Beatty Days

The parade lines up at 8:30 in the morning in front of the Middle School on 4th Street. Entrants check in by 9:30 for a number and a category, and the procession starts downtown at 10:00. No candy is thrown from the route. In 2026 the parade falls on Saturday, October 31, Halloween, and the Beatty Chamber of Commerce bills it as Beatty’s 122nd Birthday Parade. Steven Sullivan is the Honorary Grand Marshal.

The parade is the center of Beatty Days, which the chamber calls the town’s birthday celebration and “Beatty’s Biggest Weekend.” The 2026 edition runs October 30 to November 1. “A small town throws a big party,” the chamber’s page says, and “everybody is invited.”

Three days around Cottonwood Park

Nearly everything happens at Cottonwood Park, at the corner of 3rd Street and Amargosa Street, where the chamber has its headquarters. A few events move out to the Middle School, the upper and lower parks, and the Community Center. The park has two stages, Upper and Lower. Higher Ground plays the upper one and the Wildhorse Band the lower.

Friday starts at noon, when the vendors open and the bands begin. At the Community Center the Las Vegas Garden Railway Club and others set up a model railroad exhibit. In the Small Room hang the entries of the 9th Annual Aaron Huisman Desert Art Contest, in painting and drawing and in sculpture, all on the desert landscape of rural Nevada. Prizes go to adults, to youth 12 to 17, and to youth 5 to 11. The Beatty Museum opens for personal tours. Down in the lower park, chicken drop bingo runs at the Cowboys Façade in sessions called the Morning Movement and the Afternoon Special. Tricycle races start at 3:00 in the upper park.

Evening belongs to the Upper Stage. The Halloween costume contest is at 5:15, and at 5:45 Miss and Jr. Miss Beatty Days are crowned. Miss Beatty is open to girls in the 9th through 12th grades and Jr. Miss to the 6th through 8th. Each contestant writes a one-page historical essay about Beatty from 1900 to the present and sells Beatty Days raffle tickets. The essay counts for 60 percent of the score and the ticket sales for 40. At 6:00 a 1900’s reenactment is staged in the lower park.

Saturday starts at 7:00 with the Senior Center pancake breakfast at the East Side Pavilion. At 8:30 the Tombstone 5K Run and 2K Walk leaves from Third and Amargosa over pavement, dirt and quad trail, and a tenth of its registration fees goes to the BVFD. After the parade come the ‘Still Cruisin’ Classic Car Show, from 11:00 to 3:00, and a trunk-or-treat at 11:30 among the parked cars. The show runs from originals and modified originals through hot rods, street rods, muscle cars, sports cars, trucks and rat rods. Best in Show pays $500 and a trophy, and a separate award goes to the best Halloween-decorated car. The Beatty Cowboys stage Old West shootouts in the lower park all day. Tours of the Goldwell Open Air Museum leave at 11:00 and 3:00.

The bed races start at 1:00 on Third Street, between Lewis Street and Amargosa. Teams push decorated beds down the course, with prizes for best time and best decorated bed. The Pahrump Valley Times, previewing the 2025 festival, counted the races among the event’s most popular parts, “with teams vying against one another to push a wheeled bed with rider to the finish line.” The afternoon goes on with an adult cornhole tournament at the basketball courts, a horseshoe tournament, and the poker walk winners on the Upper Stage. At 4:15 comes the Root Beer Drinking & Belching Contest on the Lower Stage, and at 4:45 the Pickle Liquor Hoot-N-Holler on the Upper. Vendors close at 7:00.

Sunday is shorter. The pancake breakfast moves to 8:00. Kids aged 5 to 12 play a cornhole tournament in the upper park, and B8Y Kids dance on the Lower Stage at 10:00. The pet parade steps off in the lower park at 11:00, with ribbons and trophies for the pets, and a hula hoop contest follows at noon.

Chili, a Packard, and 191 marchers

The cook-off at Beatty Days is sanctioned by the International Chili Society, and has been since the early 2000s, according to the Pahrump Valley Times. The 2026 contest is the 22nd annual. It is a regional cook-off, and its winner advances to the World Chili Cook-Off. Saturday’s categories are Red Chili and Chili Verde. Public tasting for the People’s Choice award begins at noon, judging at 2:30. A second heat on Sunday covers Red Chili and Home Style. In 2025 a newspaper photograph showed the entries kept under a canopy and guarded while the judges took their time sampling each one.

The 2025 festival ran from Friday, October 31 through Sunday, November 2, over Nevada Day weekend. “I personally think it went great!” Ginny Faulkner, the chamber’s senior administrator, told the Times-Bonanza afterward. “Between the three days, I am going to say we had about 600 people come out. We had 191 people who took part in the parade!” Kelly Carrol was Grand Marshal that year. Hailey Helms was Miss Beatty and Kyleigh Cathcart Jr. Miss Beatty, and Dave Bryan and Dee Crawford reigned as Beatty Days King and Queen. Allen Shrum took the Judges’ Best in Show at the car show with a 1939 Packard sedan. Among the vendors was AngloGoldAshanti, offering information on its mining activities and chances at raffle prizes. Representatives of the Bureau of Land Management led walking tours of Rhyolite at 11:30 and 3:30. That year’s desert art contest, the eighth, was sponsored by Eugene Huisman Butler.

Old Man Beatty’s ranch

The town the parade celebrates stands on a ranch. Montillus “Old Man” Beatty bought the Lander Ranch in the spring of 1896, according to the chamber’s history of the town. He came from Iowa and had enlisted in the Union Army at Lyons in May of 1861 with Company I of the Second Iowa Infantry. After a disability discharge he went west. He settled in the Oasis Valley with his Paiute wife, and they raised three children there: Maude, Montillus Jr., and Frank. He was an old miner, and the history says he opened his home to anyone passing through on the way to the Death Valley mines.

In August of 1904 Shorty Harris and Ed Cross found gold in a rock, and the Bullfrog Mining District began. In 1905 Bob Montgomery bought a large part of the Beatty Ranch, platted a town site, and named it Beatty for the rancher. The neighboring town of Bullfrog had no water, and Montgomery’s town did. Beatty became the first postmaster in January of 1905. He could not read or write and held the job about a year before going back to his claims. He died in December of 1908 after a fall from a wagon.

Railroads reached Beatty by 1906. In March of 1907 Montgomery sold the town site for $100,000 to Dr. W. S. Phillips of Chicago and E. S. Hoyt of Tonopah. To promote their purchase, they backed Railroad Days, which is said to have been one of the biggest celebrations seen in Nevada. A train from Los Angeles carried investors and party-goers to Beatty free of charge, and they were met with fresh fruit, seafood and champagne as they stepped off. Hoyt and Phillips advertised the town in newspapers around the world. Some of their ads showed paddle boats loaded with ore on the Amargosa River. The chamber’s history says Phillips was later found to have started one of the largest scams of the time, but that the promotion gave Beatty the jump start it needed.

From Rhyolite Days to Beatty Days

“Beatty Days did not start out as Beatty Days and had nothing to do with Beatty at all,” wrote Deborah M. Baker, who compiled a history of the celebration. “The thought was put together due to the deterioration of Rhyolite, a small ghost town just five miles from Beatty.”

Rhyolite was platted by the Bush Brothers three months after Beatty. The Pahrump Valley Times dates its decline from 1907 and says the town was completely deserted by 1924. The chamber’s history says the banks were gone by 1910, the last train left Rhyolite Station in 1914, and the 1920 census counted fourteen people. Many of Rhyolite’s buildings were hauled to Beatty whole or taken apart for lumber. Its Miners Union Hall became Beatty’s Old Town Hall. The concrete buildings and the Bottle House stayed behind and drew tourists.

Baker wrote that this interest led “a small group consisting of Kari Coughlin, Debbie Stez, Gloria Angelino and Andy Gudas, to name a few,” to form the Friends of Rhyolite in 1990, “dedicated to preserving the ghost town and the still-standing concrete buildings.” The group hosted a Rhyolite Festival in 1996 and 1997. In 1998 attendance dropped, and the Friends looked for help. The Beatty Museum had already run a successful Beatty Railroad Days of its own, and it stepped in and merged that event with Rhyolite Days. The Chamber of Commerce joined after that, and by 2001 it was the sole organizer of Beatty Days, as it has been since.

The chamber spends about $20,000 on the festival each year, chamber president Ann Marchand told the Pahrump Valley Times in May of 2020. The money pays for advertising, printing, stage rentals, performers, T-shirts and the chili sanction fees. That spring the chamber canceled the 2020 festival because of COVID-19. Marchand said the chamber could not buy event insurance, and that it stood to lose $38,000 in state tourism advertising grants. “I’d hate to see our vendors buy a lot of product to sell at Beatty Days, and then have to cancel at the last minute,” she said. When the cancellation was announced on Facebook, some residents called it premature. Marchand answered them: “I appreciate the fact that they love Beatty Days and want it to happen.”