Time Travel: Tonopah Horses
Mining
Tonopah carries the nickname "Queen of the Silver Camps." In 1900 Jim Butler discovered Silver. One of our countries biggest silver booms were the mines around Tonopah.
The mines around the town produced almost $750,000 in gold and silver in 1901. By 1902 production consolidated under tthe "Tonopah Mining company" with backers in Philadelphia and San Francisco.
Tonopah Belmont Extension Mine was created i 1902.The company was based in New Jersey and had C.A. Heller as president. It was regarded as one of the country’s best equipped and most efficient silver cyanide mills.
Wild horses and burros
The area around Tonopah was, and is, used heavily for mining industry. South of Tonopah there are a number of herds of free-romaing burros that live on public land.
Wild horses exist throughout the county in multiple Herd Management Areas (HMAs).
Livestock
Livestock use of the areas around Tonopah began a couple of decades prior to the big Silver book of 1900. A dozen or so homesteaders and freegrazers fed miners from small claims nearby and primarily exported cattle by rail to San Francisco. In 1881 the archives of the history of the area note in multiple documents that by the turn of 1900 the area had already been severely damaged by domestic livestock grazing:
"A few years ago Nye county was considered a fine grazing country, but its feed supply has been nearly destroyed by large herds of stock which have been subsisted within its boundaries for several seasons past. During the last two years, more than 10,000 head of cattle have been driven away (1881 [1958]:515)"