A town was 1st settled by Missourians in 1849 and in the 1850s served as the trading center for a total of mining camps in the area. A town likewise got one of a big Chinese communities in the state (over 2,000 in the 1860 census).

At a instance of its innovation, placer mining was the virtually all popular mining technique, which is heavily depending on a river. A local a stream source, Dry Creek, ran dry in a period of a summerperiod months, when you took which time the mineworker were said to exist as "fiddling around," so a title. But, a single local citizen was embarrassed to become referred to as a "Man from Fiddletown" & with success lobbied to keep close at hand a title changed to Oleta (when his girl) inside 1878. Fallowing his demise around 1932, town residents petitioned to have it restored to Fiddletown.