Gila City

Overview

Arizona's first gold rush

In 1858 Col. Jacob Snively led a party of prospectors to gold in the gulches at the north end of the Gila Mountains, about 20 miles east of Yuma. The land was then part of New Mexico Territory. A camp grew up almost overnight on the south bank of the Gila River, beside the road the Butterfield Overland Mail used that year, and a post office opened on Christmas Eve 1858. It was Arizona's first major gold rush.

J. Ross Browne, who camped there in January 1864, wrote that more than a thousand people had worked the gulches at the height of the rush, and that traders arrived with whiskey, billiard tables, clothing and wagonloads of pork and beans. The town had, in his words, everything "but a church and a jail." Accounts of the diggings differ. Later writers called them rich. By their accounts miners panned $20 to $125 a day, and nuggets of up to 22 ounces went to the Wells Fargo office in Los Angeles. Browne thought they had never paid much. The gravels sat in dry hills, and the dirt had to be dry-washed on the spot or carried down to the river. When a steam engine meant to pump water to the diggings went down with the schooner Arno in 1859, many American miners gave up. Sonoran miners who knew the dry-wash method stayed.

The rich ground lasted about four years. In 1862 the La Paz strike up the Colorado drew most of the miners away, and the Great Flood of 1862 swept off what remained. The post office closed in July 1863. When Browne's party camped there, he found three chimneys and a coyote. J. B. Tenney, in an estimate cited by the state Bureau of Mines, put the placers' output before 1900 at roughly $500,000. Dry washers have picked over the gulches ever since, and a railroad stop named Dome grew up a mile and a half to the east. Nothing of Gila City survives.

Timeline

Boom, flood and dry washers

1. 1858Col. Jacob Snively leads prospectors to gold in the gulches at the north end of the Gila Mountains, about 20 miles east of Yuma. Within months more than a thousand people are digging, by later accounts.
2. 1858The Butterfield Overland Mail, running between St. Louis and San Francisco, passes through the camp.
3. Dec 24, 1858A post office opens for Gila City at Swivelers, a Butterfield station about a mile east. One source dates it to 1859.
4. Mar 1859The schooner Arno sinks near the mouth of the Colorado with a steam engine meant to pump river water to the diggings. Without water, most American miners can't make the dry gravels pay.
5. 1859Lt. Sylvester Mowry finds about 100 men and several families at work and watches more than $20 in gold come out of eight shovelfuls of dirt.
6. 1862The Great Flood of 1862 sweeps away what's left of the town. Most of the miners have already gone to the new gold rush at La Paz.
7. Jul 14, 1863The post office closes.
8. Jan 1864J. Ross Browne's party camps at the site. He later writes that the town consisted of three chimneys and a coyote.
9. 1865By now the best ground has been worked out. Dry washers keep picking over the gravels on a small scale.
10. 1870A San Francisco company pumps Gila River water to a hilltop reservoir to work the placers by hydraulic power. It doesn't last.
11. 1877A traveler, E. Conklin, spends a night at the Gila Hotel, a one-story mud building beside a stage stable and a corral. Six people live there.
12. 1892Dome, a railroad stop about a mile and a half east, gets its own post office.
13. 1926Two miners find an $88 nugget on a bench near Monitor Gulch.
14. 1931For part of the year G. H. Mears tries small-scale hydraulic mining in Monitor Gulch, pumping water from a shallow well by the railway.
15. 1932–1933In the cool season about 25 men, mostly transients, dry-wash the area for a few cents to under a dollar a day.
16. Jan 2009Visitors find an enclave of old trailers and rusting cars where they place the townsite, the Dome ruins posted No Trespassing and mining-claim stakes south of Dome.
17. 2011The same researchers report no visible remains at the likely site, private land at the trailers near it and at Dome, and the Dome cemetery on Tohono O'odham land, closed to the public.
18. Oct 2026Federal land data show the marked spot as public land managed by the BLM.

Location

Where Gila City stood

No map we found labels Gila City, so its exact spot is uncertain. The coordinates in Wikipedia and most databases, 32.755° N, 114.363° W, are those of USGS GNIS feature 4007, which is Dome, the later railroad settlement. Wikipedia also lists Ligurta as another name for Gila City, but the GNIS record it cites is a separate place 7 or 8 miles southeast, on the far side of the Gila Mountains.

The best placement comes from the Arizona Bureau of Mines bulletin Gold Placers and Placering in Arizona, which says Gila City "was about 1 1/2 miles west of the present site of Dome, near the mouth of Monitor Gulch," with the railway and the old Yuma–Gila Bend road along the north edge of the gold ground. Other sources agree on the order: the Butterfield station and post office lay about a mile east of the town, and Dome grew up a mile or two east of it. Our marker sits 1.5 miles west of Dome, on the low ground between the railway and the Wellton–Mohawk Canal where the railway swings south in a wide curve. Treat it as approximate.

The Arizona Pioneer & Cemetery Research Project, which searched the area in 2009 and updated its report in 2011, puts the likely site in the same stretch: a marshy curve between the road and the canal, with a pronounced bend of the railway to the south. It found no visible remains and suggests the canal, dug from 1949 to 1952, may have buried most or all traces of the town.

• Gila City. The 1858–1862 gold camp, about 1.5 miles west of Dome. Nothing left. This page.
• Dome. A later railroad stop with a post office from 1892, at the GNIS point. A few adobe columns and concrete foundations, with trailers on land posted private (2011). An undated listing gives it its own entry.
• Dome Cemetery. In a gulch west of the Dome ruins, with at least 67 graves, most of them Hia-Ced O'odham. It is on Tohono O'odham land and not open to the public. The small fenced site south of the tracks at Dome is an archaeological site, not the cemetery.
• Ligurta. A separate place south of the Gila Mountains, west of Wellton. Not Gila City.

The legal description an undated listing gives, T8S R21W, matches the area: the 1955 USGS sheet below marks range 21 west along this stretch of the river.

What's left

Dug-over gulches and nothing else

Nothing of the town survives, and Wikipedia and an undated listing both say so. The 1862 flood took the last of it. What you can still see is the setting Browne described: a bench of gravel and gulches at the foot of the Gila Mountains, overlooking a bend in the river. The state's placer bulletin says practically every gulch and bench from a quarter mile east to three miles west of Dome carries some gold, and that all the known productive gravels have been dug over at least once. The Union Pacific main line, the Wellton–Mohawk Canal and farm fields now fill the strip between the hills and the river.

At the likely townsite the 2011 report found only a few rusting pieces of metal, bits of glass and trash, and an old well or cistern that may be modern. The ground there floods regularly and is thick with brush. The same report shows a dangerous open shaft in the gulches to the south, where shafts and diggings from past mining can still be found.

The historic maps below show the corridor taking shape. The 1929 Laguna sheet draws the Southern Pacific and the Yuma–Gila Bend road squeezed between the river and the Gila Mountains, with Dome as a cluster of buildings to the east. The 1943 sheet adds US 95 crossing the river to the west. The 1955 sheet names the Kinter siding and the "Route of Butterfield Stage" and adds the Wellton–Mohawk Canal. By 1993 the map shows levees and canals along the river and a gravel pit in the hills southwest of Kinter.

• No buildings or ruins
• Dug-over gulches and benches, with open shafts
• The Butterfield stage route, now a dirt road
• Dome's adobe ruins, 1.5 mi east (separate site, posted private)

Historic maps

Gila City on USGS maps, 1929–1993

Crops from the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection, centered on the townsite. Each sheet shows what surveyors mapped that year; compare them with today's topo and aerial on this page.

19291:62,50019431:62,50019551:62,50019931:100,000

Map & directions

Getting there

Yuma is the closest city, about 32 minutes away by the computed route. Both routes reach US 95 east of Yuma and turn onto Route of Butterfield Stage. A 2011 report describes it as a dirt road. It follows the old stage road between the Wellton–Mohawk Canal and the railway. There's nothing to see at the site itself, so treat this as a drive to the setting and stay on the road. We haven't driven the route.

Base map: USGS The National Map (public domain). Routes: OSRM on © OpenStreetMap contributors data (ODbL), computed October 2026. Times assume dry roads.

Photos

Have photos of Gila City?

We haven’t added photographs of Gila City yet. If you’ve visited, share your photos and a field report below.

J. Ross Browne’s 1869 book Adventures in the Apache Country includes an illustration titled “Gila City.”

Visitor reports

Been to Gila City?

Been there lately? Tell the next visitor what you found: whether you could get in, the state of the road and what's still standing. Photos are welcome. We read every report before it appears here.

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Nearby

Other sites near Gila City

Straight-line distance from the townsite to other mapped sites in our Arizona index.

• Dome1.5 mi E · Yuma
• La Laguna7.3 mi NW · Yuma
• Colorado City14.2 mi W · Yuma
• Fortuna14.5 mi S · Yuma
• Castle Dome Landing15.1 mi N · Yuma
• Filibusters Camp20.0 mi E · Yuma
• Williamsport22.4 mi NW · La Paz
• Castle Dome23.4 mi NE · Yuma

Sources

Sources and credits

1. ghosttowns.com, "Gila City": fact sheet fields (county, roads, legal description, climate, best time, remains, post office dates, population).
2. Wikipedia, "Gila City, Arizona", retrieved October 2026: Snively, Monitor Gulch, the Butterfield station, the Arno, Mowry's report, daily takes and nuggets, the 1862 flood, the La Paz rush, the Ligurta name.
3. Eldred D. Wilson, Gold Placers and Placering in Arizona, Arizona Bureau of Mines Bulletin 168 (reprinted 1981), p. 18 and after: the site 1.5 miles west of Dome, extent of the gold ground, J. B. Tenney's $500,000 estimate, the 1870 hydraulic works, the 1926 nugget, 1931–33 mining.
4. J. Ross Browne, Adventures in the Apache Country (Harper & Brothers, 1869), pp. 76–78: his camp at Gila City, the rush and its collapse, "three chimneys and a coyote."
5. Arizona Pioneer & Cemetery Research Project, "Dome Cemetery and Gila City" (Kathy and Ed Block, visit of January 2009): Dome east of Gila City, the trailers and rusting cars at the possible Gila City site, the Dome post office, the No Trespassing sign, claim stakes, the road from US 95, E. Conklin's 1877 account of the Gila Hotel as quoted there.
6. Arizona Pioneer & Cemetery Research Project, "Dome Cemetery and Gila City: Updated Information" (Kathy Block, 2011 update, version 123011): the likely townsite with no visible remains, the canal dug 1949–1952, private land at the trailers near the site and at Dome, the Dome cemetery on Tohono O'odham land and closed to the public, the fenced archaeological site, the open shaft, the dirt road from US 95, the six residents Conklin counted in 1877.
7. Land status: BLM Surface Management Agency dataset, queried October 19 and October 22, 2026 (BLM land at the marked spot; private or unknown land at Dome).
8. Coordinates: approximate, 1.5 miles west of USGS GNIS "Dome" (feature 4007) per Wilson. GNIS "Ligurta" (feature 24494) for comparison. Elevation: USGS 3D Elevation Program point query. Routes: OSRM on OpenStreetMap data, October 2026. Not field-checked.

Photo and map credits

• Topo map, area base map and aerial imagery: USGS The National Map (public domain).
• Historic maps: USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection (public domain): Laguna 1929, 1:62,500; Laguna 1943, 1:62,500; Laguna 1955, 1:62,500; Yuma 1993, 1:100,000.