Bonds
High-yield investment can turn out to be very rewarding for investors. Although there is a certain amount of risk involved in high-yield bonds investments, they can also be very profitable for investors if they are targeted towards companies that have the potential to recover from their financial instability.
A high-yield bond, also known as a junk bond or non-investment grade bond, refers to debt security that has a very low rating. High-yield bonds are usually rated below BBB (according to Standard & Poor’s) or Baa3 by Moody’s; therefore they have a rating lower than the investment grade. Investors have access to high-yield bonds either through mutual funds or through individual business investments. High-yield bonds investments through the means of mutual funds are considered to be a lot safer, as they considerably reduce the chances of investing in non-profitable business trusts or companies. High-yield investments can become very profitable, as they can sometimes produce returns higher than those of solid, above investment grade bonds.
Companies that experience a temporary regression, going through less favorable financial situations, usually offer high yields to investors, in order to gain their interest. The trick in high-yield investments is to choose the right companies! Target your high-yield investments towards companies that have the ability to recover from their financial difficulties. For instance, you should avoid high-yield bond investments in companies that are constantly having difficulties in maintaining their position on the market. It is advised to invest in more powerful companies that have the ability to overcome their financial crisis. By investing in such companies through mutual funds, the risk of failure is considerably reduced.
High-yield bonds are a great opportunity to increase investors’ profits and they are also a good way of expanding business portfolios. The interest rates of high-yield bonds are also a lot more stable than those of investment-grade bonds and therefore they can build a stable, predictable income. Although high-yield bonds are exposed to some risks, investors are the first ones to benefit from debt insurance, therefore minimizing possible financial losses in case of bankruptcy.
If they are carefully speculated, high-yield bonds can become very lucrative and can also expand the investors’ business portfolios. High-yield investments should be always closed through mutual funds, in order to minimize the risks of investing in financially irregular companies. If they are targeted towards the right companies, high-yield investments can be very rewarding in time!
Posted in 
Tags: 
Charitable
Image by duncan
By attention to business,
and integrity in dealing,
he accumulated wealth.
The most of which he destined to form a permanent capital.
The proceeds whereof to be applied in educating and clothing
poor children and providing htem
with a sum of money.
For this laudable purpose
his funds were invested
on lands in the parishes of:
Strathmiglo: 20,000
Collessie: 10,200
Kinghorn: 39,800
and on heritable bonds: 700
£70,700
As you search for tax exempt bonds related information or other information about real time quotes or i bonds information, take your time to view the below article. It will provide you with a really refreshing insight into the tax exempt bonds information that you need. After going through it you will also be better informed about information in some way related to tax exempt bonds, such as best fixed income investments or even municpal bond prices.
In general, corporations have to offer higher coupon rates to sell their bonds. Maturity date range from 1 year to more than 30 years, with higher coupon rates being associated with longer periods to maturity, to compensate for increased risk. Long-term bonds tend to rise and fall in price more dramatically than do short term bonds; these bonds are more susceptible to movements in interest rates.
There are different types of bonds, some of the commonly issued ones are asset-backed securities. These securities make use of assets, which are not tangible in nature. Some scrutiny is done to make these assets available for investment to a much broader range of investors.
To start, you need a brokerage account. It’s your choice, whether you go with a full-service broker or an online trading account. Possibly, your own level of experience may help you to make that choice. Make sure you understand what the account requires you to do in order to place an order. You don’t want to find yourself needing to place an order but unable to do so because you’re traveling and don’t have internet access, as an example.
As detailed as this article is, don’t forget that you can find more information about tax exempt bonds or any such information from any of the search engines out there. Commit yourself to finding specific information therein about tax exempt bonds and you will.
A popular subcategory of contract surety bonds is represented by bid bonds (provide financial assurance that the contractor intends to enter the contract at the price bid and provide the required performance and pre-negotiated payment bonds), while a popular subcategory of commercial surety bonds is represented by contractor license bonds (contractor license bonds are imposed by state law in order to obtain a license to form a certain business).
If you don’t like investing in bonds directly, you may also choose from a wide range of bonds by investment companies. You can buy bond funds investing in different types of bonds, including investment grade, high defer and overseas bonds. Some funds also specialize in investing in budding market bonds.
A recent media report also revealed how tax-free bonds have emerged as a boon for retail investors. This has increased global cash flow as more and more people are getting initiated in the process of investing in tax-free bonds.
We were thrilled to know that many people found this article about tax exempt bonds and other auction rate debt, bond redeem savings, and even index bonds helpful and information rich.
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Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (4)
Image by Ken Lund
Around 1905, Tom Kelly built his house in Rhyolite, Nevada, using 51,000 beer bottles masoned with adobe. Kelly chose bottles because trees were scarce in the desert. Most of the bottles were Busch beer bottles collected from the 50 bars in this Gold Rush town. Rhyolite became a ghost town by 1920. In 1925, Paramount Pictures discovered the Bottle House and had it restored for use in a movie. It then became a museum, but tourism was slow, causing it to close. From 1936-1954, Lewis Murphy took care of the house and hosted tourists. From 1954-1969, Tommy Thompson occupied the house. He tried to make repairs to the house with concrete which, when mixed with the desert heat, caused many bottles to crack (Kelly had used adobe mud).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_wall#Bottle_Houses_Throughou…
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
When investor wanted to buy into unit trust, the very first question that comes to their mind is that; “what is the main difference of each unit trust fund” and what does this different unit trust makes any difference in terms of generating investment return for the investor? Some of the main type of investment are as follow; bond fund, money market fund, equity fund and recently emerged on the market will be Islamic fund. Those laid down above are some of the major category of unit trust fund that is widely available on the market; and each and every fund display different income trend and potential return. In this article, the author will do some basic explanation and laid down the foundation of understanding on each fund for investor to gain better insight into these funds.
Let’s start by explaining on bond fund, for bond fund it is purely an investment that focuses its main instrument on bond market usually government bond. For this kind of fund, investor are looking into steady stream of income but however investor need to be aware that income does not increase much as the economy grow nor it fall during economy down fall; this is usually purchase by retiree or investor who are not willing to take high investment risk and are looking for long term steady income for savings or retirement gold. However for young investor who looking to diversified their investment the bond market will be a good choice as it not only allow investor to spread their investment risk it also provide some steady income for investor who might use this income for personal savings or cover the losses from fail investment if any. Annual fund management fee is kept at lower level than any other fund as fund manager do not have to spend as much time managing the fund as other fund and thus the annual fund management fee is one of the lowest among the entire unit trust fund. Some might ask “since bond can be purchase on the market why i have to pay money for someone to buy it for me?” it is very simple, an investor exposure to the bond market might be as great as the fund manager did and thus with the fund manager always on the lookout for bond to purchase and managing the return distribution to investor that small amount of annual management fee is perhaps worth it but if investor themselves are exposed to great amount of bond then you might consider buying it yourself but again it is good to not overestimate yourself on the market.
Secondly, is the money market fund. It is widely believe that the money market fund is a conservative investment instrument which is similar of those from bond fund however the difference being that for money market fund the fund manager will invest more in short term debt securities rather than bond which are long term investment. The money market fund is suitable for investor who are looking for short term investment that is conservative while preserving the investor cash and earn a small interest based on the investment return; prices for this fund will remain stable and usually will not be less than and if it is lower than the benchmark of the fund is said to be “fail” but however statistically it rarely happen. Those investor who are looking only for steady income then perhaps spreading the investment to bond fund and also money market fund will be good as it allow investor to spread investment risk while gaining both long term and short term income from these funds; as for annual management fee the fee is low and is close to the fee chargeable by a bond fund.
Thirdly, is the equity fund. This fund involve the purchase of many different type of equity depending on the investment patter by fund manager set forth in the proposal or master prospectus. This type of fund comes with a greater risk than those two fund mention earlier as it involve investment in the equity market that is volatile and changes according to the economy; this type of fund is the all-time favorite for many investor who are looking for greater investment return and are willing to take risk ranging from moderate to high risk. The annual management fee is among the highest charged to investor as it involve the fund manager full attention to the market performance and the equity market to achieve its investment objective set forth; equity fund comes in a variety of format such as equity fund that aims to buy on undervalued stocks, equity fund that focus on purchase of blue chips stock and so on which is too wide to be mention. Investor that buy into this type of fund need to monitor the fund by themselves as well and not only rely on the fund manager to do so as it involve higher risk for investor to the extent of losing money.
Coming in will be the Islamic fund, this fund had arisen to the market thanks to the introduction of Islamic banking to the world. This Islamic fund is specifically targeted at the Muslim investor who wanted to make investment but is afraid that the return he or she obtains might not in compliance to the Islamic law and thus this fund offered the platform for them to invest in. Of course, non-Muslim investors also realize the opportunity of the fund and some of them will invest in the fund as well although they are not Muslim. But however investor need to understand a few point before making any investment to the Islamic fund, first of all the Islamic fund investment pattern must adhere to the Islamic law and any violation to the Islamic law is not allowed and thus it will limit the fund manager available investment option that is available on the market. secondly the risk of these fund are usually ranging from moderate to high as well as it had investment limitation that other funds do not have. Annual fund management fee chargeable is higher than the bond market as well, due to fund manager need to spend more time managing the fund and on the lookout for investment that is Islamic law compliant; Islamic fund are available in the form of Islamic equity fund which is similar to the normal equity fund but however the only difference is that the Islamic equity fund investment must be Islamic law compliant.
As a conclusion here, the unit trust fund type is wide but mainly can be categorize into the above categories where each of it have different set of characteristic as well as investment return, risk, annual fund management fee and so on. For investor to succeed in unit trust investment, studies must be done to the fund that you intend to purchase in so that the investor understand the risk involve and can make sound investment decision accordingly.
Bond Mutual Funds
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Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (6)
Image by Ken Lund
Around 1905, Tom Kelly built his house in Rhyolite, Nevada, using 51,000 beer bottles masoned with adobe. Kelly chose bottles because trees were scarce in the desert. Most of the bottles were Busch beer bottles collected from the 50 bars in this Gold Rush town. Rhyolite became a ghost town by 1920. In 1925, Paramount Pictures discovered the Bottle House and had it restored for use in a movie. It then became a museum, but tourism was slow, causing it to close. From 1936-1954, Lewis Murphy took care of the house and hosted tourists. From 1954-1969, Tommy Thompson occupied the house. He tried to make repairs to the house with concrete which, when mixed with the desert heat, caused many bottles to crack (Kelly had used adobe mud).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_wall#Bottle_Houses_Throughou…
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
· The IMF predicts the US economy to slow down.
· The outlook for Western Europe and Japan isn’t too great either.
· Headline inflation has increased in both advanced as well as emerging economies.
· Oil price has doubled over the last six months.
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Government Bond Funds
These funds invest in debt securities issued by the government such as the Treasury bills, Treasury bonds, Treasury notes, Mortgage-backed securities issued by government agencies etc. Some of these funds are also exempt from state and/or local taxes.
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These funds invest in securities issued by state and/or local governments for doing public works such as building bridges, laying of state highways, constructing schools etc. Some of these funds are also exempt from federal taxes. Since they have the backing of the federal government, they are considered to have a very high credit rating.
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These funds invest in the debt securities of corporations. They do not have the backing of the government; hence they are a bit more risky than the other two types of funds. However they pay out much higher income than the government funds.
Apart from these funds there are many other types of bond funds such as the zero-coupon funds – that invest only in zero coupon bonds, international funds – those that invest in international bonds, convertible securities funds – which invest in convertible securities (bonds that can be converted to stock) etc.
These are some of the funds that an investor can look forward to invest. However there are many more alternatives to invest. To know about investing in mutual funds visit Investing in Mutual Funds and to get an idea as to how mutual funds work visit Mutual Funds. Also visit Exchange Traded Funds to know about exchange traded funds.
Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (17)
Image by Ken Lund
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
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A stock is a share in the ownership of the company you have invested in. By owning an amount of stock, you will be paid dividend as and when the company declares. When you own a stock, you have the total control of this stock. You can sell it anytime if you think that you no longer intended to own it or you think that it is not worth to own it. You can also keep it for your whole life and use it as collateral to borrow money from bank or financial institution. Stock investments can be long-term or short-term investments.
A bond is a debt security which the bond issuer owns you if you have bought the bond and is obliged to pay interest or repay the principal at a later date. Bonds provide the borrower with external funds to finance long-term investments, or, in the case of government bonds, to finance current expenditure. Bonds are bought and traded mostly by institutions like pension funds, insurance companies and banks. Most individuals who want to own bonds do so through bond funds.
Though stock and bond are securities, there are some differences in their investment policies. Major difference is that stock investment gives you the share of ownership of the listed company whereas bond investment doesn’t give as bond holders are lenders to the issuers. Another difference between stock and bond investment is that bonds usually have a defined term or maturity after which the bond is redeemed. On the other hand stocks may be outstanding. Bond usually has contract type repayment schedule and once they have paid back all the money that you have lent to them, the bond will end. Once the expiration date has over, the whole investment will become worthless. On the other hand, the ownership of a stock can not be cancelled unless the company is declared bankrupt.
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Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (8)
Image by Ken Lund
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
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An issuer issues a “foreign currency” bond in a currency other than its national currency. The issuer issues the bond in foreign currency to make it more attractive to buyers and also for taking advantage of international interest rate differentials. Government bonds are bonds issued by a government to finance fiscal borrowing requirements.
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Although many people still confuse a surety with an insurer, they are two distinctive notions. Thus, it is very important to distinguish between suretyship and insurance agreements. For instance, a liability insurer may pay a third party on behalf of the insured, in which case the insured is under the protection of the insurer. By contrast, in case of surety bonds, the surety guarantees the performance of a certain contractor to the owner of a project, but the surety bond protects the project owner instead of the contractor.
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Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (20)
Image by Ken Lund
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
Remember you are in the world of the wise and wise people must be wise investors, in my article Investing where it counts I discussed some of the best ways to invest your money in order to attain freedom. In that article, I talked about bonds and how they can make you a person of success and achievement. However, we talked about corporate bonds then, this time we are going to look at the government bonds, if you were planning to give up on reading more of this article, I advice you to stay around for a few minutes since the information below may positively change your life for ever.
Bonds are used by governments all over the world to borrow money from the public to achieve their economic goals like curbing inflation. The good thing with bonds is that you will have utmost security about your money or investment and the sides of being a creditor to your government, most important of all, bonds normally have a good interest rate at the gain of an investor.
You do not need a lot of money to invest in bonds, many country requires initial investment capital of not more that . You there fore have a chance to increase your capital if you only save a little for the cause of bonds.
Allow me use the word Treasury bonds and not just bonds, this is because bonds are majorly for the corporate companies which need to borrow money from the public and since this article majorly refers to the government bonds, the word Treasury bonds will be appropriate.
What are Treasury bonds?
Treasury bonds are long term debt instruments with tenors of normally 2,3,5 and 10 years. They may be issued at per value, at a discount rate (below face value) or at a premium (above face value)
Investors in Treasury bonds are paid a fixed coupon interest amount normally every after 6 months based on the face value of the bond until the maturity date. The investor will also earn interest by buying bonds on discount or lose some interest by buying at a premium or earn only the coupe interest by buying at per value
Who can invest in Treasury bonds?
Bonds can be acquired by residents and non-residents who have opened up CDS (Central Depository System)accounts, the investor can be any individual, organization, or corporate and must have attained a contractual age of 18 years as it is in most countries.
What is Central Depository System?
This is an electronic register which register the investors, auction government securities, create and store electronic investor’s securities and also performs the task of security redemption at maturity. You can call it the central processing unit for bond transactions. It is better to understand such things before you go in for Treasury bonds.
How to apply for Treasury bonds
As with many other security transactions, you can acquire bonds directly from your government, there are normally registered primary dealers who can help you in you in the application process. These are normally big commercial or investment banks, Such institutions must be well capitalized and must have a clearing account with the central bank.
How will you earn from Treasury bonds.
You can always re sell your bonds to a primary dealer, or any other Treasury bonds investor or you can a security exchange for a broker to find a buyer. Take a scenario where you are about to face a fore closure or a debt repayment date is drawing nigh, reselling your investment (bond) will come in to save. Remember that as a wise man, who visits the world of the wise, you can resell your bonds at a higher price than the one you bought them at.
You can use a bond certificate to acquire a loan from most of the financial institution; a bond certificate is widely accepted as security for your loan. You can use that money to carry out development plans, in a sense you can go for a band just as a way getting security for your future loans. That is a very nice idea to drive you to success.
Treasury bonds grow profits normally after every 6 months, the interest you get will be based on the coupon interest rate and whether your bid was priced at a discount, par or premium. If you bond has a 10% interest and you invested 100 millions, you will be getting 10 millions (coupon interest) after every 6 months until the maturity date.
Investing in bonds is one of the best ways to save your money, many times, the interest you will receive from your bonds is always far higher from that you get from other financial institutions including banks. Why would you save your money from home and get the same amount after a certain time when you have a better way to invest? I think you should give bonds a try, I know you will come back to thank me when you have made some fortune.
I know there are many things you may not understand about bonds, my article Bonds and Treasury bills terminologies will help you understand everything. I wish you luck in your investments
Related Invest In Bonds Articles
Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (21)
Image by Ken Lund
Around 1905, Tom Kelly built his house in Rhyolite, Nevada, using 51,000 beer bottles masoned with adobe. Kelly chose bottles because trees were scarce in the desert. Most of the bottles were Busch beer bottles collected from the 50 bars in this Gold Rush town. Rhyolite became a ghost town by 1920. In 1925, Paramount Pictures discovered the Bottle House and had it restored for use in a movie. It then became a museum, but tourism was slow, causing it to close. From 1936-1954, Lewis Murphy took care of the house and hosted tourists. From 1954-1969, Tommy Thompson occupied the house. He tried to make repairs to the house with concrete which, when mixed with the desert heat, caused many bottles to crack (Kelly had used adobe mud).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_wall#Bottle_Houses_Throughou…
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
Bond Basics—Part 1: http://atlantaplanningguys.com/?p=1214
Bond Pricing—Part 2: http://atlantaplanningguys.com/?p=1229
Welcome or our final chapter of Bond Basics! As investors, we tend to assign less risk and more safety to these types of investments. While this is a true generalization, NO investment is without its risks. To wrap up this three part series, I’d like to discuss some of the risks that are associated with bonds and some ways to mitigate them. There are two fundamental risks to bonds that I’d like you to be familiar with: Market Risk & Interest Rate Risk.
Market Risk: Bonds are an investment, just like equities. They have a price at which they can be bought and sold on any given day. We have already discussed the price at which most bonds come to market, the “issue price.” Once any bond has been purchased, the price at which you can turn around and sell it will fluctuate based on several factors.
Interest Rates: if interest rates rise, prices for existing bonds tend to fall.
Up/Down Grading a Bond’s quality: A bond is rated based on the likelihood that the issuing agency or company will be able to pay back the debt in a timely manner. If the rating of your bond goes down, the price will likely follow. This is sometimes referred to as “credit risk”.
People tend to purchase bonds with the assumption that they will hold them to maturity. In this case, market risk is less of a concern. Market risk becomes relevant if and when the bond holder decides to sell the debt and finds that its current value is less than original issue price.
Interest Rate Risk: “I thought the interest was fixed on a bond?” Yes, you are correct. Most bonds have a fixed interest rate, the coupon. When a bond matures the holder is paid back their initial investment. Interest rate risk comes into play when the investor goes looking to replace the bond that has just matured. If prevailing interest rates have dropped, the investor will be forced to invest more money to receive the same income.
Example: John’s ABC Bond matures and he is paid ,000. It was a 10-year note paying 8% semi-annually (/year in interest). If prevailing interest rates for a brand new 10-year note are 6%, the investor would have to invest over ,300 to get the same payment.
Now that we have talked about several of the predominant risks associated with bond, let’s discuss a few ways to guard against them.
Proper Allocation: If you have been following our blog for a while, you know that we typically recommend a client allocate between 25-40% toward Fixed Income. Investors tend to overweight their allocation to bonds as they age and this can further exacerbate these common risks. We typically recommend further diversification among different types of fixed income investments—Corporate, High Yield, Treasury and Municipal bonds).
Bond Laddering: This technique involves buying bonds with varying maturities. We already know that longer maturities tend to have higher coupons. Focus on spreading your investments out across a broad spectrum of maturities. This can alleviate the ugly side of interest rate risk when rates fluctuate.
In summary, having a basic understanding of how bonds work, on their own and as part of an overall investment plan, can go a long way to helping investors mitigate risk and maximize returns. While CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ practitioners exist to help set investors up for financial independence, we truly believe that knowledge is power. Invest wisely.
Bottom line, talk to your investment advisor. Bonds are a critical component to long term performance. Be sure you have all the facts before you invest.
Bonds Investing
Author Admin
Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (12)
Image by Ken Lund
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
Bonds Investing
You have heard of credits and loans. These things are very important for you. Lending institutions will lend you money, and in turn, pay them back later, more often than with interest. You wonder about the time when it will be you who can lend money and not the one who’ll borrow it. Actually, you can. Investing in the bond market is basically just like that. When you invest in bonds, you basically lend your money to another party, and after a certain amount of time called a “term,” you will get your money back—with interest, of course. Imagine yourself lending money to the government or a large corporation, now that is some feeling. Bonds investing is a relatively sure way to earn profit. Bond investing is especially going to be prevalent today because corporations will be needing investors primarily due to the global financial crisis.
“My Name is Bond, Just Bond”
A bond is specifically defined as a dept security, where the bond investor will basically lend money to a corporation, who issues the lender a bond. In bond investing, the buyer of the bond is the debt issuer as the bond seller is the one who will receive the debt. Bonds investing is basically like loaning money to a friend, only that it is more formal, and that the debtor is required to repay the borrowed money with interest and after fixed intervals. The end of that interval is the end of the term of the bond, or in other words the end of the life of a bond, also called bond maturity. Bond investing can be short-term, where the bond matures in a year or two, intermediate-term, where the bond will mature after two to three years, and long-term, where a bond can have a life for up to thirty years or more.
Kinds of Bonds
There are quite a number of types of bonds where you can invest on, depending on the terms and who issued them. Fixed rate bonds have, well, fixed rates, and have constant interest rates throughout the term of the bond. Generally in bonds investing, the longer the life of bond is, the higher the interest rates will be. The perpetual bonds, or perpetuities, is another exemption to the general bonds investing rules, for perpetuities have no maturity. The municipal bond is a state or local government issued bonds. In bonds investing, these bonds are usually deemed the safest because they are backed by the government. An advantage of municipal bonds is that they can be tax free, therefore reducing the bearers tax liabilities.
Stocks vs. Bonds
As both securities, the mechanism for stocks and bonds are generally the same. However, there are also major differences between the two. For one, when you become owners of stocks or stock-holders, you become part owners of the company that sold you the stocks. However, in bonds investing you are merely lending money to the institution that sold you the bonds. Another one is of course, in bond investing, the bonds have a life or maturity, or at least in most cases, whereas stocks have none.
Generally speaking, stocks can give you more profit. However, bonds are better in terms of risks and therefore more dependable. In bonds investing, the capital of the debt issuer will be preserved by the company. This cannot happen in stocks, as the stock-holder is basically part owner of the company, they will go down when the company goes down. Your investment in bonds, unless of course, the company who sold you the bond goes bankrupt, will always be safe. Bonds investing is a low-risk investment, and though it may not profit as high as the other debt securities, you are safer in bonds and you are more sure to earn your money back—with added interests, of course.
By Larry Lane for www.Investorzoo.com
Need to know where to invest a portion of your investment portfolio in relative safety? The investment world has a plethora of investment choices. Bonds can be an ideal investment for those seeking safety. As with all investments, the security is only as good as the company or government backing the bond. Below are some fixed income financial instruments that may fit your investment criteria.
Cds
Are you looking for a safe guaranteed investment? Certificates of deposits from an FDIC bank will provide you with a guaranteed return in the form of an interest payment every three months for the term of the CD purchased. You then get your principal back at maturity. If you have a CD at a FDIC member bank, you are guaranteed the principal and interest by the federal government. These are considered the safest investment and thus usually pay the smallest yield. Cds can start in terms of 6 months and go out to several years. The longer you agree to tie up your money with your chosen bank, the higher the return.
US Government Treasuries
Unless the US government goes bankrupt, US Treasury are a direct obligation of the United States government and are considered the gold standard as far as safety is concerned.
Treasury bills
Treasury bills are issued in minimum denominations of ,000 and are short term in nature; maturing in a year or less. They are sold at auction for less than their face value. The common term is “par”. When the bond becomes due, their full value is paid.
Treasury notes
Notes are issued in minimum amounts of 00 and mature in two to ten years. They carry a stated interest rate which is paid semiannually. Treasury notes are purchased through an auction and can be purchased at or below face value.
TIPS: Treasury Inflation Protected Securities
Commonly known as “TIPS” are securities whose principal is adjusted by changes in the Consumer Price Index. With inflation rises, the principal increases. Conversly, when there is deflation, the principal payment decreases.
The relationship between TIPS and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) affects both the sum you are paid when your TIPS matures as well as the amount of interest that a TIPS pays you every six months. TIPS pay interest at a fixed rate. Because the rate is applied to the adjusted principal, however, interest payments can vary in amount from one period to the next. At the maturity of a TIPS, you receive the adjusted principal or the original principal, whichever is greater. This provision protects you against deflation.The US Treasury provides TIPS Inflation Index Ratios which will allow those interested to calculate the change to principal resulting from changes in the Consumer Price Index.
How to buy TIPS
TIPS are sold directly through the Treasury, banks, brokers, and dealers. The price of a TIPS can be less than, equal to, or greater than the face value.
You can bid for TIPS in either of two ways:
•With a noncompetitive bid, you agree to accept the yield determined at the time of the auction. With this bid, you are guaranteed to receive the TIPS you want, and in the full dollar amount you wish to invest.
•With a competitive bid, you specify the yield you are willing to accept.
As a result, your bid may be:
• 1) Accepted in the full amount you want if your bid is less than the yield determined at auction.
• 2) Accepted in less than the full amount you want if your bid is equal to the high yield.
• 3) Rejected if the yield you specify is higher than the yield set at auction.
To place a competitive bid, you must use a bank, broker, or dealer.
Additional TIP information
The interest rate on a TIPS is determined at auction.
TIPS are sold in increments of 0. The minimum purchase is 0.
TIPS are issued in electronic form. You will receive a confirmation, but there is no physical bond issued.
You can hold a TIPS until it matures or sell it in the secondary market before it matures. Should inflation rise after your purchase, you may experience a loss of principal.
Treasury Bonds
These are exactly like treasury notes except they mature in 10 years or more.Since Treasury securities are issued by the US government many consider treasuries risk free. This is not absolutely true. It is true that if held to maturity, you are guaranteed to receive your principal and stated interest rate. However, if you are forced to sell, you may take a loss. Should interest rates rise, your bond will be worth less than your original purchase.
Zero coupon bonds
Zero coupon bonds guarantee not only to pay you the specified interest rate on your principal; they also guarantee to pay the same rate of interest on your interest. Zero coupon bonds pay no periodic interest, instead it is automatically reinvested. “Zeros” are the best way to lock in high interest rates far into the future. If rates go up after buying your bond, you are locked into receiving below market interest rates. Again if you have to sell early, you will recognize a loss. Although you’ll receive no annual interest payments, the IRS will tax you as if you were.
Municipal bonds
“Muni bonds” are issued by city, states and governmental agencies. As with corporate bonds, bonds are rated by bond rating services. Interest rates vary according to the length of the term and rating of the government or agency. Muni bonds are free of federal income tax. They are also free of state and local incomes taxes when purchased by residences of the states in which they are issued. Muni bonds are very attractive to those in high tax brackets since they have fantastic tax advantages.
Corporate bonds
To finance their operations, corporations need to borrow money. They pay a fixed interest rate over a maturity of up to 30 years. Interest payments are made to the bond holder semi annually. At maturity, the bondholder receives their initial investment back. Interest rates vary depending on term and company. Rating services such as Moody’s and Standard and Poors grade the company based on their assessment of the company’s financial stability. Ratings range from AAA (the highest ranking) and down to F. These ratings are not perfect and are only the opinion of the respective companies. Before purchasing a corporate bond, it is extremely important that you know the health of the company they are investing in as well as the terms of the bond. In effect, you are considered the bank.
Junk bonds
High yield or junk bonds are bonds with ratings below investment grade. Consequently, they have to offer a higher interest rate to induce investors to purchase them. One way to reduce the risk investing in junk bonds is to invest in a corporate bond mutual fund or ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) to spread the inherited risk of default.
Convertible Bonds
Convertible bonds are bonds that can be exchanged for a specific number of shares of common stock. Bondholders share in the growth potential offered by the company’s stock. Convertible bonds pay lower interest rates than non convertible bonds of equal quality.
International Bonds
As with US Treasury bonds, you can purchase bonds of foreign governments. In many cases bonds issued by foreign governments pay a higher rate of interest rates because they must compete with more stable governments such as the United States. The dual edged sword to foreign bonds is the exchange rates. Your true return may fluctuate depending on the currency exchange rate of the government’s bond you’ve purchased.
Risks
There are several inherent risks when purchasing a bond. As we’ve discovered over the last year, anything is possible. If the company that issued the bond you’ve purchased goes bankrupt, you stand to lose entire investment. Since there is always a risk of bankruptcy, corporate bonds usually pay higher interest rates than government securities or CDs backed by the FDIC. Your bond may be “called” or redeemed before maturity. This might happen if there is a dramatic deflation and interest rates decline.
Managing your risk through mutual funds and ETFs
It is impossible to totally eliminate all risk. To diversify your bond holdings, you might want to purchase a bond mutual fund or ETF (Exchange Traded Fund). A given fund may invest in several hundred different issuant, thus decreasing the risk of default. Given the number of options available, you should be able to find an appropriate investment. If you are looking for investment choices, check popular internet sites such as Morningstar.com.
Interest rate risk During the course of holding your bond, interest can rise, thus decreasing the value of the bond you’ve purchased. If you are forced to sell early before the maturity date, you may experience a loss. Inflation and taxes will eat into your total return. With the exception of municipal bonds, the federal and state governments will tax you on your gains. However, if you are looking for an investment vehicle less volatile than the stock market, bonds may be an investment worth exploring.
Larry Lane is the editor for www.InvestorZoo.com a social networking site specializing in personal finance
The article above is information of a general nature and the information provided may not apply to your personal situation. Please consult your financial planner or licensed professional for investment advice.
Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (18)
Image by Ken Lund
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
Bonds are very popular securities because they regularly pay interest income and pay back the initial principal after the bond matures. Bonds are popular with people of various risk classes but they certainly appeal to conservative investors looking for a steady income stream. Bond mutual funds may be even more attractive than buying into individual bonds because they provide a portfolio with increased diversification at a low-cost. Needless to say, before considering to purchase into a bond fund consider your risk tolerance, objectives, and income needs and compare that to the goals, risk level, and investment style of the bonds or bond funds you are interested in.
What is a Bond?
A bond is simply a loan between an investor and the bond’s issuer. Say a company issues bonds and an investor can buy those bonds or in other words provide a loan to the company in return for a promise to pay back the initial investment after a specified period along with interest during the intervening period. The interest rate agreed upon by the company and the investor is called the coupon rate. When the bond matures or in other words when it’s time for the company to pay back the loan, the issuer repays the investor’s original investment.
Since bond markets generally don’t move in tandem with equity markets, they can provide investors with the added diversification in their portfolios. Furthermore, they provide investors with a steady income stream. The only exception to this rule is for zero-coupon bonds, which from their name indicate that there are no interests rates attached to these bonds so there is no income paid out over time; however, even though zero-coupon bonds provide no cash flow they are sold at a discount to their face value and at maturity the investor gets paid the full face value of the bond.
There are many kinds of bonds available each having varying risks, benefits, tax implications to an investor’s overall portfolio. Most bonds can be generally organized under four major categories: corporate, government, government agency, and municipal. Corporate bonds are issued by corporations and depending on the corporation that is issued them they can vary in risk. For instance, a small company issuing bonds can offer attractive yields to investors but can at the same time bring with it substantial amount of risk whereas a large-cap company can issue bonds that can be less risky because the investor knows that the chances of the large-cap company to default is slim. On the other hand, government bonds are probably the safest types of bonds because they are issued by the U.S. Treasury and backed by the credit of the U.S. government. Government agency and municipal bonds can vary substantially in risk but they typically fall between corporate bonds and government bonds on the risk spectrum.
Bond Mutual Funds
Many investors want the benefit of diversification to minimize their risk and they generally achieve this end by purchasing a bond mutual fund. This way investors can combine may different bonds into one portfolio and still pursue their fixed income objectives. Because bond funds aim to provide a steady income stream to investors, they are suited to investors that are looking to firstly minimize the impact of equity market fluctuations on their portfolios and secondly to protect their principal and current income. Bond funds may be the most appropriate for investors that are nearing retirement, are in retirement or others who do not easily tolerate fluctuations in the value of their portfolios. However, a bond fund is simply a pooled resource that invests in many bonds, so before investing consider the underlying individual bonds held in the portfolio particularly paying close attention the risk of those individual bonds and how that overall risk may affect the fund and your portfolio.
Risks
All bonds have come level of “credit risk,” which is the risk that the bond issuer will go into default before the bond matures. In that instance, you may lose a portion or all your original principal and any income that may have been due. Bonds are often rated by Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s (S&P) to provide investors on the creditworthiness of the issuer; Aaa or AAA are the highest credit ratings given by these companies. Bond funds also can be issued ratings just like individual bonds based upon the quality of their underlying bond holdings.
Like stocks and other investments, bonds can have other risks from market fluctuations to an investor who is forced to sell them before their maturity date. If an investor is forced to liquidate his bond positions before their time and the bond’s price has fallen at this time, he will lose part of his original investment as well as all future income from the interest. Another risk common to all bonds and bond funds is interest rate risk. Interest rates and bond prices have an inverse relationship, so when interest rates in the economy rise, the bond’s price will generally fall and vice versa.
However, bond holders can avoid running the risk of fluctuating interest rates and market risk if they hold on to their bonds until maturity. On the other hand, bond mutual fund investors should consider these risks more carefully when purchasing into the bond funds they are interested in because fund managers can potentially buy and sell bonds as they see fit to meet the fund’s objectives. As a result, interest rate risks and market risks become more prominent and therefore risk loss because of inherent fluctuations within the bond fund.
Types of Bond Funds
Bond funds also come in many forms each seeking to reach a different purpose and therefore buy and sell individual securities to achieve their goals. Similarly to individual bonds, different bond funds have different risk factors and benefits such as tax benefits. Some popular bond funds include corporate, U.S. government, and municipal bond funds.
Since U.S. government bond funds are composed of securities backed by the creditworthiness of the U.S. government, they hold almost no credit risk. Nevertheless, they are still affected by changes in market conditions, interest rates just like all other bonds, as well as inflation risks – not keeping pace with inflation specifically. U.S. government bonds are taxed at the federal level but are exempt from state level taxes. U.S. government bond funds typically appeal to conservative investors looking for steady income streams and solid protection of their principals.
On the other spectrum, corporate bond funds aim to invest in a variety of corporate issued bonds with different credit risks. Some companies can potentially have substantial credit risks while others have may have less. In addition, corporate bonds are affected by interest rate and market risks. Needless to say, the potentially riskier a bond is can mean that it has potentially higher yields; therefore, these investments may be suitable for investors that can tolerate a bit more risk in pursuit of higher interest income.
Municipal bond funds invest in a variety of bond issues of state government and municipalities. Municipal bonds are taxed at the state and local levels and are exempt from federal taxes. Because of their potential tax benefits, when compared to taxable securities, municipal bonds can be appropriate for investors in high federal tax brackets. Municipal bonds are affected by interest rate and market risks also.
Reduce Risk When Investing in Bonds
1. Try to match your bond maturities to your investment time frame. For instance, if you are retired and you need to withdraw from your portfolio each yeah to meet your day-to-day expenses, buy bonds or bond funds with maturities of one year. In addition, depending on your portfolio you can invest portions of your portfolio in intermediate bonds say 5 to 10 year bonds and long-term bonds (10 years +), for higher interest rate payments.
2. Long-term investors can reduce their risk by buying both short-term and long-term maturity bonds.
3. Buy bonds or bond funds with average maturities that range across the maturity spectrum but with heavier concentration in shorter maturities.
Choose the Fund That Meets Your Need
Although every bond fund carries its own risks, you should always strive to balance the risks with diversification. Diversification can help reduce your overall portfolio risk from any particular fund. Professional management can help you save the hassle from having to research and evaluate the thousands of bonds and bond funds in the market. The best strategy is to speak with your Isakov Planning Group Financial Advisor to determine what your fixed income needs actually are and then your financial advisor can identify funds that will help you meet your needs.
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Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (14)
Image by Ken Lund
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
Junk bonds refer to an investment that is usually rated below the investment grade at the time it is being sold in the market. For the fact that they are given a lower value, they also have the potential for very high yields as a way of attracting investors. Unfortunately they also have a very high risk of default or credit adversities, but this should not be a put-off to investors because, they have proved to be very reliable over the years.
Junk bonds are also commonly known as non-investment grade bond or speculative grade bond. They are seen to have the same characteristics as a regular bond. At the time of issue, the issuing company or organization must state the amount of money they intend to pay you back as you redeem the investment. They also have to be specific about the date of repayment. You will find that the maturity period differs depending on the issuing company.
These investments fall into a number of categories depending on various other factors. The Investment Grade category is that which is issued by low-medium risk lenders. They are normally given labels that range from AAA-BBB. They do not have very attractive returns but their risk factor is also as low. The Junk Bonds are also a category on their own and are labeled as BB/Ba or less.
Fallen angels has been rated under this investment, but this happened because its performance declined and its prices became unfavorable. As such, they have always been given figures less than what they are really worth and hence have the potential for greater returns. Rising Star is a category that has characteristics of an investment that will soon be soaring high in prices and worth as well.
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Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (5)
Image by Ken Lund
Around 1905, Tom Kelly built his house in Rhyolite, Nevada, using 51,000 beer bottles masoned with adobe. Kelly chose bottles because trees were scarce in the desert. Most of the bottles were Busch beer bottles collected from the 50 bars in this Gold Rush town. Rhyolite became a ghost town by 1920. In 1925, Paramount Pictures discovered the Bottle House and had it restored for use in a movie. It then became a museum, but tourism was slow, causing it to close. From 1936-1954, Lewis Murphy took care of the house and hosted tourists. From 1954-1969, Tommy Thompson occupied the house. He tried to make repairs to the house with concrete which, when mixed with the desert heat, caused many bottles to crack (Kelly had used adobe mud).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_wall#Bottle_Houses_Throughou…
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
The best bond fund for most average investors could be a high-yield, or long-term, or corporate bond fund. Then again, maybe not. This article takes you back to bond basics to find the best bond fund for most investors. Read on. You could save thousands, or make additional thousands based on the information presented here.
Getting back to bond basics, folks invest in bonds and bond funds primarily to earn higher income than they can get from stocks and savings vehicles like bank CDs. Few average investors invest in individual bond issues, because that requires significant knowledge and experience.
Bond funds, on the other hand, are professionally managed and offer investors diversification, sometimes at a reasonable cost. These funds hold bonds in their portfolio, and these bonds pay interest. This interest is passed on to investors in the form of dividends.
There is only one way I know of to get rich with bond funds. Wait until interest rates get historically high, as in the early 1980’s. Then, borrow a ton of money, and buy as soon as rates start to fall. Now, let’s get back to reality because interest rates are near historical lows.
When you buy shares of a bond fund these days, you are simply trying to get the highest income you can, without taking on heavy risk. As I have said in other articles, bond funds have interest rate risk. This means that if you invest now and interest rates go up in the future, the value of your investment will fall. Who wants a bond(s) that pays 6% when new bonds are paying 9%? Investors will buy it … but only at a reduced price.
NOW, let’s look for the best bond fund available. We will play “elimination” and weed out the risky ones and the losers. First, high-yield bond funds pay higher dividends for one reason. They hold high-risk bonds that are often referred to as JUNK. Second, long-term bond funds pay higher than average yields (dividends) because they have higher interest rate risk. Third, foreign bond funds are riskier because the value of the dollar fluctuates, and this could work against you.
Now, let’s eliminate bond funds because they pay lower dividends. Government bond funds invest in the likes of U.S. Treasury bonds, which are the safest on earth. And short-term bond funds are relatively safe because they hold bonds that mature in a few years. The problem is that neither of the above pays dividends worth taking any risk to get.
Now, we’re ready to zoom in on the best bond fund, which would probably be a higher-quality intermediate-term bond fund. We don’t need the highest quality, because we want good dividends.
I have in front of me such a fund, and it has a dividend yield of over 6%. But this is not the best bond fund I can find. The reason is that even though it is offered by one of the biggest and best mutual fund companies, it is rather expensive to buy and to own.
If you invest ,000, 4% comes off the top for sales charges. Then, as long as you stay invested, 1% a year is taken to pay for expenses.
Now we save/make some money. The best bond fund is similar to the above, except that it costs you zero to buy it and yearly expenses are less than .25% a year vs.1%. This bond fund is a no-load, intermediate-term BOND INDEX FUND.
After all, we are not out to make a killing here, and a dollar saved is a dollar earned when it comes to bond funds.
Dow Takes Giant Leap as Bailouts Snap Gloom
Image by YoTuT
Dow Takes Giant Leap as Bailouts Snap Gloom
By E.S. BROWNING and ANNELENA LOBB
Last week’s gloom turned into euphoria as investors sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 11%, the biggest one-day gain since 1933. It was the fifth-largest percentage gain ever, and it came immediately after an 18% weekly decline, the worst such drop in the Dow’s 112-year history.
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Bright Monday at the Markets
Stocks rallied Monday, snapping a brutal losing streak after governments around the world took action to shore up the global financial system.
The head-snapping shift in sentiment, spurred by global plans for governments to rescue banks through direct capital injections, left investors debating whether this marked the end of the past year’s frightening bear market, or just a temporary respite.
History tells a mixed story of rallies like Monday’s. Of the five past one-day gains of 10% or more, two marked the end of bear markets, in 1987 and 1933. But three — in 1929, 1931 and 1932 — proved short-lived, and were followed by further declines. Because of that, market historians were reluctant to make definitive judgments about the one-day event.
"We don’t know yet whether the bear market is over, but we do know about the medium term," says Phil Roth, chief technical market analyst at Wall Street brokerage firm Miller Tabak + Co. "This is a big clean-out, so we will get some recovery here now."
"People can say, ‘Whew, we survived the financial crisis.’ But then we have the issue of the recession, and we don’t know how deep that will be," he says.
The Dow surged 936.42 points to 9387.61, its largest one-day point gain ever. Monday’s session ended eight consecutive trading days of losses, and wiped out almost all the blue-chip index’s losses from the last three days of last week. The Dow finished just below Tuesday’s close.
Even so, the Dow remains down 34% from its record 14164.53, hit Oct. 9, 2007, and down 13% in October alone. It is at a level it first reached in January 1999.
As Wall Street veterans tried to figure out what the day meant, they had to pull out their history books. For most of the day, it looked like the biggest one-day rally since Oct. 21, 1987 — just after the crash. But after a late-day 300-point surge, Monday’s gain surpassed that 1987 rally.
Some noted that the heavy buying occurred on Columbus Day, when the main U.S. bond markets were closed. That meant that investors couldn’t get a clear idea of how the surge would affect the debt markets, which have been behind much of the financial trouble. And while the price-swing was enormous, total trading volume of New York Stock Exchange stocks was below average for this volatile month. At 7.12 billion shares, it nevertheless was the 15th-heaviest trading day ever.
Investors got more good news after trading ended. Word surfaced that the Bush administration’s plan would include investing roughly 0 billion in banks, providing guarantees of bank debt, and increasing the insurance on certain bank deposits, according to people familiar with the plans. Bank-rescue plans unveiled Monday in Europe helped lift the U.S. stock market.
There were some signs around the globe of relief in bond markets as well.
European bond markets were open on Monday. Investors there reacted by selling short-term, ultrasafe bonds and moving back into stocks, reversing the flight to the relative safety of government bonds that has been underway for weeks. German government bonds that mature in two years fell in price, pushing the yield up 0.13 percentage point to 3.18%.
The futures market where investors bet on U.S. Treasury bonds was also open. Trading there suggested that investors expect a similar decline in price and rise in yield for short-term Treasury bills and longer-term Treasury bonds on Tuesday. The price of a 10-year Treasury note futures contract fell to its lowest level since early August, according to Optima Investment Research.
There also were signs that banks’ fears of lending to one another may begin to abate. The cost of futures contracts that correlate to the market rate at which banks lend to one another — the London interbank offered rate, or Libor — suggested that traders believe Libor will come down, another sign of relief. Three-month sterling Libor fell slightly on Monday, suggesting that other dollar-based bank-lending rates may decline on Tuesday.
During last week’s stock selloff, the market tumbled during the last hour of trading nearly every day. But on Monday, stocks soared at the end of the day. Joseph Saluzzi, co-head of stock trading at Themis Trading, says some investors watched the market rise all day, hoping for a decline so they could buy in more cheaply. But when that never happened, they feared missing out on the big rally and rushed to buy stocks.
In addition, some large institutions, such as index funds, have a policy of making their trades at day’s end, which can lead to exaggerated late moves.
Other investors stepped back late in the day. Tom O’Halloran, manager of the 8 million Lord Abbett Developing Growth fund, began placing buy orders as soon as he arrived at his Jersey City, N.J., office. He filled about a third of his buy orders in the morning in the small emerging-markets, technology and energy names his fund focuses on, but then stopped as the market moved up. He added to positions in Maryland-based software firm Vocus Inc. and Houston-based Complete Production Services Inc.
By afternoon, Mr. O’Halloran began selling out of concern that some stocks were becoming too pricey. This included San Diego medical-device maker NuVasive Inc. and Las Vegas leisure company Allegiant Travel Co., which was up 23% on Monday.
"The levels of fear in the marketplace, combined with continued efforts on the parts of policy makers to ease the credit crisis, were the ingredients for the very powerful rally today," he says. "There was such extreme pessimism and fear at the end of the week, that the market was set up for a big rally" on Monday.
One surprise: Banking stocks, which had been among the most beaten down, didn’t rise as much as the overall market. That was partly because many of them had risen strongly Friday on expectations of a global bailout program, despite the broad-market decline. The banks’ failure to keep up on Monday also reflected continued concerns about their strength.
The big winners on Monday were stocks tied to economic growth, which suggests that investors believe any recession will be relatively short. Energy companies were up 16%, basic-materials stocks such as mining companies were up 14%, and technology stocks were up nearly 12%. Industrial commodities, which had been suffering amid recession worries, staged a comeback. Copper futures jumped 8% in New York, the biggest percentage gain since 2006. Copper futures remained 43% below their July record, however.
Crude-oil futures jumped 4.5% to .19 a barrel, as gasoline, heating oil and natural gas futures also rose. Oil futures remained down 44% from their July record.
Gold futures, a place of refuge lately, fell, but not heavily, reflecting uncertainty about how long the rebound would last. They were down 1.9% to 8.90 an ounce.
Many of last week’s most battered stocks soared Monday. Morgan Stanley rose 87% after it closed on a billion investment from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.
Central banks acted in unison on Monday to help ease one key market strain — the demand for dollars by banks. Currency-swap arrangements between the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, the European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank were altered to "accommodate whatever quantity of U.S. dollar funding is demanded," according to a joint statement.
"When all the fixed-income people come back and play, we’ll see if we can maintain the rally," says Jason Weisberg, a trader with Seaport Securities.
—Liz Rappaport, Diya Gullapalli, David Gaffen and Mark Gongloff contributed to this article.Write to E.S. Browning at jim.browning@wsj.com and Annelena Lobb at annelena.lobb@wsj.com
I will be the first person to tell you that investing in the stock market is really really hard. Many speculators will have you believe that investing can be easy; that you can just push a few buttons on your computer to pick a few stocks and make a bunch of money, but I think we both know better than that!
Some people think that investing in bonds is a safer bet than investing in the stock market; and for the most part, they are right. But there are some traps that you can get sucked into, especially in the municipal bond market and that is exactly what I want to talk about in this article today.
Someone once told me that there is no such thing as a really bad bond… as long as you find one at the right price! I suppose that’s probably true, but it begs the question… what is the right price?
Investing in municipal bonds can be tricky because it is often hard to determine what the correct price should be. Generally speaking I find that bond valuations confuse the heck out of the average investor because unless you’ve taken an advanced finance or economics class in bond pricing, then the math may be beyond you.
What is so enticing about municipal bonds is that many municipalities offer relatively high tax exempt yields and so you really should have some of them in your investment portfolio no matter what.
But don’t get lulled into a false sense of security, as these types of bonds have significantly higher risk than your regular money market account even though they are simply stodgy old bonds. As far as risks go, they are much riskier than regular US government bonds because US bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury whereas municipal bonds aren’t backed up by much of anything. And yes municipalities do go bankrupt all the time so you have to be careful.
Here are some other risks that are involved that you may not have thought about for munis.
The first risk is the same risk that all bonds hold, and that is the interest rate risk. With bonds, when interest rates rise – the market value of the bond falls because bonds have an inverse relation between yield and price. When price goes up, the yield goes down, and when the yield goes up price goes down.
The next risk is default, as I already mentioned. Yes it is true that defaults are not very common… but the fact remains the same, defaults can and do happen especially in times of recession like we are currently in right now in 2010.
Finally, many brokers simply don’t specialize in municipal bonds and may steer you the wrong way. Check to see if your stockbroker has a specific musical bond department and if so only deal with them. If they don’t, consider finding a firm that specializes in municipal bonds just for that portion of your portfolio.
Yes, there are risks in municipal bonds but the tax advantages and the higher yields will usually outweigh those risks. As with any investment opportunity, be sure to do your homework before you make an investment decision.
Bond Investing ? Overview
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Ghost Town of Rhyolite, Nevada (13)
Image by Ken Lund
Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County, in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, near the eastern edge of Death Valley. The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners, and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region’s biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure including piped water, electric lines, and railroad transportation that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study’s findings proved unfavorable, the company’s stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite’s population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.
After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were scavenged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved. From 1988 to 1998, three companies operated a profitable open-pit mine at the base of Ladd Mountain, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite. The Goldwell Open Air Museum lies on private property just south of the ghost town, which is on public property overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
The town is named for rhyolite, an igneous rock composed of light-colored silicates, usually buff to pink and occasionally light gray. It belongs to the same rock class, felsic, as granite but is much less common.[2] The Amargosa River, which flows through Beatty, gets its name from the Spanish word for "bitter", amargo. In its course, the river takes up large amounts of salts, which give it a bitter taste.[3]
"Bullfrog" was the name Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest "Ed" Cross, the prospectors who started the Bullfrog gold rush, gave to their mine. As quoted by Robert D. McCracken in A History of Beatty, Nevada, Harris said during a 1930 interview for Westways magazine, "The rock was green, almost like turquoise, spotted with big chunks of yellow metal, and looked a lot like the back of a frog."[4] The Bullfrog Mining District, the Bullfrog Hills, the town of Bullfrog, and other geographical entities in the region took their name from the Bullfrog Mine.[5] "Bullfrog" became so popular that Giant Bullfrog, Bullfrog Merger, Bullfrog Apex, Bullfrog Annex, Bullfrog Gold Dollar, Bullfrog Mogul, and most of the district’s other 200 or so mining companies included "Bullfrog" in their names.[6]
"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 what became the town of Beatty. In 1906, he sold the ranch to the Bullfrog Water, Power, and Light Company.[7] "Shoshone" in "Montgomery Shoshone Mine" refers to the Western Shoshone people indigenous to the region. In about 1875, the Shoshone had six camps along the Amargosa River near Beatty. The total population of these camps was 29, and because game was scarce, they subsisted largely on seeds, bulbs, and plants gathered throughout the region, including the Bullfrog Hills.[8]
The Bullfrog Hills are at the western edge of the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. Extensionally-faulted volcanic rocks, ranging in age from about 13.3 million years to about 7.6 million years, overlie the region’s Paleozoic sedimentary rocks.[9] The prevailing rocks, which contain the ore deposits, are a series of rhyolitic lava flows[10] that built to a combined thickness of about 8,000 feet (2,400 m) above the more ancient rock.[11] After the flows ceased, tectonic stresses fractured the area into many separate fault blocks.[9] Most of these blocks tilt to the east, and the horizontal banding of individual flows shows clearly on their western scarps.[12] Within the blocks, the ore deposits tend to occur in nearly vertical mineralized faults or fault zones in the rhyolite. Most of the lodes in the Bullfrog Hills are not simple veins but rather fissure zones with many stringers of vein material.[13]
Rhyolite is at the northern end of the Amargosa Desert in Nye County in the U.S. state of Nevada. Nestled in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km) northwest of Las Vegas, it is about 60 miles (97 km) south of Goldfield, and 90 miles (140 km) south of Tonopah. Roughly 4 miles (6.4 km) to the east lie Beatty and the Amargosa River. To the west, roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from Rhyolite, the Funeral and Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range rise between the Amargosa Desert in Nevada and Death Valley in California. State Route 374, passing about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) south of Rhyolite, links Beatty to Death Valley via Daylight Pass. Rhyolite is about 25 miles (40 km) west of Yucca Mountain and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, which is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site.[14][15][16]
Surrounded on three sides by ridges but open to the south, the ghost town is at 3,800 feet (1,200 m) above sea level.[1] The high points of the ridges are Ladd Mountain to the east, Sutherland Mountain to the west, and Busch Peak to the north.[17] Sawtooth Mountain, the highest point in the Bullfrog Hills, rises to 6,002 feet (1,829 m) above sea level about 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest of Rhyolite.[18] The hills form a barrier between the Amargosa Desert and Sarcobatus Flat to the north. Most of the primary mining communities in the Beatty–Rhyolite area during the gold-rush boom of 1904–08 were either in or on the edge of the Bullfrog Hills.[19] Of these and many smaller towns and camps in the Bullfrog district, only Beatty survived as a populated place.[20] Prior to its demise, the rival town of Bullfrog lay about 0.75 miles (1.21 km) southwest of Rhyolite, and the Montgomery Shoshone Mine was on the north side of Montgomery Mountain, about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) northeast of Rhyolite.[14]
Nevada’s main climatic features are bright sunshine, low annual precipitation, heavy snowfall in the higher mountains, clean, dry air, and large daily temperature ranges. Strong surface heating occurs by day and rapid cooling by night, and usually even the hottest days have cool nights. The average percentage of possible sunshine in southern Nevada is more than 80 percent. Sunshine and low humidity in this region account for an average evaporation, as measured in evaporation pans, of more than 100 inches (2,500 mm) of water a year.[21]
Beatty, about 500 feet (150 m) lower in elevation than Rhyolite, receives only about 6 inches (152 mm) of precipitation a year. July is the hottest month in Beatty, when the average high temperature is 97 °F (36 °C) and the average low is 61 °F (16 °C). December and January are the coolest months with an average high of 54 °F (12 °C) and an average low of 27 °F (−3 °C) in December and 28 °F (−2 °C) in January.[22] Rhyolite is high enough in the hills to have relatively cool summers, and it has relatively mild winters. However, it is far from sources of water.[17]
On August 9, 1904, Cross and Harris found gold on the south side of a southwestern Nevada hill later called Bullfrog Mountain.[23] Assays of ore samples from the site suggested values up to ,000 a ton,[24] or about ,000 a ton in 2009 dollars when adjusted for inflation.[25] Word of the discovery spread to Tonopah and beyond, and soon thousands of hopeful prospectors and speculators rushed to what became known as the Bullfrog Mining District.[26]
Within the district, gold rush settlements quickly arose near the mines, and Rhyolite became the largest.[27] It sprang up near the most promising discovery, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, which in February 1905 produced ores assayed as high as ,000 a ton,[28] equivalent to 2,000 a ton in 2009.[25] Starting as a two-man camp in January 1905, Rhyolite became a town of 1,200 people in two weeks and reached a population of 2,500 by June 1905. By then it had 50 saloons, 35 gambling tables, cribs for prostitution, 19 lodging houses, 16 restaurants, half a dozen barbers, a public bath house, and a weekly newspaper, the Rhyolite Herald. Four daily stage coaches connected Goldfield, 60 miles (97 km) to the north, and Rhyolite. Rival auto lines ferried people between Rhyolite and Goldfield and the rail station in Las Vegas in Pope-Toledos, White Steamers, and other touring cars.[27]
Ernest Alexander "Bob" Montgomery, the original owner, and his partners sold the mine to industrialist Charles M. Schwab in February 1906.[29] Schwab expanded the operation on a grand scale, hiring workers, opening new tunnels and drifts, and building a huge mill to process the ore. He had water piped in, paid to have an electric line run 100 miles (160 km) from a hydroelectric plant at the foot of the Sierras to Rhyolite, and contracted with the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad to run a spur line to the mine.[30] Three railroads eventually served Rhyolite. The first was the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad (LVTR), which began running regular trains to the city on December 14, 1906.[31] Its depot, built in California-mission style, cost about 0,000,[32] equivalent to about ,110,000 in 2009.[25] About a half-year later, the Bullfrog Goldfield Railroad (BGR) began regular service from the north. By December 1907, the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad (TTR) began service to Rhyolite on tracks leased from the BGR. The TTR was built to reach the borax-bearing colemanite beds in Death Valley as well as the gold fields.[31]
By 1907, about 4,000 people lived in Rhyolite, according to Richard E. Lingenfelter in Death Valley & the Amargosa: A Land of Illusion.[32] Russell R. Elliott cites an estimated population of 5,000 in 1907–08 in Nevada’s Twentieth-Century Mining Boom, noting that "accurate population figures during the boom are impossible to obtain".[33] Alan H. Patera in Rhyolite: The Boom Years states published estimates of the peak population have been "as high as 6,000 or 8,000, but the town itself never claimed more than 3,500 through its newspapers".[34] The newspapers estimated that 6,000 people lived in the Bullfrog mining district, which included the towns of Rhyolite, Bullfrog, Gold Center, and Beatty as well as camps at the major mines.[34]
Rhyolite in 1907 had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains, telephone and telegraph lines, daily and weekly newspapers, a monthly magazine, police and fire departments, a hospital, school, opera house, and stock exchange, and two churches. Most prominent was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than ,000,[32] equivalent to ,150,000 in 2009.[25] Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices and the post office as well as the bank. Other large buildings included the train depot, the three-story Overbury Block, the two-story eight-room school, and the Bottle House. A miner named Tom T. Kelly built the Bottle House in February 1906 from 50,000 discarded beer and liquor bottles.[32] Another building housed the Rhyolite Mining Stock Exchange, which opened on March 25, 1907, with 125 members, including brokers from New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The small, modestly-equipped storefront listed shares of 74 Bullfrog companies and a similar number of companies in nearby mining districts. Sixty thousand shares changed hands on the first day, and by the end of the second week the number had topped 750,000.[35]
Although the mine produced more than million (equivalent to ,900,000 in 2009)[25] in bullion in its first three years, its shares declined from a share (in historical dollars) to less than .[37] In February 1908, a committee of minority stockholders, suspecting that the mine was overvalued, hired a British mining engineer to conduct an inspection. The engineer’s report was unfavorable, and news of this caused a sudden further decline in share value from to 75 cents.[38] Schwab expressed disappointment when he learned that "the wonderful high-grade [ore] that had brought [the mine] fame was confined to only a few stringers and that what he had actually bought was a large low-grade mine."[37] Although the mine was still profitable, by 1909 no new ore was being discovered, and the value of the remaining ore steadily decreased. In 1910, the mine operated at a loss for most of the year, and on March 14, 1911, it was closed. By then, the stock, which had fallen to 10 cents a share, slid to 4 cents and was dropped from the exchanges.[39]
Rhyolite began to decline before the final closing of the mine. At roughly the same time that the Bullfrog mines were running out of high-grade ore, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake diverted capital to California, and the financial panic of 1907 restricted funding for mine development. As mines in the district reduced production or closed, unemployed miners left Rhyolite to seek work elsewhere, businesses failed, and by 1910, the census reported only 675 residents.[40] All three banks in the town closed by March 1910. The newspapers, including the Rhyolite Herald, the last to go, all shut down by June 1912. The post office closed in November 1913; the last train left Rhyolite Station in July 1914, and the Nevada-California Power Company turned off the electricity and removed its lines in 1916.[41] Within a year the town was "all but abandoned",[41] and the 1920 census reported a population of only 14.[34] A 1922 motor tour by the Los Angeles Times found only one remaining resident, a 92-year-old man who died in 1924.[42]
Much of Rhyolite’s remaining infrastructure became a source of building materials for other towns and mining camps. Whole buildings were moved to Beatty. The Miners’ Union Hall in Rhyolite became the Old Town Hall in Beatty, and two-room cabins were moved and reassembled as multi-room homes. Parts of many buildings were used to build a Beatty school.[43]
Rhyolite, maintained by the Bureau of Land Management,[44] is "one of the most photographed ghost towns in the West".[45] Ruins include the railroad depot and other buildings, and the Bottle House, which the Famous Players Lasky Corporation, the parent of Paramount Pictures, restored in 1925 for the filming of a silent movie, The Air Mail.[46] The ruins of the Cook Bank Building were used in the 1964 film The Reward and again in 2004 for the filming of The Island.[47] Orion Pictures used Rhyolite for its 1987 science-fiction movie Cherry 2000 depicting the collapse of American society.[48] Other movies that used Rhyolite as a setting include Ride ‘em Cowboy (1931), Rough Riders Round-Up (1939), The Arrogant (1987), Delusion (1991), Ramona! (1992), Ultraviolet (1992), Six-String Samurai (1998), and Twice as Dead (2001).[46] Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park managed by a nonprofit corporation, is located at the southern entrance to the ghost town.[49] The Rhyolite-Bullfrog cemetery, with many wooden headboards, is also near the southern entrance.[50]
Tourism flourished in and near Death Valley in the 1920s, and souvenir sellers set up tables in Rhyolite to sell rocks and bottles on weekends.[51] In the 1930s, Revert Mercantile of Beatty acquired a Union Oil distributorship, built a gas station in Beatty, and supplied pumps in other locations, including Rhyolite. The Rhyolite service station consisted of an old caboose and a pump managed by a local owner.[52] In 1937, the train depot became a casino and bar called the Rhyolite Ghost Casino, which was later turned into a small museum and curio shop that remained open into the 1970s.[50
Mining in and near Rhyolite after 1920 consisted mainly of working old tailings[50] until a new mine opened in 1988 on the south side of Ladd Mountain. A company known as Bond Gold built an open-pit mine and mill at the site, about 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Rhyolite 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.[53] The mine used a chemical extraction process known as vat leaching[54] involving the use of a weak cyanide solution. The process, like heap leaching, makes it possible to process ore profitably that otherwise would not qualify as mill-grade. Over its entire life, the mine processed about 2,800,000 short tons (2,540,000 t) of ore and produced about 690,000 ounces (19,600 kg) of gold.[53] At 1998 prices, the gold was worth about 0 million.[55]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyolite,_Nevada
Bond investing, like gold investing, is a low return/low risk type of investment. But bond investing can be far more complicated than it looks. It may also happen that the company that has issued bonds ultimately goes bust, then the people who have participated in the process of Bond Investing by purchasing the bonds issued by that particular company have nothing to do but consider their investment as bad debt, an debt that cannot be recovered.
Many investors maintain a diversified investment portfolio consisting of bonds, stocks and cash in varying percentages depending upon their individual circumstances and objectives. Because bonds typically have a predictable stream of income and repay principal at maturity, many invest in them to preserve and increase their capital or to receive dependable interest income.
When investing in bonds, it’s important to remember that an investment’s return is linked to its risk. Risks common to most all bonds include:
Credit Risk – financial risk that the issuer will not be able to repay the principal upon maturity as promised Call Risk – longer-term bonds are usually callable. The bonds may be called before the maturity date if interest rates decrease Market Risk – if the bond must be sold before the maturity date, the bond may be worth more or less than the face value depending on interest rate movements. Liquidity Risk – some securities are very hard to sell if there is a thin trading market or if the bond is relatively unknown.
Managing the various risks of bond investing is paramount to our overall fixed income strategy. Make sure that your risk tolerance is okay for the type of bond you have selected. Investors should also keep in mind that the more long term their bonds are, the more exposed they will be to interest rate fluctuations.
Know your needs Bond investing doesn’t fit everyone’s investment priorities.