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1222

NV - Goldfield,Esmeralda County - Goldfield Newspaper - Gil Schmidtmann Collection

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Western Americana Start Price:75.00 USD Estimated At:150.00 - 300.00 USD
NV - Goldfield,Esmeralda County - Goldfield Newspaper - Gil Schmidtmann Collection
Session D is a Mail-Bid Only Auction. Absentee bids will be accepted only. No live bidding will be allowed. All winners will be contacted after the auction. BIDDING ENDS MONDAY JUNE 27 AT 5PM PACIFIC TIME!!!
Goldfield Review: Special Rawhide Edition, Saturday, March 7, 1908

Includes Sections 1, 2, and 3, pages 1-24. Extremely rare.

“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, 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.

In the short span of two years the town went from its peak population of 7000 people (Mar. to June, 1908), to fewer than 500 people by the latter part of 1910. Helping push the decline of the town even further along was a disastrous fire which swept through Rawhide in September 1908, along with a flood in September 1909, from which many people did not recover or rebuild. While the original mines worked out the last of the gold and silver from the veins first discovered by Swanson, Holman, and McLeod, people began to leave the area, moving to the next “big thing”. While there remained a few people eeking out a life working in the mines, or processing the ore, or just working their own claims and prospecting, for all intents and purposes the town became a hollow shell of what it once was.”

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rawhide,_Nevada]
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