Answer:
People wanted to make a lot of money.
Explanation:
In 1858, there was the discovery of precious metals such as silver in Comstock Lode in Nevada and Gold in Califonia ten years earlier. These discoveries attracted settlers to the areas for decades because they wanted to strike it rich by mining those precious resources.
They created what was known then as boomtowns which later turned into ghost towns by the time the people in those communities exhausted the minerals that was available then.
