Belmont
Nye County, Nye County, Nevada
Marker Inscription
Belmont. Belmont sits at an elevation of 7,400 feet. A spring flowing year round made this a gathering site of the Shoshone Indians for rabbit drives and celebrations.In 1865, silver ore discoveries led to the development of an attractive tree-shaded mercantile community. East Belmont became the mining and milling center. A wide range of nationalities worked the mines, operated businesses, and provided services. At its height, Belmont had schools, churches, a post office, and a newspaper, as well as a Chinatown, a red-light district, and a racetrack. The town was the Nye County seat from 1867 to 1905, and a courthouse survives from this period.Belmont had a reputation as a rowdy town. Incidents of saloon brawls, vigilante actions, shootings, hangings, and feuds made the town notorious. Well known Nevadans such as Jack Longstreet, Tasker Oddie, Jim Butler, and Andrew Maute all participated in local early history.Silver production totaling four million dollars was from high grade but shallow ore. By 1890, most mines ceased to be profitable and were forced to shut down. Belmont’s population dwindled as most residents left for new discoveries in nearby mining towns.
Erected by Nevada State Historic Preservation Office
The Story
A reliable year-round spring in Buena Vista Canyon long drew Shoshone people to this high valley for rabbit drives and gatherings before silver strikes in 1865 transformed it into the boomtown of Belmont. At its peak it boasted schools, churches, a newspaper, a Chinatown, and a rowdy reputation for brawls, feuds, and vigilante justice, serving as the Nye County seat from 1867 to 1905. When the shallow, high-grade ore played out around 1890, residents drifted off to newer strikes, leaving the surviving courthouse to preside over a quiet townscape.
Why it matters
Belmont captures the boom-and-bust arc of the Nevada silver frontier, where fortunes, diverse immigrant communities, and frontier lawlessness rose and vanished within a single generation.
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Related people
- · Jack Longstreet
- · Tasker Oddie
- · Jim Butler
- · Andrew Maute
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Ione
Nye County, NV
Ione Valley sustained a dense Indigenous population for roughly 5,000 years, and the Shoshone and Northern Paiute who lived here later practiced distinctive property and agricultural customs. When silver was struck in 1863, Ione City boomed to more than 600 residents and in 1864 became the first county seat of newly created Nye County. Its glory was brief—Belmont's wealth pulled away both the miners and, by 1867, the county seat—yet Ione proved resilient, never wholly deserted through decades of mining slumps.
Lida
Esmeralda County, NV
Set in a valley long used as a gathering place by Shoshone and Northern Paiute people, Lida began drawing prospectors in the 1860s, and by 1872 a proper town had been platted amid the stores, stables, and post office of a working mining district. The richest ore was too valuable to trust to local mills and was hauled to Austin or Belmont for treatment. After 1880 the camp faded, flared briefly during the turn-of-the-century Goldfield rush, and dwindled to a tiny community that hung on until World War I.
Hiko
Lincoln County, NV
Founded as a camp around 1865 and laid out as a townsite in 1866, Hiko took its name from a Shoshone word meaning roughly 'white man' or 'white man's town.' W. H. Raymond hauled a five-stamp mill up the Colorado River to Callville and then 140 miles overland by oxen to process Pahranagat ores, and in late 1866 Hiko became Lincoln County's first county seat. Raymond poured nearly $900,000 into the district before it failed, and after the mill moved to Bullionville in 1870 and the county seat to Pioche in 1871, the town declined.
Pahranagat Valley
Lincoln County, NV
Fed by three springs and named for a local Native people, Pahranagat Valley has been farmed since the mid-1800s and briefly boomed after ore was found in 1865. A stamp mill at Hiko made it the county seat until mining faded and Pioche took the honor. The valley won odd national fame in 1867 when journalist Dan De Quille of the Territorial Enterprise spun his tall tale of magnetic "traveling stones," a hoax so straight-faced that readers took it for truth. Today the town of Alamo and a wildlife refuge share the well-watered meadows.