Ketchum and the Wood River Valley: Miners, Sheepherders, and Movie Stars

The town of Ketchum sits in the Wood River Valley in central Idaho, tucked against the base of Bald Mountain at roughly five thousand eight hundred feet above sea level. It is a small town today, fewer than three thousand permanent residents, but it has had a surprisingly large life. Before the skiers came, before the celebrities, before Sun Valley changed the valley's direction, this canyon was defined first by silver ore and then by sheep on a scale that is difficult to imagine now.

The mining rush began in eighteen eighty. Prospectors found rich veins of silver and lead in the Warm Springs and Wood River mining districts, and a smelting center sprang up almost overnight. The place called itself Leadville for a while, but the postal department could not keep it straight from Leadville in Colorado, so the name was changed to honor a local trapper named David Ketchum who had roamed through the basin the previous year.

By eighteen eighty-two the Philadelphia Smelter was processing lead and silver from mines throughout the valley and was notable enough that observers mentioned it had some of the nation's first electric lights. The smelter ran for about a decade, then the ore played out and the boom collapsed. What came next surprised people.

Sheepherders discovered that the high mountain pastures of the Pioneer, Boulder, and Sawtooth ranges around Ketchum made ideal summer grazing grounds. Each spring ranchers from southern Idaho drove enormous flocks north through town and up toward the high country. Each fall the sheep came back down, and the livestock corrals near the Union Pacific spur filled again with animals waiting to be shipped.

By nineteen twenty, Ketchum had become the largest sheep-shipping center in the entire American West. Locals called it Woolly City. Then came nineteen thirty-six, when Averell Harriman and the Union Pacific opened Sun Valley a short distance down the road and changed the valley's future entirely.

Celebrities arrived, and skiers, and eventually the writers and retirees and outdoor enthusiasts who make up the community today. Ketchum is a layered place, and the layers show.