The story
Seven Troughs sprang up in 1906 after gold was found in the canyon the year before — ore so rich that some 1907 assays ran to more than $100,000 a ton, pulling miners over from Tonopah and Goldfield. By 1907 the camp had a post office, hotel, saloons, and around 350 people, and the district's mines produced roughly $2 million in gold between 1908 and 1918.
The canyon's darkest day belonged to its downstream neighbor, Mazuma. On July 11, 1912, a cloudburst sent a wall of water estimated at up to twenty feet down Seven Troughs Canyon; it destroyed the cyanide mill, spilled its chemicals into the flood, and swept through Mazuma, killing several people. The high-grade ore thinned within a few years, the post office closed in 1918, and by the early 1920s Seven Troughs was a ghost.
What remains today
Weathered wood-frame buildings and mine structures in the canyon, mill foundations, and the site of Mazuma downstream.
From the archives
Seven Troughs turns up on 77,182 digitized newspaper pages from Nevada — read them free in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection.
Source: Library of Congress digital collections.
Questions from the field
- What happened in the Seven Troughs flood?
- On July 11, 1912, a cloudburst sent a flash flood down Seven Troughs Canyon into the downstream town of Mazuma, destroying the cyanide mill and killing several residents. It's one of the deadliest flash floods in Nevada mining history.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
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Check in at Seven Troughs — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
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Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 856135
- — Wikipedia — Seven Troughs, Nevada and Mazuma, Nevada
- — Western Mining History — Seven Troughs, Nevada