Smoky Hill City, Kansas
Encyclopedia
Ghost town
A ghost town is an abandoned town or city. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, or due to natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, or nuclear disasters...
in Ellis County
Ellis County, Kansas
Ellis County is a county located in Northwest Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the county population was 28,452. Its county seat and most populous city is Hays...
, Kansas
Kansas
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. It lies approximately 12 miles (19.3 km) southwest of Hays
Hays, Kansas
Hays is a city in and the county seat of Ellis County, Kansas, United States. The largest city in northwestern Kansas, it is the economic and cultural center of the region. It is also a college town, home to Fort Hays State University...
.
History
The land was bought by Charles K. Holliday of TopekaTopeka, Kansas
Topeka |Kansa]]: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...
, and a townsite plat was filed with the county in 1899. Holliday began selling town lots. Some of the first residents came from the town of Chetolah, just across the Smoky Hill River
Smoky Hill River
The Smoky Hill River is a river in the central Great Plains of North America, running through the U.S. states of Colorado and Kansas.-Names:The Smoky Hill gets its name from the Smoky Hills region of north-central Kansas through which it flows...
. Chetolah had been founded ten years earlier in the anticipation of a railroad connection that was never built. With the influential Hollidays backing the new town of Smoky Hill City, residents of Chetolah deserted to the new town.
Charles Holliday was the son of railroad magnate Cyrus K. Holliday
Cyrus K. Holliday
Colonel Cyrus Kurtz Holliday was one of the founders of the township of Topeka, Kansas, in the mid 19th century; and was Adjutant General of Kansas during the American Civil War. The title Colonel, however, was honorary...
. Both father and son believed that the area contained valuable mineral deposits. The town was situated on the north bank of the Smoky Hill River to serve the gold mines that Charles Holliday imagined would spring up to mine the supposed gold
Gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au and an atomic number of 79. Gold is a dense, soft, shiny, malleable and ductile metal. Pure gold has a bright yellow color and luster traditionally considered attractive, which it maintains without oxidizing in air or water. Chemically, gold is a...
-bearing shale
Shale
Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock composed of mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals and tiny fragments of other minerals, especially quartz and calcite. The ratio of clay to other minerals is variable. Shale is characterized by breaks along thin laminae or parallel layering...
along the Smoky Hill River valley.
The idea that the shales of along the Smoky Hill River contained valuable minerals started in the mid-19th century as a swindle by native Americans who said that they knew of tin
Tin
Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn and atomic number 50. It is a main group metal in group 14 of the periodic table. Tin shows chemical similarity to both neighboring group 14 elements, germanium and lead and has two possible oxidation states, +2 and the slightly more stable +4...
mines along the Smoky Hill. In the 1890s, prospectors imagined that they found zinc
Zinc
Zinc , or spelter , is a metallic chemical element; it has the symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is the first element in group 12 of the periodic table. Zinc is, in some respects, chemically similar to magnesium, because its ion is of similar size and its only common oxidation state is +2...
in the shale of Ellis and adjacent Trego County, and then believed that they found gold. The delusion was abetted by unscrupulous assayers, and by swindlers selling secret metallurgical processes to extract gold from the shale. Vigorously warning against the gold delusion was Kansas state geologist Erasmus Haworth
Erasmus Haworth
Erasmus Haworth was an American geologist.Born on a farm near Indianola, Iowa, he graduated from the University of Kansas with a bachelor of science degree in 1883 and received a master's degree there the following year. He received his doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1888...
, even though the influential promoters threatened to have him fired for his opposition. The Ellis County gold boom sputtered along from 1895 to 1903, by which time (almost) everyone realized that there was no gold in the shale.
The designation of Smoky Hill City as a townsite was vacated by Ellis County in 1905, at the request of Charles Holliday. The settlement survived for several more years, but was eventually completely abandoned.