Rawhide, Nevada

Rawhide, Nevada was a town in Mineral County, Nevada, approximately 55 miles southeast of Fallon. The site of Rawhide has been dismantled by recent mining activity, with little or nothing remaining to be seen.

Rawhide was a mining town that exemplifies many of the towns which sprang up in Nevada during the silver and gold rushes in the state's history. Rawhide was less a town born on the actual finding of large silver or gold deposits, and more on the manipulation of greed and desire for “the next big thing”. That there was silver and gold in the hills surrounding Rawhide is indisputable, but the town itself existed more on promotion, self-serving aggrandizement, and showy displays by the promoters and developers of the town alluding to wealth and success that didn't exist relative to the size of the town. Fueling this was stock manipulation by unscrupulous mining stock brokers that funneled millions into the accounts of the manipulators, but provided little return on investment to the stockholders. There were riches to be made, and these schemers preyed on the common desire of investors of the time to get rich quick. Rawhide provided them a perfect milieu to fleece their victims.

In December 1906, prospector Jim Swanson made a discovery of a rich gold and silver deposit in the hills near what became Rawhide. He was soon joined by Charles ("Charley") B. Holman and Charles ("Scotty") A. McLeod, who also found sizeable deposits nearby on Hooligan Hill. McLeod had recently been ordered to cease prospecting around the nearby camp of Buckskin, and bitter about this, he suggested the name of Rawhide for the new camp, as a play on the name of the Buckskin camp he held with contempt. Word spread, and both Holman and McLeod sold their claims to investors and moved on to Stingaree Gulch later in 1907, where they found yet another large deposit. The two men sold these claims for even more money, and then left the area to prospect elsewhere.

The frenzy that these claims created soon had Rawhide booming. Investors began selling stocks at a frenetic pace, and the town soon had a population of about 5000, with three banks, four churches, a school, twelve hotels, twenty-eight restaurants, a theater, and thirty-seven saloons. While the original mines and claims did produce a decent profit in gold and silver, the fever created an amount of activity far in excess of what the mines could support. Stock swindlers like George Graham Rice [1], a flashy con-artist from Goldfield, plied their trade, creating a sense that Rawhide would be the next Virginia City (or the like of any number of other Nevada boom towns), with untold riches to be had for the savvy folks who would just invest in his companies. Others, like businessman George "Tex" Rickard came to Rawhide to establish legitimate businesses, and make money off the boom while it lasted. Rawhide’s hey-day was short-lived; the glaring, gross over-promotion which manipulators performed to inflate the worth of Rawhide doomed its chance for success from the start.

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