President Abraham Lincoln made Nevada a territory in the fall of 1861 to protect its rich silver and gold mines from the Confederacy. Fast-tracked...
Silver State Miners
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Miners
Cornish Miners and Tommyknockers
The rocky wilderness of the American West turned out to be the richest treasure trove of natural resources in the history of the civilized...
The Hazards of Underground Mining
Those hard rock miners in mining camps like Bisbee, Morenci, Virginia City and Jerome, faced a number of hazards including gas pockets, cave ins,...
The Angel of the Cassiars
Nellie Cashman came to the rescue of stranded miners. Nellie Cashman was one of the great figures in the Old West, an entrepreneur who was famed for...
The Edge of the West
William Henry Jackson, a member of the Hayden Survey, photographed the miners working the North Star and Mountaineer lodes at their camp on King...
The Harvey Girls
Humorist Will Rogers once quipped, “Fred Harvey supplied the West in food and wives.” It wasn’t just the excellent food that attracted people to his...
Bartlesville, Oklahoma
The oil-enriched town preserves and celebrates its Western heritage. The 150,000 Boomers and Sooners who flooded into the Oklahoma...
Salting A Gold Mine The game of buying and selling a worthless mine could conceivably become a matter of who could outwit whom...
Mining Camp author Brete Harte wrote: "The ways of a man with a maid are strange, but tame, when compared to a man with a mine when buying or...
Drilling Contests For the hard-rock miners, the most popular contest of all was single-jack and double-jack drilling...
Among the popular forms or recreation that took up what little free time the hard-rock miners had included baseball, wrestling and boxing. A miner’s...
Ask the Marshall
In the June issue of True West, there are several photos of the mines and miners of George Hearst. How did those men get paid?