Gold turned up here in 1895, and the rush followed fast. By 1896 officials had realised this was becoming a serious mining centre and lobbied for a proper townsite. When the mining warden cast about for a name, the answer was already on the map: the diggings sat below Mount Sir Samuel, christened four years earlier by Lawrence Wells in honour of Samuel James Way, Chief Justice and Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia. Practicality won out over ceremony. The mountain's name was already on everyone's lips, so the warden simply dropped the 'Mount' and gazetted the town as Sir Samuel in 1897. A distant judge thus lent his title to a remote outback camp he had no part in and likely never visited.

By about 1908, at its height, Sir Samuel was a substantial Goldfields town. A 1938 article in Perth's Western Mail, looking back, estimated a peak population of four thousand. For a settlement carved out of arid scrub, the list of what it supported is striking: two pubs to slake the dust, three banks to handle the gold, a post office, a school, a rifle range and a racecourse where the town came to spend its winnings. Each institution marked a kind of optimism, a bet that the reefs below would keep paying and the people would keep coming. In the goldfields, a racecourse was a declaration that a place intended to stay.

Even law and order proved fragile here. The first police presence, opened in 1899, was nothing more than a cluster of tents and brush shelters pitched against the heat and the dust, and in 1901 it burned to the ground. Tenders for a replacement went out in 1902, and a proper station was finally built in 1903, only to close in 1910 as the town began emptying out. In a detail that captures how transient these settlements were, the building itself was dismantled and carted off to Youanmi in 1911, recycled for the next hopeful town down the track. Nothing was wasted on a frontier where timber and iron had been freighted in at great cost. Sir Samuel's institutions did not so much collapse as migrate, following the people and the gold wherever they went next.

Today Sir Samuel is an abandoned town, one of dozens of ghost settlements scattered across the Goldfields of Western Australia, the residue of a mining frontier that flared and faded in a single generation. The pubs, banks and racecourse have vanished into the red country, leaving little for the eye to fasten on but scattered relics and graves. What remains is the geography and the name. The town still sits on the route between modern Leinster, a working nickel community built more than half a century later, and the gold town of Wiluna to the north, a fixed point on the map long after the place itself dissolved. There is a quiet irony in the name outlasting everything else: a colonial judge's title, borrowed almost by accident, has proved more durable than the four thousand lives that once filled the streets below his namesake hill. Sir Samuel endures now mostly as a story, a memory of the people who chased gold to the edge of the desert and then moved on.