The Rocky Mountain and Great Basin states are the heart of ghost-town country. Once-bustling pioneer outposts, mining camps, lumber towns, and railroad villages stand today as reminders of the glory days of gold rushes, industrial progress, and that pioneering spirit of the Old West. This book guides readers to the fascinating and scenic ghost towns of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Nevada. Varney highlights popular tourist destinations as well as out-of-the-way spots unfamiliar even to natives of the region. Maps, historical background, and stunning color photographs bring to life dozens of ghost towns and provide practical information for exploring this fascinating chapter of American history.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press Travel through the ghost-town country of the Pacific Northwest, guided by the camera and pen of Norman D. Weis. Both well-known and obscure towns, with intriguing names such as Comeback Mine Camp, Electric, Ruby, Greenback, Disautel, and Old Todora entice you to explore their secrets.

Ghosts Towns of the West is filled with photographs, maps, history, and detailed directions to find the best ghost towns to linger in the wake of the Old West. Ghost Towns of the West blazes a trail through the dusty crossroads and mossy cemeteries of the American West, including one-time boomtowns in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. The book reveals the little-known stories of long-dead soldiers, indigenous peoples, settlers, farmers, and miners. Perfect for planning a road trip, each section covers a geographic area and town entries are arranged by location to make this the most user-friendly book on ghost towns west of the Mississippi. Most ghost towns are within a short drive of major cities out West, and they make excellent day trip excursions. If you happen to be in or near Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, or El Paso, for example, you ought to veer towards the nearest ghost town. Western ghost towns can also easily be visited during jaunts to national parks, including Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Crater Lake, Mount Rainier, Glacier, Yellowstone, and many others throughout the West. Ghost Towns of the West is a comprehensive guide to former boomtowns of the American West, covering ghost towns in eleven states from Washington to New Mexico, and from California to Montana. This book has everything you need to learn about, visit, and explore a modern remnant of how life used to be on the western range.

Distributed by the University of Nebraska Press for Caxton Press When mineral riches were found in southern Idaho "boomtowns" arose across this rugged land. When the mining activity ceased these towns were quickly abandoned yet they still stand; a testimony to the vagaries of life in the frontier in pursuit of gold and silver.

THIS is the story of the men who sought for gold, from California to the eastern rim of the Rocky Mountains. Mrs. Wolle writes colorfully of the unbelievable privations the men endured in penetrating the fastnesses of the high Sierra and the Rockies and in crossing the desert wastes of Arizona, Utah and Nevada; of the mines first discovered in New Mexico by Coronado and his men four centuries ago; and the first great rush that hit California in 1849. She follows the miners who poured in successive waves into the golden gulches of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, climbed to the deeper mines high in the mountains of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, and dared at last to penetrate the Indian-infested Black Hills of South Dakota. It is doubtful if the vividness of this phase of history will ever fade for American readers. In personally following the trails of the pioneering prospectors, Mrs. Wolle finds her excitement continually renewed, as she stumbles upon mute evidence of past bloodshed, lust and struggle. It is this excitement which she conveys to her readers both in the text and in the more than one hundred on-the-spot drawings which show the towns and town sites with the eye of the nostalgic lover of this picturesque and courageous part of our national heritage. A guide book for the adventurous, THE BONANZA TRAIL will be attractive alike to travelers, American history enthusiasts and collectors of Americana. Nor will its pages soon be forgotten by the general reader. “THE BONANZA TRAIL is the fascinating and definitive book on the ghost and near-ghost towns of the Old West for which so many students and amateurs of Western Americana have been waiting. Like the once booming camps and diggings which are its subject, it is a repository of the wonderments, glories and pathos of pioneer times and romantic bonanzas....A book that, to the informed intelligence, is almost impossible to put down.”—LUCIUS BEEBE, The Territorial Enterprise