and, more then likely, in my previous life, I was a great prospector in the Old West, traveling by burro or stagecoach to the many boomtowns in the Old West. It just seemed that I had to find out what had happened to some of the great towns that were part of the taming of the West. These towns are now referred to as Ghost Towns, and they dot the hillsides and cover the lonely deserts.

If you ever have had the inkling to be a Lone Ranger or a Gene Autry or a Roy Rogers while growing up, then you have seen the type of towns I loved to go to in my free time. I would often ask for time off on my circuit to travel to a lot of these Ghost Cities. For the most part, I was given my wishes on a lot of trips around the United States.

One city that comes to mind while thinking back is Rhyolite, Nevada. It is located about 100 miles north and west of Las Vegas, just six miles from the California border at Death Valley. Rhyolite was founded in the early part of the 1900's, when two single-blanket jackass prospectors named Ed Cross and Shorty Harris camped not far from where the remains of the city are today. The next morning, after camping under the stars, Shorty Harris' burro had wandered off and was standing near an outcropping of quartz. Grabbing a frog-shaped rock and cracking it open with his picking hammer, he found a beautiful vein of gold inside.

He cried out to his partner, Ed, who came running, and they decided to do some more investigating and found a large amount of the same kind of rock. The two men scrambled to mark off their claim and declared this to be the Bull Frog, and the name stuck. Within a few weeks, the word had been let out, and a new city was formed on the desert sagebrush alongside all the wild animals and snakes. A larger strike happened just four miles from the Bull Frog, a bigger town sprung up from the desert floor, and it was called Rhyolite. It grew to over 10,000 people in just a couple of months and had the title of the largest city in the state of Nevada.

Then, there was a big earthquake and fire in San Francisco, and the money that helped to fuel the growth and existence of Rhyolite suddenly stopped. The stock market hit a panic, and, suddenly, the ore values plummeted to below what it took to get the minerals out of the ground and process it. By the mid 1920's, Rhyolite had only a single person guarding the huge buildings and the dwellings that had not been drug off to places as far away as San Diego, California. Today, only a handful of those buildings remain.

I visited Rhyolite in 1968 after a very successful group of matches in the Los Angeles territory known at the time as the PWA. Its champion was Freddie "Classy" Blassie, who had some ferocious battles with the likes of Bobo Brazil, Rocky Montero, Mil Mascaras, The Hangman, and Don Carson. I met with Evan "Tommy" Thompson, who was running the bottle house. We spoke for over two hours about Rhyolite and some of the people that had been there. One guy that stood out in his mind was Death Valley Scotty, who lived in Grapevine Canyon in the upper eastern edge of Death Valley. Scotty was the biggest pseudo-miner con man in the West. He made a huge, comfortable living telling people that he had a gold mine in Death Valley and got people to invest in it. One of his investors, named Johnson, even built a castle that bears his name where Scotty is buried. It is an incredible piece of engineering and building. It had its own power plant that ran off of water from an underground stream, through a Pelton Wheel, and then to a generator. He had all the comforts of home in the place called Death Valley. The Castle was sold to the National Park Service, which conducts tours daily. If you do go there, please pay your respects to Scotty at his final resting spot, overlooking the castle on a plot known as Windy Point. His pet collie, named Windy, is buried on the same hill.

The bottle house was made out of 50,000 beer bottles; there are the remains of the Cook Bank Building, a huge concrete edifice that had the roof dynamited off it to prevent paying taxes on it after the town lost all its citizens. There is also a big, beautiful train station and casino, which still stands. Both the train station and the bottle house are behind a huge chain link fence today as a result of vandals. There are caretakers who live at Rhyolite, but it is slowly sinking back into the desert from where it rose. If you visit---please---just take pictures and leave your memories.

There were three trains that serviced Rhyolite, and it had its own water plant, its own electric utility, and its own phone system. Today, it only has a lonely paved road that leads back to it from the main highway into Death Valley. Its neighboring town, some four miles away, was called Beatty, and it still exists today because of its location on U.S. 95. It is very small by city standards but a great place to visit and stay at.

I have also visited a lot of other Ghosts in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah and Oregon, to name a few states, and I have a lot of stories to tell about them.

There are a couple of good sites about ghost towns, if you care to visit them---one is at www.ghosttowns.com. It has a lot more pictures of Rhyolite and related ghosts.