From Woolly City to Ski Town: Ketchum's Long Transformation

The years between the collapse of the sheep industry and the opening of Sun Valley were not easy ones for Ketchum. The Great Depression deepened what had already been a slow economic decline in the valley. The town had shrunk to a small population by the early nineteen thirties.

Some of the old downtown buildings sat empty. The Union Pacific still ran its spur line, servicing whatever freight remained, but it was a thin economy in a canyon that had once held thousands. Then in nineteen thirty-six, a short distance down the road, Averell Harriman and the Union Pacific opened a ski resort unlike anything America had seen.

Celebrities arrived almost immediately. The resort's publicity agent, a man named Steve Hannagan worked to fill Sun Valley with famous names. Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, and Errol Flynn were among the early visitors.

Ketchum, as the nearest town with real services, restaurants, and housing, began to absorb the overflow. The transformation took decades rather than seasons. Sheep ranchers did not vanish overnight, and the corrals were still in use into the nineteen forties.

But gradually the town reoriented toward recreation, toward the community of artists, writers, and outdoor enthusiasts who found in this narrow valley a place that rewarded staying. By the time the mid-twentieth century had passed, Ketchum had become something genuinely different from what the miners or the sheepherders would have recognized, and yet the layered history of all those earlier eras is still present if you look for it.