The American Story

The American story is rich, colorful, inspiring and often controversial. Each chapter illustrates what makes this country unique, and why the United States remains a destination for people seeking freedom and opportunity.

One chapter about the Colorado River Valley in that story could easily be entitled, “Gold, Grit, and Ghosts in the Black Mountains.” Or, perhaps, a more fitting title would be “Prospectors, Boom Towns, and the Railroad That Almost Was.”

The rugged ramparts of the Black Mountains above Bullhead City, Arizona along the eastern edge of the Colorado River make it challenging to find the fading relics that are tangible links to one of the Southwest’s last great gold rushes, These relics hint of stories about stubborn prospectors, roaring boom towns, fleeting fortunes, and a railroad that vanished before a promising future dawned.

The Black Mountains are landscapes where ambition met geology head-on. You will find it in ghost towns like Oatman, Goldroad, and Old Trails. And you will find tantalizing hints of a great story in names on a map like Silver Creek.

Dawn of The Gold Rush

Soldiers from Fort Mohave and prospectors began the search for gold in the Black Mountains as early as the 1860s. They were drawn by rumors and tantalizing discoveries of gold-bearing quartz in sand washes. Water was scarce, summer temperatures soared to 100 degrees and higher, and the terrain was challenging.

Early mining efforts were sporadic. Men worked small claims, often alone or in loosely organized partnerships. They hammered at the hard rock and chased promising veins that pinched out as often as they paid. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, or worse. Persistence didn’t promise prosperity.

Still, the gold was there. According to legend, in 1863, prospector John Thomas Moss identified promising deposits, and filed several claims. But the discovery of rich deposits of gold, silver, and other ores in the nearby Cerbat Mountains sparked a boom. And the Black Mountains were left to the lone prospector.

With the dawn of the 20^th century everything changed. Jose Jerez, a former Mexican army Captain turned prospector, with a grubstake from Henry Lovin in Kingman, discovered a deposit of gold that an assay revealed to be one of the richest in the territory of Arizona. The boom was on!

Boom Town

Suddenly, the Black Mountains were no longer a prospector’s gamble. They were a corporate opportunity. New mining technology, improved milling processes, and growing investment capital transformed the western slope and the deep canyons.

At the heart of it all stood Oatman, a town that embodied the romanticized image of the wild swing from raucous mining camp to boom town. Named for Olive Oatman, a frontier personality whose life story included being captured and traded to Mohave tribes on the Colorado River and national attention, the settlement evolved from a tent city mining camp into a full-fledged boomtown with modern amenities almost overnight.

Within a year, Oatman’s population surged to an estimate of more than 3,500 people. Streets filled with miners, merchants, speculators, and dreamers. Saloons, hotels, assay offices, and boarding houses sprang up in rapid succession. For a brief, blazing moment, this was one of the richest gold-producing districts in the region. And Oatman was one of the most modern communities in western Arizona.

A Tale of Two Cities

To the north on the west slope of Sitgreaves Pass the camp of Goldroad, originally Acme, grew around Jerez’s original discovery. This company owned town lacked the glitz and glimmer of Oatman but it as well as smaller mining camps such as Silver Creek made this the largest gold producing region in the territory of Arizona during the first decades of the 20^th century.

Attesting to the prominence of the mines on the west slope of the Black Mountains is the short-lived Mohave & Milltown Railroad that now serves as hiking and mountain biking trail. Built in 1903, this narrow-gauge railroad stretched approximately 17 miles from the Santa Fe Railroad on the Colorado River near Needles, California, into the heart of the mining district.

For a brief time, ore moved more efficiently and costs dropped. Profits soared.

Then in 1904, record breaking rains triggered washouts that destroyed significant portions of the line. The companies limited capital made repairs an impossibility. The rail line was abandoned, the rolling stock was sold to a railroad in Ludlow, California, and in 1912, the rails were removed.

The Route 66 Era

A secondary gold rush came to the Black Mountains with establishment of the National Old Trails Road. That pioneering highway became Route 66 in 1926.

N.R. Dunton went to work in a Goldroad garage in 1925 and purchased it a few years later. During the 1930s he expanded the business to include mining equipment rental, a towing service over the steep Sitgreaves Pass, and school bus and trash hauling service.

In 1946, Dunton purchased the Taylor Owen Ford dealership on Route 66 in Kingman, Arizona. The dealership has changed over the years but remains a Dunton family-owned business.

Today Goldroad is little more than ghostly ruins scattered along Route 66. Though they are now quite elderly, there are folks that still have fond childhood memories of this rough and tumble mining camp.

With closure of the mines, and then realignment of Route 66 in 1952, Oatman quietly faded from modern, prosperous boom town to sun bleached relic. But the Route 66 renaissance sparked a gold rush of another kind, and once again this frontier era mining town is booming.

In the grand sweep of America’s 250-year story, places like Oatman, Goldroad, Vivian, and Silver Creek remind us that our history is diverse, colorful, and thrilling.

Written by Jim Hinckley’s America, sharing America’s story since 1990.