Silver, Gold, and the Coeur d'Alene Mining Wars

In eighteen eighty-four, a prospector named Noah Kellogg, the story goes, followed a wandering jackass into a canyon in the mountains east of present-day Coeur d'Alene and found a vein of silver-lead ore that would become one of the richest mining districts in the world. Geologists debate the quality of the prospecting; no one debates the silver. The Coeur d'Alene mining district, centered in a narrow canyon called the Bunker Hill, would eventually produce more silver than any region on earth. The town of Wallace, Idaho, was for decades the self-proclaimed Silver Capital of the World.

The wealth came with violence. Mining companies brought in contract labor, cut wages, and banned union organizing. Workers lived in boarding houses above shafts where ventilation was poor and cave-ins were common. Lead dust accumulated in the lungs. In eighteen ninety-two, labor conflict boiled over when members of the miners union dynamited the Frisco Mill near Gem, Idaho. Two men were killed, the mill was destroyed, and the governor declared martial law. Hundreds of union miners were arrested and held in open-air stockades called bull pens.

The violence returned seven years later. In April of eighteen ninety-nine, someone placed a bomb under the Bunker Hill concentrator in Wardner and detonated it, destroying the building. Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg, who declared martial law in the aftermath, was out of office by the time his enemies caught up with him but had not been forgotten. In December of nineteen oh five, he was killed by a bomb wired to his front gate in Caldwell. The case that followed became a national sensation. The prosecution's team included William Borah, a future U.S. Senator. The defense hired Clarence Darrow. The accused, Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners, was acquitted in nineteen oh seven. Harry Orchard, who confessed to building the bomb, died in the Idaho State Penitentiary in nineteen fifty-four at the age of eighty-eight.