Leadville, Renamed: The Trapper Who Gave His Name to a Town
Near Ketchum, Idaho
When silver and lead were discovered in the Wood River Valley in eighteen eighty, the settlement that grew up around the smelters called itself Leadville. It was an honest name for a mining town, direct about what lay in the ground beneath it. The problem was that another Leadville, in Colorado, was already well known, and the postal department judged the name too common.
The solution was a rename. The post office rechristened the Idaho settlement for a man named David Ketchum, a trapper and guide who had ranged through the Wood River Valley before the miners arrived and who had staked an early claim in the basin in eighteen seventy-nine. Ketchum's own connection to the place was thin by the time it bore his name, but the name stuck where Leadville had failed.
The confusion the town was renamed to avoid has repeated itself in smaller ways ever since. Ketchum, Idaho and Ketchum, Oklahoma are both real places. But the Idaho town has the greater fame now, lifted by proximity to Sun Valley and by associations with skiing and celebrities that the original trapper could not have imagined when he was riding through this narrow valley in the years before anyone else arrived.
