Gold Butte, Nevada

An exercise in impermanence, located in the Nevada desert.

This is about the ghost town. If you're looking for the national monument, which is arguably more interesting, see Gold Butte National Monument.

• And if you're confused in general, don't be. See Gold Butte (disambiguation).

Here is a map. It delineates the incorporated and tragically unincorporated territories of Clark County. Gold Butte, a name given to both a mountain peak and the ruin of a town at its feet, is located in that far eastern hook, as if trying to escape the rest of the county.

Gold Butte is the name assigned to a ghost town and the more enduring mountain peak that watches over it in Clark County, Nevada. The entire bleak landscape, both the failure of a town and the peak, is now under the "protection" of the Gold Butte National Monument, a task managed by the Bureau of Land Management, presumably to prevent further outbreaks of human ambition. The mountain itself, Gold Butte, stands at a respectable 5,013 feet (1,528 m), rising a stark 1,280 feet (390 m) above the skeletal remains of the town. This peak is geologically situated within the Virgin Mountains, and its name, with a stunning lack of imagination, was apparently derived from the Gold Butte Mining District it anchored.

Geology

Before the first prospector arrived with delusions of grandeur, the land itself was telling a far more dramatic story. The very bedrock of the landscape surrounding Gold Butte and the nearby Bonelli Peak is a testament to deep time. It is composed of gray, Proterozoic stone—a time when life was just getting started and had the good sense to remain simple. This foundation consists of porphyritic perthite-quartz-biotite granites and quartz monzonites, which are also classified under the grander title of rapakivi granite.

These ancient granites, known collectively and with tedious functionality as the Gold Butte Granite, were not formed in quiet solitude. They are intrusive, having forced their way into even older formations of garnet-cordierite-sillimanite and hornblende gneisses, migmatites, and their predecessors: older granites, pyroxenites, and hornblendites. East of Gold Butte, these Proterozoic medium-to high-grade metamorphic and plutonic rocks are buried, unconformably, beneath a staggering 3 to 4 kilometers (1.9 to 2.5 mi) of steeply east-dipping Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.

All of these plutonic, metamorphic, and sedimentary strata are bound together in a massive, fault-bounded segment of the planet's crust known as the Gold Butte Block. The terrain you see, of which Gold Butte is just a minor feature, represents the deeply eroded footwall of a Miocene detachment fault. This geological violence has provided a continuous outcrop, a cross-section of the upper Earth's crust that is approximately 24 to 25 kilometers (15 to 16 mi) thick. In a twist of geological irony, this forgotten corner of Nevada offers what might be the longest, most continuously exposed section of the Earth's crust in the entire southwestern United States. The ground beneath the ghost town is infinitely more significant than the town itself.

Fryxell and Duebendorfer have argued, quite convincingly, that the strata forming Frenchman Mountain began their existence as the hanging wall that once rested atop the now tectonically exhumed Gold Butte block. During the Miocene, this massive block was violently ripped away and transported to its current location through the brutal mechanics of detachment and strike-slip faults. The landscape was literally remade, a geological drama that dwarfs any human story of gold and ruin.

History

The human chapter of this story is, as usual, brief and driven by shiny things. Gold Butte, the town, was the ephemeral center of the Gold Butte mining district, a territory defined by the land south of the peak, stretching between the Nevada-Arizona state line and the Virgin River (a river now mostly drowned by Lake Mead). Long before the gold-seekers arrived, a man named Daniel Bonelli found mica here in 1873, a discovery met with a collective shrug. It wasn't until 1905, when gold was finally discovered, that people began to pay attention.

The subsequent rush was a predictable, feverish affair, lasting from 1905 to 1906. Humans flocked to the desert, erecting the flimsy architecture of hope: a post office, a hotel, a livery stable, a general store, and a smattering of homes. They built a town on a whisper of wealth.

The reality, however, was deeply unimpressive. The total mining production from the entire Gold Butte district amounted to a paltry $75,000. Prospectors scoured the earth in a desperate search for gold, mica, magnesite, copper, and zinc. Despite their efforts, no significant deposits were ever found. The dream was built on dust. By December 1910, a mere five years after the rush began, the illusion had shattered. Most mining operations had ceased entirely, and the town was abandoned to the wind and the sun.

Today, there is almost nothing left to mark the site of this failed enterprise. A few crumbling foundations, two lonely graves for those who never left, and several gaping mine shafts—dark, open mouths in the desert floor. The silence is more profound than any noise the town ever made.

The Bundy standoff

History in this place has a habit of repeating its tedious themes of human conflict over land that belongs to no one. The Bundy standoff, a spectacle that unfolded in the spring of 2014, was tangentially related to the Gold Butte area. It was the predictable climax of a 20-year disagreement over land use between the Bureau of Land Management and Cliven Bundy, a local rancher with a particularly stubborn streak.

Long before that circus, there were efforts to formally protect the region. The late United States Senator from Nevada, Harry Reid (1939-2021), alongside local business leaders and conservation groups who presumably saw more value in the land than in a few underfed cattle, campaigned to have Gold Butte and its surroundings designated as a National Conservation Area. This effort culminated on December 28, 2016, when President Barack Obama established the Gold Butte National Monument, placing the public lands that cradle this ghost town under federal protection, safeguarding them from future schemes.

Notes

^ a b Carlson, H.S., 1974. Nevada place names: a geographical dictionary. University of Nevada Press. ISBN 0-87417--094-X
^ GNIS Feature Detail Report for: Gold Butte (historical). Retrieved December 31, 2016
^ GNIS Feature Detail Report for: Gold Butte. Retrieved December 31, 2016
^ Volborth, A. 1962. Rapakivi-type granites in the Precambrian complex of Gold Butte, Clark county, Nevada. Geological Society of America Bulletin, 73(7), pp. 813-832.
^ Fryxell, J. E.; Salton, G. G.; Selverstone, J.; and Wernicke, B. 1992. Gold Butte crustal section, South Virgin Mountains, Nevada. Tectonics, 11, pp. 1099–1120.
^ Wernicke, B. and Axen, G.J. 1888. On the role of isostasy in the evolution of normal fault systems. Geology, 16(9), pp.848-851.
^ Wernicke, B. 1992. Cenozoic extensional tectonics of the U.S. Cordillera. In Burchfiel, B. C.; Lipman, P.W.; and Zoback, M. L., eds. The Cordilleran Orogen: conterminous U.S. (Geology of North America, Vol. G-3). Boulder, CO, Geol. Soc. Am., p. 553–581.
^ Fryxell, J.E. and Duebendorfer, E.M. 2005. Origin and trajectory of the Frenchman Mountain block, an extensional allochthon in the Basin and Range Province, southern Nevada. The Journal of Geology, 113(3), pp.355-371
^ a b Paher, Stanley W (1970). Nevada Ghost Towns and Mining Camps. Howell North. p. 289.
^ "Gold Butte Nevada !". Archived from the original on May 11, 2002. Retrieved December 23, 2013.
^ Gold Butte ghost town. Retrieved December 23, 2013.
^ "Bill Introduced to Protect Gold Butte". Friends of Nevada Wilderness. May 23, 2013. Retrieved December 23, 2013.