. "2010-02-17T00:00:00"^^ . "0"^^ . . . "0"^^ . "4"^^ . "In 1904, a famous pair of California prospectors, Shorty Harris and Ed Cross, discovered a gold deposit here on the southern slope of Bullfrog Mountain. Within a year, the gold rush was on, and Rhyolite exploded into a town of 6,000 souls. The settlement eventually boasted telephones, electric lights, water mains, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, several brothels, three banks, a train depot, and its very own stock exchange.\n\n\n But within five years, the mines had all played out, and the town collapsed. Local hustlers managed to unload the Montgomery Shoshone Mine onto gullible eastern financiers (including Charles Schwab of US Steel fame), but for the most part, people just packed up their worldly goods and headed elsewhere. By 1910, 610 residents were left. By 1920, the census listed a population of zero.\n\n\n Today, there are eight main ghost towns around Death Valley - Ballarat, Chloride City, Greenwater, Harrisburg, Leadfield, Panamint City, Skidoo, and Rhyolite. Most were glorified mining camps, although a few, like Panamint City, specialized in harboring criminals on the run from the law. Altogether, prospectors sank between 6,000 and 10,000 mines in the area, so ruins are not difficult to find. Rhyolite was the largest of these abandoned settlements, and today it is probably the best preserved."^^ . "2"^^ .