Beatty History                           

Beatty is named after "Old Man" Montillus (Montillion) Murray Beatty, a Civil War veteran and miner who bought a ranch along the Amargosa River just north of the future town and became the town's first postmaster in 1905. The town was laid out in 1904 or 1905 after Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, owner of the Montgomery Shoshone Mine near Rhyolite, decided to build the Montgomery Hotel in Beatty. Montgomery was drawn to the area, known as the Bullfrog Mining District, because of a gold rush that began in 1904 in the Bullfrog Hills west of Beatty. As word of the discovery spread, thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to the area and established camps and mining towns including Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, Transvaal, Springdale, and others. When the gold rush ended and the mines closed a few years later, only Beatty, with ample water and a location in a transportation corridor, survived as a populated place. During the town's first year, wagons pulled by teams of horses or mules hauled freight between the Bullfrog district and the nearest railroad, in Las Vegas, and by the middle of 1905, about 1,500 horses were engaged in this business. In October 1906, the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LV&T) began regular service to Beatty; in April 1907, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BG) reached the town, and the Tonopah and Tidewater (T&T) line added a third railroad in October 1907. The LV&T ceased operations in 1918, the BG in 1928, and the T&T in 1940. Until the railroads abandoned their lines, Beatty served as the railhead for many mines in the area, including a fluorspar mine on Bare Mountain, east of town. The town became the economic center for a large sparsely-populated region. Activities sustaining Beatty during the 1920s and 1930s included retail sales, gas and oil distribution, construction of Scotty's Castle, and the production and sale of illegal alcohol during Prohibition .

Beatty's first newspaper was the Beatty Bullfrog Miner, which began publishing in 1905 and went out of business in 1909. The Rhyolite Herald was the region's most important paper, starting in 1905 and reaching a circulation of 10,000 by 1909. It ceased publication in 1912, and the Beatty area had no newspaper from then until 1947. The Beatty Bulletin, a supplement to the Goldfield News, was published from then through 1956.

Beatty's population grew slowly in the first half of the 20th century, rising from 169 in 1929 to 485 in 1950. The first reliable electric company in town, Amargosa Power Company, began supplying electricity in about 1940. Phone service arrived during World War II, and the town installed a community-wide sewer system in the 1970s. Nevada's legalization of gambling in 1931, the establishment of Death Valley National Monument in 1933, and the rise of Las Vegas as an entertainment center, brought visitors to Beatty, which became increasingly tourist-oriented. As underground mining declined in the region, federal defense spending, starting with the Nellis Air Force Range in 1940 and the Nevada Test Site in 1950, also contributed to the local economy.

In 1962, the first commercially-operated low-level radioactive waste disposal site in the United States began operations about 17 miles (27 km) south of Beatty. Waste of this sort was buried at the site from then until 1992. In 1970, the site began accepting hazardous chemical waste for burial, and this use of the site continued as of 2009. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) operates the Amargosa Desert Research Site near the waste burial site to study arid-land hydrology . The waste-disposal site, operated by a company called U.S. Ecology, "provides a steady source of employment for a dozen or so families in the area".In 1988, Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill on the south side of Ladd Mountain, about 4 miles (6.4 km) west of town along State Route 374. LAC Minerals acquired the mine from Bond in 1989 and established an underground mine there in 1991 after a new body of ore called the North Extension was discovered. Barrick Gold acquired LAC Minerals in 1994 and continued to extract and process ore at what became known as the Barrick Bullfrog Mine until the end of 1998. At the peak of the construction phase, the mine employed 540 workers. To accommodate them, Beatty added mobile home parks and a temporary camp housing 300 people. As a consequence, the town's population rose from about 1,000 in 1980 to between 1,500 and 2,000 by the end of 1990. In 2004, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) named the closed Barrick Bullfrog mine site as one of six slated for pilot reclamation projects under the national Brownfields Mine-Scarred Land Initiative. A local group, the Beatty Economic Development Corporation (BEDC), in discussions with the EPA, suggested solar-power generation as a potential use for the site. By May 2005, the Pahrump Valley Times reported that the Barrick Corporation, owner of the mine, planned to transfer 81 acres of its property to the BEDC. In February 2009, the New York Times published a Greenwire  article suggesting that part of the economic stimulus money from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act might finance the Beatty project. "Studies show that the Beatty area has some of the best solar energy potential in the United States, as well as a high potential for wind-power generation," the Greenwire story said.

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