The Trail Through Tybo
- Ian
- 9 hours ago
- 11 min read
From wild horses to atomic remnants, my journey across the desert just getting to Tybo had already been unexpectedly eventful. The day wasn't done with me yet. The road to get to Tybo is pretty tame as far as ghost town trails go. I had turned off highway 6, past the weathered air force base camp and airstrip used for the Project Faultless nuclear test, among other covert purposes.
The area around Tybo is dry, with dust and dim sagebrush as my only companions for the first few miles off of the highway. The road began to climb quicker and quicker as it wound through the hills. Leaving pavement at about 5,200 feet, I reached nearly 6,600 feet above sea level by the time I stopped in the town nearly nine miles later. Along the way, the sagebrush had made room for some more substantial greenery in the form of pinyon pines and junipers.
I rolled into town, spotting a lone chimney on my left and a sharp white home on my right. Above it were some concrete footings protruding from the hillsides, the remnants of the old mill. The story of Tybo began in 1866 when the local population of Shoshone people showed some European traders the veins of silver-lead ore in the area. The word Tybo means "white man's district" in Shoshone.
Within a few years, James W. Gally and M.V.B. Gillett had staked a claim on the main silver lode in the area. The Tybo Consolidated Company also established mining facilities and got to work. They brought in Irish, Cornish, and Swiss-Italian men who didn't always get along. There wasn't much else to do besides drink and play cards in the Nevada desert, giving tensions plenty of reasons to grow.
By 1874, Tybo had its own post office and at least one saloon. The Belmont Courier from May 16, 1874 captured what the combination of cards and whiskey looked like in practice:
"A little irregularity occurred at Tybo on Sunday last, between Thomas Best and W. Kilingsly, while engaged in a game of cards. Ugly words passed between the two, which resulted in Best ejecting a bullet through the right cheek of Kilingsly, lodging just under the skin in the left cheek. The shootist left for parts unknown and the wounded man was carted into Belmont on Tuesday. Dr. Moore extracted the ball, and the unfortunate man is comfortably ensconced at the county hospital."
By 1876, over 1,000 people called Tybo home. Businesses sprang up to support all those citizens: numerous saloons, half a dozen stores, and multiple blacksmith shops. By 1880, there was a brewery, dressmaker, Wells Fargo office and even a stock broker in town.
The only signs of civilization left now were a few scattered wooden homes, and the old general store, its red brick slowly crumbling to dust in the wind. I parked the truck, swinging my feet out to explore. The afternoon sun cast a warm glow over Tybo, lighting up the interior of the building. Inside through the broken glass was what looked like building materials, as well as a worn washing machine and even an abandoned boombox from twenty years ago.
It was a large space, and I could only imagine what it once looked like packed with shelves chock-full of goods freighted across the desert. The whole western wall had crumbled to nothing, but I was glad to see that someone had taken the time to shore it up with timbers and keep the old general store standing. Whether the building was being shored up yesterday or ten years before, it was hard to tell.
While researching Tybo, I stumbled upon a book called Ghosts of the Glory Trail: Intimate Glimpses Into the Past and Present of 275 Western Ghost Towns. Within it, the author Nell Murbarger has a chapter on Tybo, describing some of the personalities and events that happened in town.
In May of 1876, Tybo erupted into a town-wide labor dispute. When local charcoal suppliers signed a contract to supply the local mines with fuel for their smelters, the suppliers couldn't find the necessary labor. As a result, they had to bring in Chinese workers to cut wood and fill the kilns in order to avoid defaulting on their contracts. According to Nell Murbarger in Ghosts of the Glory Trail, this move angered many of the other workers in town and after a long night of drinking and agitating each other over the issue, the men stormed into the charcoal camp around midnight shooting pistols, galloping horses, shouting and looking to drag the Chinese laborers out of town.
The men were sent fleeing into the hills, terrified. The next morning, the charcoal contractors were seen gathering the men up above town and getting them back to work to keep the mines running. The local miners came back that same evening with over 200 men and tried to oust the workers but the charcoal contractors were guarding the men with rifles, they weren't going to have it.
The confrontations continued to escalate, and soon enough the miners told the Chinese and their employers that they would be ridden out on rails if they did not depart before the end of the day. The Chinese workers, tiring of the threats to their lives, offered to leave town if their fare was paid.
Looking beyond the store now, a well-maintained red wooden building with white trim that looked like it could have been a school at one point. Gnarled apple trees stood in the yard, looking parched and eerie in the winter sun. They hadn't been pruned in years. Could they really date back to the 1800s, scraping by out here in the desert all this time?
One memorable person in Tybo was the Justice of the Peace, J. W. Gally, the same man who co-owned the mine. According to Murbarger, Gally stayed busy, as he was also the town surgeon and a prosperous rancher. When elected, many people expected Gally to be a mild-mannered lawman, but the opposite turned out to be true. Shortly after taking office, a troublemaker named Newton pulled a gun on a local rancher. When the two men showed up in court, Newton again went towards his revolver and began to draw. Justice Gally quickly pulled out a double-barreled shotgun and leveled it at Newton, making him stop mid-air.
Once the men were disarmed, the proceedings could resume. When bail was set at $1000, Newton objected of course. He insinuated that the Justice would have to come find him elsewhere to make him pay bail. Dr. Gally again produced his shotgun and pointed it at Newton. In a calm yet stern voice he remarked: "I said $1000 bail... and you'll stay in this courtroom until you or your friends produce it, or hell freezes over. Is that clear?"
While Gally wasn't exactly as wild as Roy Bean, staging world-class boxing matches on international borders and fining dead bodies for crimes, he was a memorable man of the law. Later, Gally would move to the town of Watsonville, California and manage the California State Insane Asylum.
I continued my march up the gulch, curious to see what lay beyond the main drag of town, if you could call it that. Above town, a headframe stood high on a ridge. I had wanted to hike up to it but there was a road with a gate. On the gate were some dissuading signs so I turned around and decided to appreciate it from afar. Its rusty beams stood tall, clashing with the blue of the sky.
As I continued down the road, I peered into the windows of abandoned houses. Many still contained furniture and other oddities. There were only a few along the one side of the road. Then the gulch was empty, with a wall stretching up on my left and scrubby juniper hills to my right.
As I walked ahead another few hundred feet, another headframe appeared beyond a curve in the wall. Heading towards it, I meandered through gravel and sagebrush and down across a short draw. Finally my knees pulled me up to the leveled pad and I was standing right next to the solemn giant.
The only headframes I had seen were in Butte, and they were all tourist attractions. Here I was alone, nothing but me and the echoes of industry from the past. I looked around, taking it all in. The headframe was complete, and even the wooden ore bin was in good condition. The hoist house looked decent enough from the front but the entire roof was collapsed into the hillside behind it. The engine for the winch that hoisted men and ore out of the mine was still there. The mechanic in me wondered if the crankshaft would still turn, but I didn't dare try with the roof like it was.
Stepping back outside, I peered down below the headframe where the entrance to the mineshaft once was. These days, the hole is totally collapsed in on itself and sealed off. The cables and carts were gone too. I wondered if they had just left them down at the bottom and cut the lines.
By 1877, over 250 tons of ore were leaving Tybo monthly. This made it one of the largest lead producers in the West for a short time. But it wouldn't last. By 1879, the mining companies shuttered the smelters, which put hundreds of men out of work according to Straka and Wynn in Wild West. Since the ore had been becoming less profitable, the two large mining companies in town adopted a new strategy of crushing the ore first in an effort to extract more value from the ore. The idea didn't pan out in the end, with Tybo dwindling in size throughout the 1880s.
It managed to hold on into the new century, maintaining a small cohort of residents into the 1920s. In 1929, the Treadwell Yukon Company came in and built a new mill and infrastructure to house employees. Right as they got started, the Great Depression hit and silver prices went into a nosedive for the next few years. These new facilities are pictured above. The old mining headframe on the hill can be seen on the far left.
Continuing on past the mine, I set out to find whatever else those arid hills might be hiding. In the distance there was a cabin, I headed toward that. On the rough road below my feet, gravels of red, green, and yellow. Plenty of quartz too. I wondered if I was walking on tailings or the original geological makeup.
On my way to the cabin I passed a small grove of juniper trees with a clearing nearby. Something made me walk over. Beneath the lowest branches, I spotted a dark space, an open mineshaft, nearly hidden from view. I approached carefully, keeping my distance from the edge. Peering down into it, I could see the old timbers struggling to maintain their geometry after so many decades of shifting earth.
Standing above the portal into the earth, I listened closely, half expecting to hear something from below. I had probably watched too many B-horror movies about subterranean creatures. I picked up a rock and tossed it down, wondering where the bottom of that mineshaft was. Come to think of it, how did men learned to build mineshafts. There were hardly any engineers around except at the largest mines. Many men likely learned through trial and error or by reading a few paragraphs in a pamphlet if they were lucky. I never did hear a rock hit the bottom...
When I reached the cabin, the interior looked surprisingly good. Every window was intact, and the floors had a fresh look to them. The furnishings were almost non-existent besides a bed frame and two faded upholstered chairs. The exterior and yard, however, were a different story. Pieces of trim were peeling up off the sides and building materials were scattered all about. I watched my footing, since rusty steel parts jutted from the ground at every turn.
Murbarger talks about a family who used to live up in Tybo in the 1950s, referring to them as the Barndt Clan. The family was made up of Dick and his wife Martha, as well as their seven children. The Barndts had come to own the whole town, from city hall to the general store. By that time the general store had been closed for years and the post office was long gone. The one institution that remained was the Tybo schoolhouse, with Martha Barndt as its only teacher and the Barndt children it's sole pupils.
Out beyond the cabin, the road continued west with a few forks north and south. Up the south fork I could see a pile of rusty barrels. Wondering if there would be any other clues around, I walked over to investigate. Arriving at the barrels, I could see that many had melded themselves into the hillside while others had rusted through and were tipped over. I wondered what they had once held, and whether traces of it still remained, right beneath my feet.
The canyon I was in barely had traces of humans remaining. A few more decades and those barrels would turn to dust. Within 200 years or so, all traces of man will have been scrubbed from that quiet tiny draw in central Nevada. Perhaps thats as it should be, the land like it was for millennia before us. Though change is ever present.
Retracing my steps now with the sun on my back, I passed the headframe again and noticed spectacular patterns in the rock beside it, parallel layers stacked like some precise geological cake. I hadn't see anything quite like it across the west. It almost made the rock look weak, like the layers could shift at any time. Yet the wall's size and its role as the side of the very canyon I was in implied the opposite.
As it turns out, I missed something on my hike through Tybo that day. Another three miles up the canyon to the west stand two charcoal kilns, still over three stories tall. Fifteen of them were built in 1874 for the Tybo Consolidated Company. Woodcutting crews would head up into the hills to cut pinyon pine and juniper, hauling it back to feed the kilns. Once a kiln was packed tight to minimize airspace, it was fired for about a day, then left to cool. The end result was charcoal, the fuel that powered the steam-driven smelters, mills, and machinery at the mines.
Walking back down the road, I smiled at how the town seemed to trickle on and on, a cabin here, a mineshaft there, the signs of human habitation getting subtler and subtler until they were nothing more than rusting metal. Some ghost towns end abruptly. The better ones tend to trickle on like Tybo.
Back at the general store in the heart of town, I explored it more thoroughly. There was a back entrance off to one side and a few small openings at ground level as well. They led eerily into the darkness, old pipes visible in the black but nothing else. The concrete porch out front was cracked everywhere and sinking into the earth. Even something as sturdy and rugged as concrete can fade away with time.
Climbing into my truck, I started down the road, ready to leave Tybo behind. On my way out, I stopped to marvel at the maze of foundations where the mill once stood. Littered with scraps of wood, glass, and metal parts, I picked my way carefully through it. The concrete was extensive and a brick chimney still stood like a headstone to an industry and a town long dead in the Hot Creek Range of Nevada.
Sources:
Murbarger, N. (1956). Ghosts of the glory trail: Intimate glimpses into the past and present of 275 western ghosttowns. Desert Magazine Press.
Wynn, R. H., & Straka, T. J. (2010, June). Tybo, nevada . Wild West.
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