Battle Mountain is an unincorporated town in and the county seat of Lander County, Nevada, United States. The population was 3,705 at the 2020 census. Its primary economic base is gold mining and, to a lesser extent, legalized gambling.
The town is located on Interstate 80 between Winnemucca and Elko.
The Battle Mountain area was home to the Northern Paiute and Shoshone peoples. The area was noted by fur trappers in the 1820s and 1830s. It served as a waypoint for westward-bound travel on the Emigrant Trail along the Humboldt River by 1845. According to local legend, the name stems from confrontations between Native Americans and early settlers during the 1850s.
When copper ore was discovered and mining began in 1866, the Central Pacific Railroad started a station in Argenta to support the mining activity. In 1868, the railroad established the Reese River siding in Battle Mountain to support it, but in 1870, the railroad moved the Argenta station to Battle Mountain and established a townsite to serve the Battle Mountain copper and gold mining district. Two railroads headquartered there starting in 1890: the Central Nevada Railway and the Battle Mountain and Lewis Railroad. As of 2009, the railway is still in use.
In 1874, the Nevada Legislature overrode the governor's veto and approved a railroad from Austin to Battle Mountain. The Nevada Central Railroad from Battle Mountain to Austin was completed in 1880. The rail line was constructed to connect the silver mines around Austin to the Central Pacific line at Battle Mountain. The rail line served the Austin area until it was abandoned in 1938.
Ulysses S. Grant spoke in the town in 1879 during his western speaking tour.
President Woodrow Wilson established Battle Mountain Indian Colony by executive order in 1918. In 1919, Nevada's Red Scare Miners held a ten-day strike at the Battle Mountain Copper Mines.
On May 15, 1979, the voters of Lander County approved the move of the county seat from Austin to Battle Mountain in a special election. In a subsequent ruling, the Nevada Supreme Court affirmed this decision.
Chiefs Frank Temoke and Frank Brady refused the government's offer of a payoff under the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley at Battle Mountain on December 11, 1992.
The 2008 Wells, Nevada, earthquake of 6.3 magnitude that affected the northeastern part of the state severely damaged one of the city's oldest historical buildings, the Lemaire Building, which was condemned.
Battle Mountain is located at the confluence of two rivers, the Humboldt and the Reese. The town is in the Humboldt valley between the Shoshone Range to the southeast, the Battle Mountains to the southwest and the Sheep Creek Range across the Humboldt to the north.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
This page covers Battle at Flat Top Mountain. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
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