Jim Butler Days

At ten o’clock on the Saturday of Jim Butler Days, the parade steps off down Main Street in Tonopah. In 2026 the grand marshal was Douglas “Stretch” Baker, who drove a tractor along the route and threw goodies to the crowd at the curb, while children ran into the street after candy tossed from the floats. The Hasana Dance Troupe took first place for its swirling footwork. The Tonopah Historic Mining Park took second with a float decorated for the nation’s 250th birthday, and the Zelzah Shriners took third in their miniature cars. Winners are announced on the Downtown Event Plaza half an hour after the parade ends.

Joni Eastley, who leads the Jim Butler Days Committee, explained the choice of Baker: “Whenever there’s a project to be done around town, you can be sure to find Stretch involved. He has contributed in major ways to every mural and monument here and deserved to be recognized. He’s our ‘let’s get it done’ guy who never says ‘no’.”

The parade is the center of a week-long celebration of the town’s founding, held every Memorial Day weekend in the Nye County seat. Admission is free. The 55th edition ran from Sunday, May 17, to Monday, May 25, 2026. It opened at the Tonopah Convention Center with a pageant and coronation. Marc and Tiffany Grigory were crowned King and Queen, Laurali Nicholson was named Little Miss Tonopah, and Oakley Miller was named Mini Miss Tonopah. A talent show followed. The town’s kindergarten promotion, middle school promotion and high school graduation fell in the same week. On Thursday there was kick-off karaoke at Tonopah Liquor Company and a ghost tour leaving from the lobby of the Mizpah Hotel. Eastley’s invitation to outsiders: “Tonopah’s central location in the state makes it equally inconvenient for everyone, so come on over and stay for a few days.”

Single jack, double jack and the muck pile

After the parade, Eastley told the Pahrump Valley Times, “hundreds of people head over to the Tonopah Elks Lodge to watch the Nevada State Mining Championships, where men and women compete for big dollars and the honor of taking home silver hammers and shovels.” The morning starts with the Muckers Pancake Breakfast and a build-your-own Bloody Mary bar at the lodge. Competition begins at noon, and the Elks run a no-host bar.

Jacking means driving a steel bit into rock with a hand hammer. A Las Vegas Sun writer described the events in 1996. Single-jack drilling was then a men-only contest in which each contestant pounded a chisel into a 42-inch-deep block of blue granite, and the winner drove it farthest, fastest. Double-jack was coed, with one partner holding and the other driving. “I’ve seen a lot of knuckles broken (in the double-jack contest),” Jim Merlino told the Sun. “I did it one year and learned my lesson.” In mucking, contestants race with hand shovels to fill an ore car with rock and dirt. During the boom years, Merlino said, a single miner filled 11 to 14 of the one-ton cars a day: “Some men would fill 30 cars a day — 30 tons.”

In 2026 Tom Donovan announced the championships and Eastley kept the statistics. Taskar Eason and James Eason won the men’s team mucking. Lisa Maslach and Hannah Dowers won the women’s, and Baker presented the checks. In 2025 about 700 people watched over six hours of competition. On Sunday morning the lodge holds the youth and junior events, where children muck dirt just as the adults did the day before.

From the plaza to the speedway

Friday is when the crowds arrive. Food trucks line Brougher Avenue all day, and the Tonopah Historic Mining Park opens free from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday through Sunday. Music on the Downtown Event Plaza begins at 1:30 with local talent. In 2026 the Tomahawk Jones Band, Mikala Braska and Lie For Fun followed, and the Williams Brothers Band played at 8 p.m. Between sets came a frozen T-shirt contest, a stein-holding contest and, at 6 p.m., the bartender’s race. Tonopah Liquor Company poured whiskey tastings that afternoon. At the Convention Center the craft and vendor fair offered handcrafted jewelry, artisan soaps and baked goods. It ran two days for the first time in 2026, a change Eastley said shoppers “seemed very appreciative” of.

Saturday fills the rest of the town. A blacksmith works all day at the Mining Park, and there is gold panning at the Elks Lodge. Wine is poured in the Mizpah Hotel’s Jack Dempsey Room, named, the Sun reported in 1996, for the heavyweight champion who once worked there as a bouncer. Tonopah Brewing Company holds a craft beer tasting, and horseshoe pitchers compete at the Joe Friel Sports Complex. In 2026 Tonopah Community Church held an open house at St. Mark’s Church for the building’s 120th birthday. Author Jackie Boor, great-granddaughter of Tonopah’s first sheriff, signed copies of Logan: The Honorable Life and Scandalous Death of a Western Lawman at the Central Nevada Museum on Friday, the Mizpah on Saturday and the Mining Park on Sunday. That evening the Central Nevada Racing Association ran pro stocks, mini dwarfs, mini stocks, IMCA sport mods, IMCA modifieds and hobby stocks at Tonopah Speedway, and Lie For Fun played again at Tonopah Liquor Company at 9:30.

On Sunday afternoon the Jim Butler Stampede, put on by Ladner Rodeo Productions, fills the Tonopah Fairgrounds & Arena. The program includes bulls, ranch bronc riding, mini bulls, team roping, barrel racing and junior peewee barrels, with buckles and added money at stake. The 2025 crowd was estimated at 900 or more. At 6 p.m. the cowboy singer Dave Stamey gave a free concert at the Convention Center, sponsored by Ioneer Mining. “As part of the evening, Stamey was presented with a special resolution adopted by the Tonopah Town Board designating his song ‘Tonopah’ as the official town song,” Eastley said, adding that people had come from California, Texas and Arizona to hear him. Cowboy karaoke followed at Shotgun Willy’s Saloon in Tonopah Station.

Monday belongs to the VFW. Ceremonies are held at the Tonopah Cemetery at 10 a.m. and the Goldfield Cemetery at noon. At 1 p.m. comes the Airmen’s Memorial Wall at the old Tonopah Army Air Field, where 750 B-24 combat crews trained between February 1944 and August 1945. VFW Post 1103 serves lunch afterward, and the public is invited. In 2026 the Tonopah Volunteer Fire Department flew a large American flag from a fire engine all weekend. The raffle is drawn at the Elks Lodge at 2 p.m.

Twenty-sixth, fiftieth, fifty-fifth

In 1996 the Sun’s David Renzi called that year’s celebration the 26th. He described Tonopah as a former silver town of about 3,000 people, 210 miles north of Las Vegas and 240 miles south of Reno, with Jim Butler Days banners hanging outside its restaurants. Merlino, then 39, was a second-generation Tonopahan and director of the Convention Center. “Tonopah has been a victim of a boom-and-bust cycle (from the beginning),” he said. That year every Jim Butler who came to town was to serve as a grand marshal, and Merlino had six confirmations.

The 50th celebration was set for 2020 and was canceled because of the pandemic. It was held in 2021 instead. “We are moving full steam ahead,” Eastley said that March. The 2021 plans included Walk the Rock and a Sunday concert by the Reeves Brothers of Pahrump.

The 2025 theme was “Try That in a Small Town,” after the Jason Aldean song, and the crowns went to a well-known couple, Sam and Jim Merlino. Eastley counted more than 1,000 visitors over the three-day weekend, and nearly all the area hotels were sold out. Nye County Sheriff Joe McGill reported no incidents requiring a law enforcement response. Every year Mike Truesdell of Mike’s Rubbish and Recycling sets trash receptacles throughout downtown and keeps his men checking them through the weekend.

A burro, a windowsill and an assay in Austin

Tonopah Springs, the town history says, was an Indian campground long before Butler spent a chilly night there. Tonopah is a Shoshone word meaning “small water,” according to the Sun. The festival’s own site tells the discovery story under the words “Legend has it.” Camping near the spring in May 1900, Butler went after his burro when it wandered off and picked up a rock to throw at it, and the rock held promising ore. The town’s history calls the animal a mule, gives the date as May 19, 1900, and says Butler noticed an outcropping laced with silver when he found the animal.

The accounts agree that no one at first believed him. According to the town history, an assayer at Klondike called the samples worthless, mostly iron, and threw them into the back of his tent. Butler gathered more samples on his way home and set them on the windowsill of his Monitor Valley ranch. There Tasker Oddie, later governor of Nevada, saw them and offered to pay for another assay in exchange for a quarter interest. Oddie in turn gave a quarter of his quarter to Walter Gayhart, an assayer in Austin. The festival site calls Gayhart a chemistry teacher and puts the ore at more than $200 a ton. The town history says it ran as high as $600. Oddie sent an Indian runner to the ranch with the news, but Butler stayed to finish his hay harvest. Meanwhile prospectors from Klondike searched the springs for his lode without finding it.

On August 27, 1900, Butler and his wife filed eight claims at Belmont. The Mining Park’s account says Belle Butler urged him to return to the site. Six of the claims, the Desert Queen, Burro, Valley View, Silver Top, Buckboard and Mizpah, became some of the biggest producers Nevada ever had. For a one-quarter share, Wilse Brougher hauled the first ore by horse and wagon to Austin, and from there it went by rail to Salt Lake City. That shipment netted the partners $500. Short of capital, the Butlers leased claims by the foot on a handshake, and the cry “Jim, how about a lease?” went through the camp. Work on the Mizpah began in October 1900, and a camp called Butler grew up beside it. On Christmas Day, 1900, fourteen men lived there. A post office named Butler opened on April 10, 1901, and was renamed Tonopah on March 3, 1905. By the town history’s count, the district’s total production came to just over $150 million.

Butler died in 1926 and is buried in Sacramento, California. He does not lie among the miners in the old Tonopah Cemetery, used from 1901 to 1911, where one headstone reads: “Forgotten by everybody but God.”