Smoky Hill City is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

in Lookout Township,

Ellis County, Kansas Ellis County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kansas. Its county seat and most populous city is Hays. As of the 2020 census, the county population was 28,934. The county was named for George Ellis, a first lieutenant of the Twelfth ...

, United States. It lies approximately southwest of Hays.

History

The land was bought by Charles K. Holliday of

Topeka Topeka ( ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County, Kansas, Shawnee County. It is along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, in northeaste ...

, and a townsite plat was filed with the county in 1899. Charles Holliday was the son of railroad magnate Cyrus K. Holliday and both father and son believed that the area contained valuable mineral deposits. The town was situated on the north bank of the

Smoky Hill River The Smoky Hill River is a river in the central Great Plains of North America, running through Colorado and Kansas. Names The Smoky Hill is named from the Smoky Hills region of north-central Kansas through which it flows. American Indians li ...

to serve the gold mines that Charles Holliday imagined would spring up to mine the supposed

gold Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...

-bearing

shale Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of Clay mineral, clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g., Kaolinite, kaolin, aluminium, Al2Silicon, Si2Oxygen, O5(hydroxide, OH)4) and tiny f ...

along the Smoky Hill River valley. Holliday began selling town lots. Some of the first residents came from the town of Chetolah, just a few miles down the Smoky Hill River. Chetolah had been founded ten years earlier in the anticipation of a railroad connection that was never built. With the influential Hollidays backing the new town of Smoky Hill City, residents of Chetolah deserted to the new town. The idea that the shales of along the Smoky Hill River contained valuable minerals started in the mid-19th century as a swindle by Native Americans who said that they knew of

tin Tin is a chemical element; it has symbol Sn () and atomic number 50. A silvery-colored metal, tin is soft enough to be cut with little force, and a bar of tin can be bent by hand with little effort. When bent, a bar of tin makes a sound, the ...

mines along the Smoky Hill. In the 1890s, prospectors imagined that they found

zinc Zinc is a chemical element; it has symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is a slightly brittle metal at room temperature and has a shiny-greyish appearance when oxidation is removed. It is the first element in group 12 (IIB) of the periodic tabl ...

in the shale of Ellis and adjacent Trego County, and then believed that they found gold. The delusion was abetted by unscrupulous assayers, and by swindlers selling secret metallurgical processes to extract gold from the shale. Vigorously warning against the gold delusion was Kansas state geologist

Erasmus Haworth Erasmus Haworth (1855–1932) was an American geologist. Born on a farm near Indianola, Iowa, he graduated from the University of Kansas with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1881 and received a master's degree there in 1884. He received his doct ...

, even though the influential promoters threatened to have him fired for his opposition. The Ellis County gold boom sputtered along from 1895 to 1903, by which time (almost) everyone realized that there was no recoverable gold in the shale. The designation of Smoky Hill City as a townsite was vacated by Ellis County in 1905, at the request of Charles Holliday. The settlement survived for several more years, but was eventually completely abandoned.

Geography

The townsite occupied approximately in sections 3 and 10 of Township 15 South, Range 20 West of the 6th Principal Baseline and Meridian, , elevation above sea level.

References

External links

''The Imaginary Gold Mines of Kansas''
* Ellis County maps
CurrentHistoric
KDOT {{coord, 38, 45, 42.4, N, 99, 31, 55.9, W, type:city_region:US-KS_source:GNIS-enwiki, display=title Former populated places in Ellis County, Kansas

History

Geography

See also

References

Further reading

External links