Associated Press
ASSOCIATED PRESS
8/25/2002 10:53 pm
 
GOLDFIELD — About 2,000 people, including the grandson of Wyatt Earp, attended a weekend celebration marking the 100th anniversary of this historic mining town.

The highlight of the three-day event was a parade Saturday down U.S. 95, the main drag in the Esmeralda County seat of 300 located 186 miles north of Las Vegas.

Traffic was diverted for two hours during the parade, which featured nearly 100 entries and state Controller Kathy Augustine as grand marshal.

“It was fantastic. It was the biggest event we’ve had in Goldfield in a long time,” said organizer Virginia Ridgeway.

Other events included dances, a bed race and a land auction. The original Goldfield fire house — one of many historic buildings in the town — opened for the first time as a museum.

Earp’s grandson, who goes by the same name, was named an honorary sheriff’s deputy during a ceremony Friday. He showed up in costume with his grandfather’s gun.

The senior Earp lived in nearby Tonopah for a while in the early 1900s, while his brother, Virgil, died in Goldfield in 1905. The two took part in the West’s best known gun fight — at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz., in 1881.

The celebration commemorated the December 1902 discovery of gold that touched off what historians called the last great gold rush on the Western frontier.

Goldfield helped fuel Nevada’s second great mining era after the decline in the 1870s of the Comstock mines in the Virginia City area, said Nevada state archivist Guy Rocha.

“In terms of the Western mining frontier, this was the last great hurrah,” Rocha said. “Goldfield was the last of the rough-and-tumble towns.”

“Tonopah got the second era started but Goldfield was the peak. And Goldfield at its peak was the largest town in Nevada,” he added.

By 1907, Goldfield had a population of 20,000. Among those associated with the town were George Nixon, who went on to become a U.S. senator, and George Wingfield, who went to become a leading Nevada financier.

The Goldfield boom did not last, and residents now are looking to tourism to boost their economy.
 
© Copyright Reno Gazette-Journal, a Gannett Co. Inc. Newspaper.