Беатти, Булфрог және Амаргаса аймағының географиялық және тарихи атаулары

The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common. The Amargosa River, which flows through nearby Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste. "Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog." The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine. "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district's other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names. The name persisted and, decades later, was given to the short lived Bullfrog County. Beatty is named after "Old Man" Montillus (Montillion) Murray Beatty, a Civil War veteran and miner who bought a ranch along the Amargosa River just north of what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company. "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.

The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region's Paleozoic sedimentary rocks. The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows that built to a combined thickness of about 8000 feet (2438 m) above the more ancient rock. After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks. Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.

Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U. S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 mile (193 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 mile (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 mile (145 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 mile (6 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 mile (8 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 mile (1 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 mile (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site. Bordered on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3800 feet (1158 m) above sea level. The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north. Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6002 feet (1829 m) above sea level about 3 mile (5 km) northwest of Rhyolite. The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills. Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place. Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 mile (1 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 mile (2 km) northeast of Rhyolite. Beatty, about 500 feet (152 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is and the average low is December and January are the coolest months with an average high of and an average low of in December and in January. Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water. Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to $3,000 a ton, or about $ a ton in dollars when adjusted for inflation. Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District. Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest. It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as $16,000 a ton, equivalent to $ a ton in Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 mile (161 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine. Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906. Its depot, built in California mission style, cost about $130,000, Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers". The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines. equivalent to $ in .

Although the mine produced more than $1 million (equivalent to about $24 million in 2009) In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer's report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from $3 to 75 cents. Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low grade mine." Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California while interrupting rail service, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents. All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916. Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",

Much of Rhyolite's remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners' Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.

The Rhyolite historic townsite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West". Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail. The ruins of the Cook Bank building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island. Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1988 science fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society. Six String Samurai (1998) was another movie using Rhyolite as a setting. In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose, a storage tank, and a pump, managed by a local owner. In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s. In 1984, Belgian artist Albert Szukalski created his sculpture The Last Supper on Golden Street near the Rhyolite railway depot. The art became part of the Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park near the southern entrance to the ghost town.

Mining in and around Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about of ore and produced about of gold.