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The railroad routes matter just as much as the ore - once the rails got rerouted or a nearby town became the new hub, entire communities could empty out even if the mines were still producing. You'll notice a lot of these ghost towns sit along old rail lines that don't connect to modern highways, which is why they stayed dead instead of just shrinking down like places that adapted.
Most of them sprang up during mining booms - silver, gold, copper - and were abandoned once the ore ran out or prices crashed, leaving behind actual buildings instead of just ruins. Some got a second life as tourist spots or artist communities, but plenty are genuinely empty except for the occasional prospector or historian poking around.
What gets overlooked in a lot of ghost town stories is just how fast things could collapse once the infrastructure shifted. A town could be thriving one year and basically dead the next, not because the resource disappeared but because a competing settlement nearby got better access to water, or the stagecoach route changed, or a larger town twenty miles away suddenly had a post office and a real bank. People followed opportunity - they weren't stubborn about staying in a place that was becoming isolated.
The Southwest is also brutal to live in if you don't have the economic reason to stay. Once the paycheck dried up, there was no "well, at least it's a nice quiet place to retire." It was hot, remote, and expensive to maintain buildings or grow food. So you'd see entire families pack up and leave within months, which meant no one stayed behind to keep things running or occupied. That's why some settlements look frozen in time - they didn't decay gradually, they just emptied out.
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