ON THE ROAD
HISTORICALLY RICH
BY BOB BEERS

The iron bars are cool to the touch, protecting me from a 200-foot drop to the bottom of this unnatural chasm. The trench from which I hang suspended a couple dozen feet below the top was dug by human hands. Most such trenches around the world were dug by slaves, but this trench was dug willingly, even enthusiastically.

The men who dug it were self-employed businessmen, driven by the rich mineral values contained in each and every shovel-full. It was Tonopah, 100 years ago, and each of the men who pitched in on this particular trench had leased their own few feet of what would eventually prove to be the richest silver strike in Nevada history.

I am at the business end of the Burro Tunnel, the latest “addition” to the Tonopah Mining Park. My second favorite museum in the state, the TMP was built on the actual ground where Jim Butler was the first to recognize that the dirt that flanked the south end of the San Antonio Mountains held so much silver you could touch a hot flame to a piece of it and pour off pure silver metal. Generations of natives had camped there, appreciating only the flowing water of nearby Tonopah Springs and the prey attracted by its nourishment.

Butler staked out a large swath of this earth, filing the requisite paperwork with the Feds to call it all his own. There were several “veins” — each only a few yards wide, some a half-mile long and extending down a nearly vertical pitch that seemed to never end. Within weeks of filing for mineral rights, Butler had leased fairly small stretches to dozens of freelance miners with big muscles, hearty constitutions and vision.

Those first miners paid no heed to the profound lack of transportation servicing the area, and filled gunny sack after gunny sack with silver ore, confident that each sack was so valuable some capitalist would eventually build a transportation system into the middle of this new Nevada state, one designed to move their gunny sacks to a distant mill for much less cash than each sack was worth. The miners were right, and eventually dug a chasm hundreds of feet deep.

Today, curators, movies and museum displays tell the story far more colorfully than I. Tonopah went on to become one of the richest silver strikes on our earth, and required the raising of immense sums of capital from distant industrialists to fully develop. Its incredibly rich history of raised capital, raw mineral resources and colorful entrepreneurs is the story of free markets and liberty.

If you’re traveling through Central Nevada this summer, you owe it to you and your family to spend a half-day at the Tonopah Mining Park. You’ll get enough exercise, history, economics, geology and fascination to guarantee your stop will rank amongst the highlights of your vacation. LW