The Goldfield Flood Safes

Trlewis48 · Sep 14, 2026

The Goldfield Flood Safes

Two strongboxes, hundreds of gold coins, and a Nevada gully that has never given them back

By T. Lewis

A City Built on Nerve

Before it was a footnote in Nevada guidebooks, Goldfield was the largest city in the state. Gold was found in the hills south of Tonopah in December 1902 by two grubstaked prospectors, Harry Stimler and Billy March, and within four years the camp they started had grown from thirty-six residents to something closer to twenty or thirty thousand, depending on whose count you trust . Miners who had spent their first winter there in tents and shanties dug homes directly into the banks of a drainage called Coyote Wash, fronting the dugouts with brownstone hauled down from the canyons of Malpais Mesa, the same mesa the town itself was platted against, with Columbia Mountain closing the other side of the basin . By 1906 the town supported five banks, a stock exchange, three newspapers, and a four-story hotel with imported chefs and an Otis elevator. A single lightweight-championship prizefight staged by saloon owner Tex Rickard drew a crowd more than twice the size of the arena built to hold it.

The boom did not last. By 1910 the population had fallen to around five thousand, and by 1912 annual gold production had dropped by more than half, from roughly eleven million dollars to five million. Goldfield was still a real town, with real money moving through it, but it was a smaller, more anxious version of the city it had been. That is the Goldfield that stood in the path of the storm.

September 13, 1913: The Afternoon the Sky Broke Open

On the afternoon of September 13, 1913, a cloudburst broke over the hills west of Goldfield, in the same basin drained by Coyote Wash and the canyons below Malpais Mesa. The water gathered into a single moving wall and came down into the town.

A front-page story in the Sunday Oregonian the following morning, datelined “Gold Field, Nev., Sept. 13,” is one of the few pieces of contemporary, same-week reporting on the disaster that is easy to verify today. Its headline read GOLDFIELD SWEPT BY RAGING FLOOD, and the dispatch estimated at least five lives lost, scores of residences destroyed, and property damage in the neighborhood of one hundred thousand dollars, a figure the Nevada Mining Association's own retrospective later corroborated and converted to roughly two and a half million dollars in modern terms. The Oregonian's correspondent described railroads as the heaviest losers, with track washed out and the town left, in the paper's own phrase, “shrouded in darkness.” Unconfirmed reports out of Tonopah, thirty miles north and itself cut off from communication, hinted the losses might run even higher than what Goldfield could yet confirm about itself.

A photograph in the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Special Collections, inscribed on the back “down Broadway” and captioned simply “Goldfield flood, September 13, 1913,” places the water moving through the center of town, not just its outskirts. Among the buildings lost were homes in the old sporting district, prospectors' cabins, and the Moose Hall. Every regional history of the town (the Nevada Mining Association's own retrospective, the UNLV Boomtown Years project, the Goldfield Historical Society's roadside marker, and independent ghost-town chroniclers writing decades apart from one another) places the flood on this same date, sourced independently enough that the convergence itself counts as evidence.

A note on the date: some retellings of this story, including the framing that prompted this piece, give the date as September 3. Every primary and near-primary source found here, the Oregonian's next-day dispatch, the UNLV photograph inscription, and every regional history consulted, instead gives September 13, 1913. That date is used throughout this piece, and the discrepancy is flagged here rather than silently corrected, since a claim that specific ought to survive a check.

What the Water Carried Away

The material losses that made the newspapers were buildings and, according to the Oregonian's early estimate, lives. The losses that turned this into a treasure story circulated afterward, in the accounts local historians gathered from residents and their descendants over the following decades. Three separate claims recur across those retellings.

One resident reported that two sacks of gold coin were swept out of his cabin by the floodwater. A second man, who was not in Goldfield when the flood hit, later said he had buried several sacks of stolen high-grade ore near his own cabin before he left. When he came back for it, he found not only the ore gone but the cabin itself gone, carried off entirely by the same gulch that had taken his neighbor's coin. And in the most durable version of the story, two safes said to hold hundreds of gold coins between them were lost in a gully west of town, swallowed by mud and never recovered.

None of the compiled local histories name the safes' owners, the businesses they belonged to, or which specific gully took them; those details would exist, if they exist at all, only in a contemporary newspaper account, a coroner's or claims record, or a private letter that has not yet surfaced online. That is the honest state of the evidence: the flood is documented about as well as a 1913 Nevada disaster can be; the safes are not documented independently of the local-history tradition that preserved them. The two claims sit at different levels of certainty, and this piece treats them that way rather than blending them into one seamless account.

What does make the safes claim plausible, rather than merely colorful, is this: Goldfield in 1913 was a declining boomtown, not a ghost town. It still had five banks' worth of institutional memory only a few years old, an active mining exchange, and a business district built on cash and coin rather than paper credit, in a period when a great deal of Nevada's rural commerce still ran on gold and silver specie rather than banknotes. A camp of that description keeping coin on hand in strongboxes, in saloons, assay offices, or private cabins, is entirely consistent with how Goldfield actually operated; it does not require anything exceptional to be true.

Where “West of Town” Actually Is

Every version of this story places the lost safes in a gully or wash west of Goldfield, which narrows the search less than it sounds like it should. Goldfield was platted in the basin between Columbia Mountain and Malpais Mesa, and the drainage that mattered most to the town's early history, Coyote Wash, ran along that same western edge, the same wash whose banks the earliest miners had dug their dugout homes into a decade before the flood. A cloudburst over the hills to the west, feeding into that same basin, is a geometry that matches every account of the disaster.

The modern townsite's coordinates are well fixed and cross-checked here against two independent sources: Wikipedia's entry for Goldfield gives 37°42′31″N, 117°14′08″W, and the Goldfield Historical Society's own roadside marker, cataloged by the Historical Marker Database, gives 37°42.57′N, 117°14.267′W. Converted to decimal degrees, the two sit within a few hundred feet of each other, both anchored in the historic town core along U.S. Route 95, agreement close enough to treat the town's center as reliably located.

No source located for this piece, however, gives coordinates for the gully itself. That gap in the record is real, and it is also where the opportunity sits. “West of town” toward Columbia Mountain and Malpais Mesa is a real, mappable direction, not empty folklore, but it still covers a meaningful stretch of desert wash. Anyone taking this further would want to start with the 1907 U.S. Deputy Mineral Surveyor's plat map of Goldfield, held in UNLV Special Collections, and the Goldfield Mining District claim maps from the same period, both of which lay the town's streets and the surrounding washes over each other with a precision no modern retelling bothers to reproduce.

Why This One Is Worth the Drive

Most Nevada lost-treasure stories trace back to a single undated oral account, retold so many times the original source has dissolved into the legend itself. This one is different in kind, not just detail. The flood itself sits inside a verifiable window: a metropolitan newspaper printed a dispatch the very next morning, an archive holds a photograph shot and captioned the same day, and half a dozen independent regional histories, written across a century by people with no evident reason to coordinate with one another, agree on the date and the basic shape of events. That is a far higher bar of corroboration than most stories of this kind clear.

The safes are a different tier of claim, and this piece is deliberately not blurring the two. What can be said honestly is this: a documented, catastrophic flood tore through a town that is independently known to have kept significant quantities of coined gold in circulation, in a direction and along a drainage that match the physical description in every surviving account. Whether two specific safes are still down there is not something any source available today can prove; it is also not something anything available today disproves.

Where This File Goes Next

The clearest unexamined lead is the Goldfield and Tonopah press itself. The Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection has both the Tonopah Daily Bonanza and later Goldfield papers digitized and full-text searchable, and this research has confirmed the September 14, 1913, Oregonian dispatch but has not yet worked through the local Nevada papers from the weeks immediately following the flood, which are the most likely place a contemporary reporter would have named names: the safes' owners, the businesses they belonged to, or the specific wash where they went in.

A second lead sits at the University of Nevada, Reno, Special Collections, in the Hugh A. Shamberger Papers, which include a folder of Tonopah Times-Bonanza and Goldfield News clippings spanning 1913 to 1964, potentially decades of follow-up coverage, including any later recovery attempts or newly surfaced coins, that this research has not yet been able to examine directly. Beyond the archives, Esmeralda County's recorder and assessor records could in principle tie a named business or claim to the affected blocks, and the 1907 plat map referenced above would let a modern search narrow “west of town” to a specific, walkable drainage rather than a general compass direction.

None of that guarantees the safes are still there, or that anyone could legally dig for them; a significant share of the ground west of Goldfield sits on land administered by the Bureau of Land Management, where surface collecting rules and mining-claim overlays would govern any search long before a shovel went into the ground. But as cold cases go, this one comes with a real date, a real newspaper, a real photograph, and a real drainage, which puts it in rare company among Nevada's lost-treasure lore.