Joseph Good
American
Joseph Good was a southern Nevada prospector and cattleman of the El Dorado Canyon mining era whose herds watered at the desert spring that still bears his name as the town of Goodsprings, southwest of Las Vegas.
Biography
Joseph Good was one of the scattering of prospectors and stockmen who worked the desert country of what is now Clark County, Nevada, in the years when El Dorado Canyon on the Colorado River was the region's great mining excitement. Mining in the canyon began by 1857 and boomed after silver and gold lodes were opened in 1861, and the isolated camps there created a steady demand for beef that ranchers like Good helped supply.
Good ranged his cattle at a spring on the west side of the Spring Mountains, and while others drifted on he stayed with the country; the watering place became known as Good's Spring. When silver ore found nearby in 1868 led to the organization of the New England Mining District, later renamed the Yellow Pine district, the spring served its prospectors, and the settlement that eventually grew there kept the name Goodsprings. It survives today as one of southern Nevada's best-preserved early mining towns.
Beyond these outlines, records of Good's life are fragmentary: his origins, his later years, and his dates of birth and death do not appear in standard references. Like many figures of the early lower-Colorado rushes, he is remembered less through documents than through the place name his presence left on the map.