Mackay: Copper Town in the Lost River Valley

Copper was discovered in the White Knob Mountains above the Lost River Valley in eighteen seventy-nine, but it took until nineteen oh one for anyone to mine it seriously. That year the White Knob Mining Company arrived, and a superintendent named Wayne Darlington was given the job of platting the new town. He named it after his boss, John Mackay, one of the Comstock Lode silver kings.

By October fourteenth, nineteen oh one, the town was incorporated, and within three years it had a brick schoolhouse, two hotels, a bank, and an opera house. Smelter stacks rose in the valley. The copper eventually ran low, and Mackay shrank to a small ranching community in a dramatic mountain setting.

Mount Borah, the highest peak in Idaho at just over twelve thousand feet, rises to the north.