Jim Butler
American
1855 – 1923
Jim Butler was a Nevada rancher and part-time prospector whose May 1900 discovery of silver-rich ore at Tonopah, famously credited to a wandering burro, set off the boom that revived Nevada mining and opened the state's twentieth-century bonanza era.
Biography
James L. Butler was born on February 2, 1855, in Logtown, El Dorado County, California, and settled in central Nevada, where he ranched near Belmont, the seat of Nye County, and served as the county's district attorney while prospecting on the side. In May 1900, while traveling through the desert hills to the southwest, he found outcrops of unusually heavy, dark rock at a spot the Shoshone called Tonopah.
Legend says Butler discovered the ore while picking up a rock to throw at a burro that had wandered off in the night; historians consider the tale likely apocryphal, and note that his wife Belle, of Paiute descent, and her family knew the district's mineral springs and outcrops long before. Assays showed the samples ran hundreds of dollars to the ton in silver and gold. Butler, aided by young attorney Tasker Oddie, a future governor and senator, staked the Desert Queen, Burro, Mizpah, and other claims, and rather than mine them himself pioneered a leasing system that let all comers work sections of the veins for a royalty, spreading the boom's wealth widely and earning him a reputation for fair dealing.
The Tonopah strike, the second-richest silver bonanza in Nevada's history, ended a twenty-year statewide depression and led directly to the discoveries at Goldfield and beyond. Butler sold his interests to the Tonopah Mining Company in 1902 for a comfortable fortune and retired to ranching in California, where he died on January 22, 1923. Tonopah's main celebration, Jim Butler Days, still bears his name.