Hardin City, Nevada: The Ghost Town Built on Silver That Was Never There

Above: the ruins of a stamp mill at Silver Peak, Nevada, photographed for the federal government in March 1940. Timber framing and corrugated iron, built down a slope so that the rock could fall through it; the drive gear is still bolted to the headworks at the top, and the hills of Esmeralda County stand behind. This is not Hardin City — no photograph of Hardin City from its own lifetime is known to exist, and nothing of the site that survives can be published. But it is the right state, the right technology and nearly the right condition. Three mills in this line of business stood on the Black Rock Desert for two years, crushing ore that contained no silver at all.

In the autumn of 1849 a man named James Allen Hardin went out hunting from a wagon camp at Double Hot Springs, on the north-western edge of the Black Rock Desert, and came back with about forty pounds of a soft grey metal.

He thought it was lead. The party wanted it for bullets.

Seventeen years later there was a town on that ground with fifteen houses, three mills and a resident chemist on a thousand dollars a month, and men were arriving from San Francisco to buy into ledges that assayed at twenty-seven hundred dollars a ton.

There was no silver. There had never been any silver. The rock was decomposed basalt stained green with celadonite, and the only metal in it was a trace of iron.

The interesting question is not how the town died. It is how the assays came out so high for so long — and the best answer anybody has ever offered is that the machinery was lying.

Forty Pounds of Something Soft

Hardin was a wagonmaker, bound for California on the Applegate–Lassen cutoff with two companions and a train behind him. What he found was lying loose, it was heavy, and it cut soft. In 1849 on an emigrant road, soft heavy grey metal meant lead, and lead meant ammunition, which was worth more than almost anything else a man could carry.

They took what they could manage and went on to California, which is what everybody on that road was doing.

He settled at Petaluma and did nothing about it for a year. Then he had some of it smelted into a button and sent the button to San Francisco to be assayed, and the assay office burned down with his sample in it before anybody could tell him what he had.

That fire is the hinge of the whole story. Had the assay come back it would have said what every later competent assay said — and the Black Rock Desert would have stayed empty. Instead the sample was gone, the number was never known, and the number nobody knows is always better than the number anybody does.

By the time men went looking again, the word had changed from lead to silver.

Nine Years of Looking

In July 1858 a company left Petaluma to find the ledge again: Hardin himself, a neighbour named Frederick Alberding who knew the Rogue River country, a man called A. B. Jamison who would matter a great deal later, and half a dozen others including M. S. Thompson, afterwards a Nevada state senator.

They did not find it. Nobody found it. Parties went out in 1858, 1859 and 1860 and came back with nothing, and the search was expensive in a way the usual accounts skate over.

On the twenty-sixth of April 1859, Peter Lassen was shot and killed in a canyon at the edge of the Black Rock Range, hunting the Hardin lode, and his companion Edward Clapper was killed with him. Lassen was one of the best-known trail-breakers in the far West; the cutoff Hardin had been travelling in 1849 carried his name. The creek where he died carries Clapper's.

The next May, Major Ormsby's command was destroyed at Pyramid Lake, and for a season no prospector went into that country at all.

Two men dead and a war, for a ledge that was not there.

Found Again, 1865

In the late autumn of 1865, A. B. Jamison — who had been on the 1858 expedition — found ore at a spot on the western arm of the playa that became known as the Foreman location, and everybody agreed it was the lost Hardin ledge.

It was not, and it did not matter. What mattered was that there was now something to point at.

Men came in over the winter. Jamison, a man named Harvey and another called O'Donnell were on the ground on New Year's Day 1866. Five days later Charles Wright and Dick Nichols located the Snow Storm Ledge. Somebody had already put up an arrastra — a drag-stone mill, the cheapest possible way to grind rock — the autumn before.

On the thirteenth of January 1866 the first printed report gave the Hardin ledge at a hundred and thirty to two hundred dollars a ton in silver. That is a good mine. In February a letter to a California paper reported returns of two thousand seven hundred dollars a ton.

That is not a good mine. That is the Comstock. And people behaved accordingly.

Fifteen Houses and Fifteen Thousand Rats

Judge Harvey built the first house in March 1866. By July a newspaper over in Washoe City was reporting that the Evans boys of Long Valley were about to build a mill at Hardin City, a city of fifteen houses and fifteen thousand rats, and expected to have it running by the first of October.

The rats are not a joke at the town's expense. Any camp on an alkali flat with a spring and a food supply got them.

A post office opened that July under the spelling Harden City. In October it was renamed Harveyville, after the judge, and it closed in August 1867. Thirteen months of mail service, start to finish.

Three mills went up, which is the figure that ought to stop you. A stamp mill is the most expensive thing in a mining district. Nobody builds one on a rumour; you build one when you have persuaded yourself and a number of other people with money that there is ore enough to feed it for years.

The Evans brothers of Long Valley built one and spent seventeen thousand dollars between the mill and the mining. A San Francisco firm, Atchinson and Company, put up a second and ran ton after ton through it without raising the faintest trace of silver. A third went up in 1867.

And a five-stamp mill was bought and freighted north in the autumn of 1866 by a company that had read the assays and believed them.

Five Hundred Pounds to Franktown

Here is the mechanism, and it is the best thing in the story.

Before the mills went up at Black Rock, the ore had to be tested somewhere, and the nearest places that could test it at scale were the custom mills of western Nevada — the ring of plants around Washoe Valley and the Comstock that crushed and amalgamated other men's rock for a fee.

Somebody freighted five hundred pounds of Black Rock ore to the Dall mill at Franktown, in Washoe Valley. The Dall mill had been working ore from the Ophir.

The Black Rock rock came out at three hundred and six dollars a ton in silver.

Other samples went to other mills in the same district and came back as high as twenty-seven hundred.

Now consider what a silver mill of 1866 actually was. Rock went under a battery of stamps into a mortar box, and the crushed pulp went into cast-iron pans charged with mercury, where it was ground and heated and stirred until the silver took up with the quicksilver and could be separated out. Mercury is the whole process. It is everywhere in such a building, and it does not come out clean between jobs. It sits in the mortar boxes and in the seams and bottoms of the pans, holding whatever it last took up.

And what the Dall mill had last taken up was Ophir ore, out of the richest silver mine then known in the world.

So the suspicion, held at the time by silver men who knew those buildings, was straightforward: the Black Rock rock had not produced three hundred and six dollars a ton. It had scoured three hundred and six dollars a ton out of somebody else's machinery.

There is a chemical argument that makes it worse, and it is worth a sentence because it is specific to this ground. Hardin City sits on an alkali flat. When the survey chemists later analysed the salt crusts there, they found sodium chloride, sodium carbonate and sodium sulphate. Alkali salts fed into a mercury-charged pan will attack retained amalgam and mobilise it. The Black Rock ore did not merely pass through dirty equipment. It may have been unusually good at stripping it.

Charles Isenbeck

Every boom of this kind has one person at the centre of it who can make the numbers come out, and at Black Rock that man was Charles Isenbeck.

He was trained at Freiberg, in Saxony, which in 1866 was the best mining-school credential on earth, and in March 1866 the regional press called him undoubtedly an excellent assayer and an experienced mill man. He was retained in the district for more than two years at a reported thousand dollars a month — an extraordinary salary, several times what a good mill superintendent earned.

What he sold was not an assay. It was a method. Isenbeck held that Black Rock ore was peculiar, that ordinary milling could not touch it, and that only his own process — a Freiberg process, worked with a flux of his own composition — could get the silver out. He alone could extract it. The flux was secret.

Respectable assayers on the Pacific coast and in New York tested the same rock and flatly contradicted him. It made no difference, because he had the one thing they did not: a method that produced silver, and a reason why theirs did not.

The county officers believed him. In the assessor's report for 1866–67, filed with the state, somebody wrote that if Isenbeck succeeds as he expects, the people of Blackrock and the whole country should erect a statue.

“The Grandest Humbug of the Age”

Not everybody was convinced, and the best sentence written about Hardin City at the time came from an army officer who had no stake in it either way.

Colonel A. G. Brackett was stationed at Camp McGarry, up at Summit Lake, some forty miles north. On the twenty-fifth of August 1866 he wrote a letter about the Black Rock mines that was printed in San Francisco a fortnight later, and in it he declined to decide:

“Either these mines are the finest yet discovered, or the grandest humbug of the age.”

That is exactly the right thing to have said in August 1866, and it is the sentence anybody should keep in mind who has ever been shown a very good set of numbers by a man who alone understands them.

The same letter mentions, without comment, that a five-stamp mill had been purchased and was on its way to the mines.

The Survey Comes Through

In 1867 the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel sent a party into the Black Rock country. Clarence King ran the survey; the men on the ground were Arnold Hague and Samuel Emmons, and they were there to map and describe, not to adjudicate a mining dispute.

They found a mining town called Hardin City with two small mills standing, built to work what they carefully called the so-called ore, and hundreds of — their phrase — ignorant but enthusiastic miners who believed valuable silver minerals were present.

They took the rock apart chemically.

It was a bed of decomposed basalt, full of small gas cavities, coloured with green earth and stained with iron-oxide dendrites, carrying chalcedony and agate and the occasional geode. Green, metallic-looking and handsome in the hand. On analysis it contained no metal other than a small percentage of iron.

That is as flat a sentence as a geologist ever writes, and it was published in a federal volume ten years later, by which time it did not matter to anybody still at Black Rock, because by then there was nobody at Black Rock.

Thirteen Tons

Isenbeck's end came, as these things usually do, when he was finally obliged to do at scale what he had been doing by the sample.

In 1867 he announced that he was ready to work the rock on a large scale, and thirteen tons were hauled in for him. The result announced was seventy to four hundred dollars a ton — still, on paper, a paying mine.

But he could not afford to use his flux on a large scale. That was the explanation given, and it is a complete confession if you read it slowly. A flux that is too expensive to use on thirteen tons of ore is not a milling process. It is a reagent that has to be added to every batch in order for silver to appear in it, and the federal commissioner who reviewed the district two years later put the conclusion in nine words: Mr. Isenbeck's secret flux contained a compound of silver.

He disappeared from public view.

In July 1867 the same regional paper that had called him an excellent assayer sixteen months earlier called him the prince of humbugs, and reported that he was again on his way to Black Rock with a fresh instalment of victims to insanity.

Not a Human Being Left

By the summer of 1868, in the words of the federal report, there was not a human being left in the district.

The excitement had been as wild, and the disappointments as overwhelming, as any in the history of American mining — and that is a judgement written by a man whose job was to survey the whole of the mining West and who therefore had a great deal to compare it with.

What happened to the plant is the part that antique dealers will recognise. Nothing was abandoned that could be moved. The mill built in 1867 was torn down and hauled away to Hayden Hill, in California, the following year. The San Francisco company's mill was moved as well. The Evans brothers, having sunk seventeen thousand dollars into the ground, set out half a barrel of whisky, got drunk with the rest of the camp, and walked away.

Mining machinery in the 1860s West was almost never scrapped. It was dismantled, freighted over a pass and bolted down again in the next district, and then the next, until it wore out. That is how a stamp mill from a failed camp ends up crushing ore three hundred miles away under a different company's name — and it is also, as it happens, precisely the circumstance under which a mill carries its previous owner's silver along with it.

The houses stayed. Nearly twenty years later a man who had known the place reported that Hardin City was still largely standing, out there empty on the flat.

Who Was Lying, and About What

It is worth being careful here, because this is a story that has been improved in the retelling for a hundred and sixty years, and the improvements are now repeated as fact.

What the people who were actually there concluded was this. The federal commissioner in 1869 blamed a salted flux — a deliberate fraud by one man, in which silver was added to the reagent and recovered from the ore. The survey geologists who walked the ground in 1867 blamed credulity and worthless rock, and did not bother to allege fraud at all, because in their reading nobody needed to cheat: the rock looked metallic, the men wanted it to be ore, and that was sufficient.

The machinery explanation — the Dall mill, the Ophir's mercury, the first run high and every run afterward low — is not a period verdict. It appears first in a careful county history written in 1916, fifty years after, by a man working from the newspapers and from survivors; and the vivid form of it, the one about the Black Rock ore picking up the silver left behind in the batteries and pans, was put into print in a San Francisco column in 1949.

So it is documented, and it is good, and it is historiography rather than testimony. The honest way to hold it is this: the residue theory is what later and careful people concluded, working backwards from assays that could not possibly have been right.

And it has one great advantage over the fraud theory, which is that it explains the pattern. A salted flux explains Isenbeck. It does not explain why a load of rock sent to a custom mill in Washoe Valley, by people with no connection to Isenbeck and no reason to cheat themselves, came back at three hundred and six dollars a ton. Dirty equipment explains both.

Which leaves one more thing that is often asserted and should not be: that the mills at Hardin City were themselves secondhand Comstock machinery, brought north with the Comstock's silver still in them. It is entirely plausible — plant moved constantly, and two of the three mills here demonstrably moved on afterwards. But no source from the period or since actually says it. The documented version runs the other way. The rock went to the Comstock's mills, and the Comstock's mills gave it back the Comstock's silver.

What Is Out There

The site is at the western foot of the Black Rock Range, near Double Hot Spring, about four thousand feet up, on public land inside the national conservation area that now covers that whole country.

When a travel writer walked the ruins in the early 1950s she found three mill sites. Two of them stood about a hundred yards apart near a spring and a pond; the third and largest was a ruin of black and red volcanic boulders with walls still standing about ten feet high. She found the arrastra: a plank-lined pit some six feet across, filled to the brim with blown sand, with its pivot stump and grinding stones and paving still in place. She found the low melted mounds of adobe buildings, and in them square nails, broken glass, bone buttons and the necks of green bottles. And she found several graves, outlined in volcanic boulders, with basalt headstones whose inscriptions had weathered away entirely.

She also found, half-buried in the salt crust, a corroded iron flask that had held quicksilver. It crumbled when she touched it.

That object is the whole article in one piece of rusted metal. Mercury was carried out to the Black Rock Desert in quantity, at freight rates that would make your eyes water, to extract silver from rock that did not contain any.

How much of that is still standing eighty years on, nobody has published, and the honest answer is that the walls may well be down. A recent account mentions a single pillar of rough brick and scattered glass and crockery, and wild horses on the ground.

Anyone going should treat it as what it is: an archaeological site on federal land, with graves on it.

The Lesson, If There Is One

Hardin City is usually told as a lost-mine story, and it is the wrong shape for one. Nothing was lost. The thing everybody spent nine years and two lives looking for did not exist in the first place, and when they finally gave up looking and settled for a substitute, they built a town on it.

The better frame is this. A measuring instrument can be contaminated by what it measured last, and when it is, it will tell you exactly what you were hoping to hear. Everyone involved at Black Rock had every reason to trust the pans at Franktown: they were the best mills in the West, run by professionals, working for a fee, with no stake in the outcome. The assays were not faked at that stage. They were real numbers, correctly obtained, from an apparatus that was quietly wrong.

By the time the numbers were being faked deliberately, the town already existed, three mills had been paid for, and nobody was in a mood to be told otherwise. That sequence — honest error first, then fraud moving in to defend it — is more common than the straightforward swindle, and much harder to see from inside.

The green rock, for what it is worth, is still out there by the ton, and it is genuinely handsome. Decomposed basalt, celadonite green, iron dendrites like ink-blown fern, with chalcedony and agate in the cavities. People collect it now for what it is, which is the one honest transaction in the entire history of the place.

Resources & Further Reading

The contemporary record is thin and scattered, and almost all of it is newspapers. The first report of the Hardin ledge at $130–$200 a ton ran in the Humboldt Register of Unionville on 13 January 1866; the same paper praised Charles Isenbeck as an excellent assayer and experienced mill man on 24 March 1866, and called him the prince of humbugs, travelling with a fresh instalment of victims to insanity, on 20 July 1867. T. M. Boardman's letter claiming $2,700 a ton appeared in the Red Bluff Independent in February 1866. Colonel A. G. Brackett's letter of 25 August 1866 from Camp McGarry was printed as “The Black Rock Silver Mines” in the Daily Alta California of 6 September 1866, volume XVII number 6022, which also notes the five-stamp mill purchased and on its way. The “fifteen houses and fifteen thousand rats” line comes from a Washoe City paper of July 1866, quoted by Robert O'Brien in the San Francisco Chronicle of 9 March 1949; the paper itself has never been identified, and the likeliest candidates are the Washoe Weekly Times and the Eastern Slope. The departure of the 1858 Petaluma company was noticed in the Petaluma Journal of 9 July 1858. H. L. Spargur's recollection, including the 1867 mill torn down and hauled to Hayden Hill in 1868, appeared in the Modoc Independent of Alturas on 11 September 1884. Idah Meacham Strobridge wrote the story up twice for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1900 and again in her book of 1904.

• Arnold Hague and S. F. Emmons, Descriptive Geology, Report of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, vol. II (1877) — pages 793–794 are the survey's account of Hardin City, the two mills, the “so-called ore” and the finding of no metal other than a small percentage of iron. O. D. Allen's analysis of the alkali crusts is in the same volume. Public domain.
• Rossiter W. Raymond, Mineral Resources of the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1869) — the federal verdict: the secret flux containing a compound of silver, the thirteen tons, the $70 to $400 a ton, and the district empty of human beings by the summer of 1868.
• Asa Merrill Fairfield, Fairfield's Pioneer History of Lassen County, California (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker, 1916) — the indispensable source and the earliest statement of the machinery-residue argument, including the five hundred pounds hauled to the Dall mill at Franktown and the $306 a ton it returned. Free to read at the Internet Archive.
• Myron Angel (ed.), History of the State of Nevada (Oakland: Thompson & West, 1881) — the 1858–1860 searches, the arrivals of January 1866 and the location of the Snow Storm Ledge.
• Nell Murbarger, “Lost Hardin Silver — Mystery or Hoax?”, Desert Magazine, April 1955 — the best description of the ruins ever published: the three mill sites, the ten-foot walls, the arrastra pit, the graves and the quicksilver flask that crumbled at a touch.
• W. O. Vanderburg, Reconnaissance of Mining Districts in Humboldt County, Nevada, US Bureau of Mines Information Circular 6995 (1938) — the suggestion that Hardin's original metal was hornsilver float from the Silver Camel mine near Sulphur, which would mean the 1849 find was real even though the 1866 town was not.
• Sessions S. Wheeler, The Black Rock Desert (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1978), pages 137–138.
• Applegate-Lassen Trail in the Black Rock Desert — National Register nomination, reference 78001722 — Hardin City appears as Site 7, described as not actually on the emigrant trail but owing its brief existence to a story that got started. Public domain.
• Black Rock Desert Wiki: Hardin City — the fullest bibliography assembled anywhere on this subject, including the Hardin family genealogy and the disagreements between accounts. A finding aid rather than an authority, and useful precisely because it shows its working.
• Quartz Mountain: The Ore Was Never the Problem — a Nevada silver camp that failed for the opposite reason. The ore there was real, and the freight killed it.

Hero image: “Ruins of stamp mill. Silver Peak, Nevada.” Arthur Rothstein, photographer, March 1940. Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. Public domain, free to use and reuse. The building shown is at Silver Peak in Esmeralda County and is not Hardin City; no publishable photograph of Hardin City is known to exist.