How America's Richest Gold Rush City Became a Ghost Town of 225 People

Goldfield, Nevada: The Biggest City That Disappeared In 1907, the largest city in Nevada wasn't Reno or Las Vegas — it was Goldfield, a remote mining town in the high desert with twenty thousand residents, five banks, luxury hotels, and electric streetlights. This documentary traces Goldfield's extraordinary rise from an empty patch of sagebrush in 1902 to a modern metropolis with stock exchanges, championship boxing, and a four-story hotel with gold-leaf ceilings and European chefs — and its collapse back to near-silence in barely a decade. Along the way, it follows the gamblers, con men, mining magnates, and union organizers who built fortunes and lost them in a place that was never meant to last: George Wingfield, the faro dealer who was worth thirty million dollars by age thirty; Tex Rickard, the saloon owner who staged the longest championship fight in boxing history as a real-estate promotion; George Graham Rice, the convicted forger who swindled Eastern investors out of millions in worthless mining stock; and the Earp brothers, chasing one last payday decades after Tombstone. It is a story about gold rush economics, boom-and-bust real estate, abandoned historic architecture, and what happens when an entire city is built on a resource that runs out. Sources Western Mining History, "Goldfield, Nevada" — westernmininghistory.com/towns/nevada/goldfield/ Goldfield Historical Society, history pages and biographical entries — goldfieldhistoricalsociety.com Travel Nevada / Nevada Magazine, "The Glory of Goldfield" — travelnevada.com/nevada-magazine/the-glory-of-goldfield/ Legends of America, "Goldfield, Nevada – Queen of the Mining Camps" and "Goldfield Hotel" — legendsofamerica.com UNLV Special Collections, Goldfield Consolidated Mines Company Records — special.library.unlv.edu George Graham Rice, My Adventures with Your Money (1911), via Project Gutenberg — gutenberg.org/files/44274/