Silver, Millionaires, and the Coeur d'Alene Boom
Near Spokane, Washington
In the early eighteen eighties, a prospector named Andrew Prichard discovered gold in the Coeur d'Alene Mountains of northern Idaho, about ninety miles east of Spokane. The word spread fast. By the following year, thousands of prospectors were funneling through Spokane on their way to the diggings. Spokane did not go to the mountains. Spokane let the mountains come to it.
The city positioned itself as the commercial, financial, and logistical hub of the entire Coeur d'Alene mining district. Supply stores, smelters, banks, and brokerage houses opened along Riverside Avenue to serve the mines. When gold began to play out in the late eighteen eighties, silver and lead picked up the slack. Over the following decades, the Coeur d'Alene district became one of the richest silver producers in North America. Spokane was where the money landed.
By nineteen ten, Spokane had a remarkable number of millionaires, many of them made in mining. Their names are still visible on the city's landmarks: Patrick "Patsy" Clark, an Irish immigrant who worked his way up from mine laborer to owner and built a twenty-seven-room mansion in Browne's Addition designed by architect Kirtland Cutter, with Tiffany stained glass and Italian sandstone. John Finch, Jay Graves, Charles Sweeny. These men financed Spokane's grandest hotels, theaters, and office blocks.
The Spokane Stock Exchange traded mining shares at its peak. Ordinary people bought penny-stock mining shares at lunch counters and barbershops, hoping to catch the next big strike. Some of them did. Most did not.
The mining boom also created Spokane's chronic shadow economy: the employment agencies, known to the workers who depended on them as job sharks, who skimmed fees from miners heading to the hills. That practice would ignite one of the most significant labor confrontations in American history, just a few years later.
