In 1879, the so-called Charcoal Burners War pitted Italian charcoal burners against companies that bought and used the product. During the 1870s, hundreds of Italians and Swiss immigrants (many Italian speaking) settled in the newly emerging Eureka Mining District. Many of these arrivals brought an Alpine tradition of slowly burning logs in an oxygen-starved environment to produce charcoal.

In 1856, the U.S. Army experimented with the importation of Middle-Eastern Dromedary (one hump) camels. Lt. Edward F. Beale maintained the animals could haul materials for the military in the arid West. They could carry more than horse or mules, and they had a legendary ability to survive without much water. Beale and roughly thirty camels crossed the Colorado River into present-day southern Nevada in 1857, but his experiment eventually failed, and the army sold what stock survived.

The term Bonanza Group, together with the names "Big Four" and the "Irish Four," refers to a group of immigrants who outmaneuvered William Sharon and broke the monopoly of his Bank of California until they controlled much of the Comstock Lode.

In 1865, a Native American discovered a quartz vein of silver in Nye County's Toquima range at 8,000 feet. Miners, many from Austin, then settled the area and christened their new town Belmont, the center of the Philadelphia Mining District. The legislature moved the seat of county government from declining Ione to Belmont in 1867.