Burke Canyon: The Silver Town Where the Hotel Swallowed the Railroad

In May of eighteen eighty-four, prospectors staked a lead-silver-zinc ore claim in a canyon so narrow it barely had room for a street. They called the claim the Tiger. Within three years Burke, Idaho was a boomtown, and the canyon walls pressed in so tight that builders had no choice but to get creative.

The Tiger Hotel went up in eighteen ninety-six, built over Canyon Creek rather than beside it. When the railroad was widened in nineteen oh six, trains ran straight through the building, and a walkway above the tracks joined the two halves of the hotel. Few hotels anywhere could say they had a railroad, a road, and a stream running through them.

The Tiger Hotel was dismantled in nineteen fifty-four. The Tiger claim was sold the year it was found for thirty-five thousand dollars, and by the end of eighteen eighty-five more than three thousand tons of ore had come out of it. A three-foot narrow-gauge railroad, the Canyon Creek Railroad, was finished in December of eighteen eighty-seven, and its first ore shipment reached Wallace on December twelfth. The hotel had one hundred fifty rooms, built for miners, and a fire in nineteen twenty-three badly damaged it before the demolition. The census counted fourteen hundred people in Burke in nineteen ten. That February an avalanche killed twenty residents, and about six months later the Great Fire of nineteen ten swept through the canyon. By nineteen ninety only fifteen people lived there, and the last mine closed in nineteen ninety-one. Burke itself is a ghost town today, but the canyon walls remain exactly as narrow as they always were.