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Caliente, Nevada, in Lincoln County, is closer to Cedar City and St. George, Utah, than to Las Vegas or Reno. Charles R. Savage photograph in USHS collections.
The rich ores near the surface were mined out between 1870 and 1875, and even more rapidly than it had prospered, the town declined. In the early 1870s it produced several million dollars annually in bullion, and it boasted a population of several thousand people, dozens of saloons, several daily stage lines, a daily newspaper, and other attributes of a booming mining town. By 1880 it had fewer than 750 people and its mines yielded less than $100,000 during the year. WILLIAM S. GODBE
In the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, when mining in eastern Nevada was at its lowest ebb, the man most responsible for keeping the hopes of the mineral industry alive in Lincoln County was William S. Godbe, the peripatetic Salt Lake City merchant, publisher, and mineral industry promoter. ^^ i^Some of Godbe's personal papers, including autobiographical statements, have turned up in the papers of C. C. Goodwin, the noted Virginia City and Salt Lake City editor, now in Special Collections, University of Nevada-Reno. See Goodwin, 85-6/3/11 and 12.
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