Hardin City was the site of a

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a landlocked state in the Western United States. It borders Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the seventh-most extensive, th ...

silver mining boom town from 1859 until about 1868. Hardin City was located on the western slope of the Black Rock Range in the

Black Rock Desert The Black Rock Desert is a semi-arid region (in the Great Basin shrub steppe ecoregion) of lava beds and Dry lake, playa, or alkali flats, situated in the Black Rock Desert–High Rock Canyon Emigrant Trails National Conservation Area, a silt ...

Timeline

In 1849, James Allen Hardin traveled the Applegate-Lassen Trail. While north of the Black Rock, he found ore that at the time he thought was lead. He returned to camp with thirty or forty pounds and found that it easily melted. They made bullets out of a portion, left a portion at the camp and kept a portion. The portion that remained at camp was later found and eventually assayed to be a carbonate of lead and silver. Hardin smelted a portion of the rock down to a button that many thought to be silver. Hardin sent the button to San Francisco in 1850, where it was lost in the fire of 1850 (possibly the

San Francisco Fire of 1851 The San Francisco Fire of 1851 (May 3–4, 1851) was a catastrophic conflagration that destroyed as much as three-quarters of San Francisco, California. History During the height of the California gold rush, between December 1849 and June 1851 ...

?). In the meantime, Hardin had settled in

Petaluma, California Petaluma is a city in Sonoma County, California, United States, located in the North Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. Its population was 59,776 according to the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. ...

. In 1858, an expedition was launched to find the mine. As with many stories of a lost mine, nothing was found, though there was a rush and the town of Hardin City was created. On April 26, 1859 Peter Lassen and Edward Clapper were killed nearby at what was later called Clapper Creek while searching for silver first reported by Hardin. In May 1860, news of the First Battle of Pyramid Lake caused the prospectors to leave the area. In 1866, prospectors returned to the area and a post office was in operation as Harden City from July 1866 until October 1866 and then as Harveyville from October 1866 until August 1867. During that time, ore from the area was refined, but silver could not be reliably recovered. Fairfield wrote that the mills were processing ore from the

Comstock Lode The Comstock Lode is a lode of silver ore located under the eastern slope of Mount Davidson, a peak in the Virginia Range in Virginia City, Nevada (then western Utah Territory), which was the first major discovery of silver ore in the U ...

, which was being released by the alkali dust in the Black Rock ore. This would account for the fact that the first run of Black Rock ore would result in high values, but later runs would have low values. The Hardin City area never produced significant quantities of silver, though Ladue Vary came to Hardin City to prospect and in 1884 found silver and gold to the northeast. In 1909, a specimen of ore similar to the ore found by Hardin was discovered at Hardin City in a pile of ore left by previous prospectors. Vanderburg states that Hardin's silver was probably from the Silver Camel mine near Sulphur, Nevada. The Silver Camel Mine has cerargyrite also known as

chlorargyrite Chlorargyrite is the mineral form of silver chloride (AgCl). Chlorargyrite occurs as a secondary mineral phase in the oxidation of silver mineral deposits. It crystallizes in the isometric–hexoctahedral crystal class. Typically massive to column ...

or horn silver. Cerargyite is silver chloride (AgCl), which does not match the carbonate of silver and lead as reported by Fairfield above.

Timeline

References

Further reading