This sort of thing is THE hallmark (not just A hallmark!) of the Intermountain West. Towns frequently burst into existence around the discovery of an ore body with precious metals. But precious metals being what they are, they are typically rare, and so while an ore body might seem promising, it was a finite resource and typically limited at that. This resulted in a rush to the new location with people eager for an opportunity to strike a claim, find a job, or to provide essential services. This often resulted is a sudden rise in population and the building of a lot of structures. When the ore was exhausted, the population would just as suddenly dwindle. Buildings were often hauled away to the next boom - or they fell victim to a harsh environment.

If the community was sufficiently long-lived and promising, it might succeed in establishing itself as the seat of county government, with the promise of a few jobs when the boom subsided. That said, seats of government can be moved - and they frequently are - so even this source of revenue and employment was vulnerable, and some communities went from shadows of their former selves to complete oblivion.

There are hundreds of instances of all of this in the vast uninhabited outback of Nevada, the seventh largest state in the nation (with roughly 87% of its land under federal management). In the nineteenth century, Hamilton was home to an important mining boom and became the county seat of White Pine County. It yielded that title to Ely, which retains it to this day. Dayton prospered as a result of it being able to offer milling to the Comstock Mining District, but as the mines failed, so did Dayton. It retained the title of Lyon County seat until its courthouse burned in 1910 (locals maintain it was arson caused by someone who wanted to move the seat of government). Dayton subsequently dwindled, although it has enjoyed a recent resurgence as a bedroom community. Yerington took the seat of government, and it retains that title.

Austin in central Nevada became a boomtown with such promise that everyone thought it would overtake Virginia City, which was suffering a slump (Virginia City's mines prospered for an astounding two decades before it also crashed). An entrepreneur even moved Virginia City's International Hotel to Austin in the mid 1860s, and Austin became the seat of government for Lander County (building what is likely the nation's last Greek revival courthouse, erected in 1872). Its mines quickly failed. It lost a part of Lander County to neighboring Eureka County (experiencing another mining boom-bust cycle), but it retained its government for nearly another century until Battle Mountain was able to take the seat of Lander County government.

One of the most dramatic examples of this phenomenon involved Goldfield, often put forward as the site of the last gold rush in the continental US. Shortly after the turn of the century, thousands flooded into remote south-central Nevada and established the town of Goldfield, which quickly took the title of Esmeralda County government from Hawthorne (which had earlier taken it from failing Aurora, now a ghost town). At one point Goldfield had about 25,000 people and was the largest city in Nevada. Its mines failed within a decade, and eventually Hawthorne began a fight to regain its seat of government: although its mines had also failed, it was able to claim other means of support. Ultimately, the Nevada government split the enormous Esmeralda County to form two new counties, so both places could have the benefit of county government. Goldfield and its diminished Esmeralda County declined until that enormous piece of real estate (rivalling the size of some smaller states) had only a little more than 300 residents.

This cycle of boom and bust has resulted in what may be a record for the most times that "largest community in the territory/state" has been exchanged: That title has moved from Dayton (AKA Chinatown) to Mormon Station (AKA Genoa) to Carson City to Virginia City to Reno, to Goldfield, back to Reno, and finally (or so far!!!) to Las Vegas. That's eight times that the title has moved; whether that is record could be contested here, but it is certainly remarkable.

This is a pattern throughout the mining West, caused by an industry with resources located in remote, often inhabitable land, where cities boomed into existence because of the attraction of wealth, and then just as quickly disappear. Two state parks are dedicated to this phenomenon: California's Bodie State Park and Nevada's Berlin State Park both commemorate the nineteenth-century quest for wealth and ingenuity that it took to scrape together an existence where nature provided little - together with the inevitable abandonment of the towns when it was no longer possible tor resist the effects of gravity.

I'll answer this from a slightly different angle, in how these towns entertained themselves, using three ice hockey teams as examples:

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, was the home of the first openly professional ice hockey league during the early 1900s, a direct response to a mining boom, particularly copper, that occured. The governing bodies in Canada refused to allow professionals, but the US was a little more lax on amateurism (at least in regards to hockey, at that time), so the International Hockey League was formed in 1904, based in several towns that grew due to the mining industry (and Pittsburgh, as it had an arena with artificial ice, I believe the first to do so). But with the 1907 crash in commodities, and the subsequent legalisation of professionals in Canada at the same time, the IHL folded up; however most of the top ice hockey players of the era played at least a few games in the league during this time period, giving it some added notoriety. Just a small note about the impact of boom-towns and what happens around them.

The Klondike Goldrush also saw the formation of an ice hockey team in Dawson City, Yukon, though several years after the goldrush had ended. The team, the Dawson City Nuggets, are most known for their 1905 Stanley Cup challenge, in which they travelled across Canada, travelling variously by train, dog sled, boat, and walking, until they reached Ottawa and played the strongest team in the country, the Senators (known unofficially as the Silver Seven). The Nuggets would proceed to lose the two-game series 9-2 and then 23-2, the latter being the largest margin of victory in a Stanley Cup game.

A similar situation happened with the Ontario town of Kenora, known as Rat Portage until 1905. It experience a minor boom when the Canadian Pacific Railway built a stop there in 1877, lasting until about 1908. They established a hockey team, the Thistles, comprised entirely of local players, and competed for the Stanley Cup four times between 1903 and 1907, winning in January 1907. With some 5000 people in the town at the time they were, and remain, the smallest city/town to win the Cup, and after losing it in March 1907, the shortest holders of the trophy. The economic downturn, and advent of professionalism spelt the end of the team, which folded in 1908.

There are probably more examples I could add, but the above three are the most famous ones in hockey, and show both the rise and fall of boomtowns and their economies. All of them happened for simple reasons: these rapidly-growing towns/regions had an influx of people (mainly young, single men) who suddenly had a lot of disposable income, and they needed entertainment. Sports proved to be a great answer to that, especially as betting was a huge part of sports culture in the early 1900s (and far more open and prominent than today). Of course once the economic upswing ended in these places, the teams died out, just as quickly as they arrived, and they are now largely footnotes, somewhat insignificant in the overall status of hockey today (while the IHL helped push forward professionalism in Canada, it was arguably only a matter of time before that happened).

Sources: Interestingly enough, there are several academic papers on this very topic (at least for the IHL and the Thistles; nothing on the Nuggets that I know of, yet):

• Daniel Mason, The Origins and Development of the International Hockey League and Its Effects on the Sport of Professional Ice Hockey in North America (1994). Mason wrote his MA thesis on the IHL, which has come to be regarded as the major source for the league. He later published a condensed form as a journal article, "The International Hockey League and the Professionalization of Ice Hockey, 1904-1907" in Journal of Sport History

• John Wong, From Rat Portage to Kenora: The Death of a (Big-Time) Hockey Dream another article in Journal of Sport History looks at the economic impact of the Thistles, and how it shows the rise and fall of these boomtowns.

• For the overall impact of all three, I'd suggest:

• Michael McKinnley, Hockey's Rise from Sport to Spectacle (2000). Not an academic work, but thorough (even though he lifted a passage in the book from somewhere else; yes, plagiarised), and goes over these three examples in particular.

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Well I'm pretty late here but I thought I could maybe add something about buccaneer or pirate "boomtowns" in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The economic impact of theft at sea could be very important, not just to those whose wealth was stolen and not just to the thieves themselves but also to thriving communities in port side towns who set themselves up to benefit from this plunder, in many ways far more than the buccaneers and pirates ever did. These port side towns known today as "pirate havens" thrived on this sometimes huge influx of stolen plunder that the buccaneers brought back with them from their raids and usually recklessly spent ashore on alcohol and prostitution, or cheaply fenced to enterprising merchants.

Although their glory days are long gone, the names of some of these major havens in the Caribbean like Tortuga, Port Royal and Nassau still live on and conjure up images of drunken and debauched pirates rampaging through the streets. Of course something like this has always been a stereotype of sailors in all eras but the added impact of huge amounts of stolen plunder made these piratical and violent sailors especially extravagant and important. However, as European nations increasingly grew to have more peaceful and mutually beneficial trading relations with one another in the late 17th and early 18th century, those governments that had once given tacit or explicit support to the buccaneers as lawful privateers began to turn on them and outlaw them as pirates. And with that crackdown on piracy, those port side towns that had once thrived on it also quieted down faded away into obscurity. I believe the last real "pirate haven" came to an end in 1718 with the British capture of Nassau in the Bahamas, although by then the era when buccaneers could readily rely on real safe-havens offered by complicit local governors had already disappeared at least several decades earlier.

The heyday of Tortuga and Port Royal

One of the first notorious pirate havens in the Caribbean was the island of Tortuga off the north coast of Hispaniola (modern Haiti). Although claimed by the Spanish, it was first taken over and settled by French adventurers in about 1625 who survived by hunting wild cattle and pigs in the wilderness and then selling the hides and smoked meat to passing ships (the apparatus on which they smoked the meat was referred to as a boucan and this is where the words bacon and buccaneer come from). Despite only numbering a few dozen at first and despite being attacked and driven away several times by the Spanish, the French settlers on Tortuga and nearby Hispaniola always returned and quickly grew in number. By the early 1630s they were striking back at their Spanish attackers by undertaking acts of piracy against passing Spanish ships using small boats. By the 1640s and 1650s, the buccaneers had grown bolder and they were joined in Tortuga by hundreds of English and Dutch privateers who banded with them to attack the Spanish, either by capturing Spanish ships at sea or raiding coastal towns.

By the 1660s, buccaneers in Tortuga had reached the height of their power and frequently sacked large Spanish towns along the Caribbean before returning to Tortuga to spend their loot. The former buccaneer surgeon Alexandre Exquemelin writing in 1678 describes a typical return voyage of buccaneers under their ruthless leader Francois l'Olonnais after sacking the Spanish towns of Maracaibo and Gibraltar in 1666:

Having divided the spoils, the buccaneers set sail for Tortuga, where they arrived with great joy a month later. For some the joy was short-lived -- many could not keep their money three days before it was gambled away. However, those who had lost what they had were helped by the others. A short time previously, three ships had arrived from France with cargoes of wine and brandy, so liquor was very cheap. But this did not continue for long: prices quickly went up, and soon the buccaneers were paying four pieces of eight [equivalent to about $200] for a flagon of brandy. Tortuga at that time was full of traders and dealers. The governor got the ship laden with cacao for a twentieth of what it was really worth. The tavern-keepers got part of their money and the whores took the rest, so once more the buccaneers -- including l'Olonnais their chief -- had to consider ways of obtaining more booty. (Exquemelin, 104)

Although the governors and merchants in Tortuga benefited tremendously from all this, their ultimate control over things was often tenuous and nominal at best. The buccaneers tended to be strongly independent and violently ready to oppose government regulations. The French governor of Tortuga, Jean le Vasseur, was killed by the buccaneers in 1653 after a dispute. In 1669 when Bertrand d'Ogeron, the French appointed governor of Tortuga, attempted to impose trade restrictions and tariffs on the buccaneers living on the island, the buccaneers rose up in arms and shot at him in his boat. Then a group of them planned to attack the governor's fortress and kill him, only being dissuaded when two fully armed French warships showed up to intimidate the buccaneers into retreating to the woods. The French soldiers landed and burned down the buccaneers' houses but then negotiated and agreed to the buccaneers' demands of free trading rights.

These towns were often extremely violent places because pirates themselves were engaged in a very violent business. Exquemelin describes how buccaneers would frequently get into quarrels and kill each other or fight to the death in duels. The behavior of later pirates in the 1720s in a base they had established in Madagascar was described by one observer like this:

When we bartered with the Pyrates at Ranter-Bay for Provisions, they frequently shewed the Wickedness of their Dispositions, by quarrelling and fighting with each other upon the most trifling Occasions. It was their Custom never to go abroad, except armed with Pistols or a naked Sword in their Hand, to be in Readiness to defend themselves or to attack others. (Downing, 115)

During this same time in the English town of Port Royal in Jamaica, the situation was no less violent and chaotic. Captured from the Spanish in 1655, Port Royal quickly became an alternate base for buccaneers to freely spend their loot. As in Tortuga, the settlement in Jamaica was under constant threat of Spanish invasion to recapture the island and this contributed to it becoming a refuge for buccaneers who were longstanding enemies of Spain. As in Tortuga, the English, French and Dutch buccaneers came there to recklessly spend their loot on alcohol and women before departing again to bring back more. This was vividly described by the former buccaneer quoted earlier in his 1678 book The Buccaneers of America:

Captain Rock sailed for Jamaica with his prize, and lorded it there with his mates until all was gone. For that is the way with these buccaneers -- whenever they have hold of something, they don't keep it for long. They are busy dicing, whoring and drinking so long as they have anything to spend. Some of them will get through a good two or three thousand pieces of eight in a day -- and next day not have a shirt to their back. I have seen a man in Jamaica give 500 pieces of eight to a whore, just to see her naked. Yes, and many other impieties.

My own master often used to buy a butt of wine and set it in the middle of the street with the barrel-head knocked in, and stand barring the way. Every passer-by had to drink with him, or he'd have shot them dead with a gun he kept handy. Once he bought a cask of butter and threw the stuff at everyone who came by, bedaubing their clothes or their head, wherever best he could reach.

The buccaneers are generous to their comrades: if a man has nothing, the others will come to his help. The tavern-keepers let them have a good deal of credit, but in Jamaica one ought not to trust these people, for often they will sell you for debt, a thing I have seen happen many a time. Even the man I have just been speaking about, the one who gave the whore so much money to see her naked, and at that time had a good 3,000 pieces of eight -- three months later he was sold for his debts, by a man in whose house he had spent most of his money.

... but to return to our tale. Captain Rock soon squandered all his money, and was obliged to put to sea again with his mates.... (Exquemelin, 81-82)

This "Captain Rock" mentioned here was known by the nickname Rock Braziliano and was originally a Dutchman. He was known to be incredibly violent and Exquemelin goes on to describe how in the early days of Port Royal he would get drunk and prowl the streets with his henchmen, attacking random people who got in his way and hacking off their limbs or killing them with his cutlass. Apparently the governor and any law-keeping forces in Port Royal were too afraid to do anything or arrest him. In fact, they probably not only feared violent retaliation from Braziliano's own crew (who were probably capable of killing the governor just as French buccaneers had done in Tortuga) but more importantly if they made an example of him that it would scare off other buccaneers from using Port Royal as a safe-haven. That would not only deprive Port Royal of its main source of revenue but leave the town virtually defenseless against Spanish attacks.

Port Royal was grew to be referred by contemporaries as "the wickedest place on earth" and the "Sodom of the New World" one English clergyman wrote this description:

This town is the Sodom of the New World and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cutthroats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use and I could better preach of the Word of God elsewhere among a better sort of folk. (Talty, 139-40)

I spent some time as a youth in a small town in Missouri named "Excelsior Springs" which I've always thought of as a great example of a boom town.

The town of Excelsior Springs was formed around several fresh water springs in the area that all had different alleged "healing properties." Within a year of the town being officially founded by two men named Flack and Wyman in 1880, almost 200 homes had been built in the area.

By late 1881, schools, an opera, and several hotels (including this famous 1888 hotel I worked at briefly ) were being built. No other city in Missouri had ever seen as much growth as Excelsior Springs in a single year by this point. It continued to expand, building a golf course and becoming a destination for a few US Presidents.

Now before I continue, what made/makes Excelsior Springs springs so unique is their incredibly diverse and dense combinations of different minerals found in the waters. For example, there are only 4 springs in Europe that have relevant levels of Iron and Manganese, and the only two in the United States are located in Excelsior Springs. There are over 20 different springs with different levels of types of minerals, making it one of the most dense areas of mineral-enriched spring water in the world. This was the primary reason for the idea of the waters' healing properties, and the explosive growth of the town.

In 1963, with help from national organizations like the Arthritis and Rheumatism Foundation, legislation was passed that prevented many of the clinics that had opened in the area from advertising the spring water as "cures." In addition, the Saturday Evening Post published an article called The Hucksters of Pain which destroyed a lot of the credibility of the springs' healing properties.

A combination of modern medicine, the dying of 3 railroad nodes in the area, and former citizens leaving the city for greener pastures essentially killed off the city by the 1970's. You could say their main source of revenue... evaporated

It still exists today, and the Springs are still a tourist destination, but the amount of abandoned Art Deco buildings and boarding houses still seen today are both beautiful and indicative of a lost age for the small town.