In the spring of 1884, Colonel William R. Wallace built a cabin on a flat where several canyons meet the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River, and he gave the spot a hopeful name: Placer Center. Wallace, a Civil War veteran with a hand in mining ventures across the region, claimed 80 acres at what he judged to be the natural crossroads of a brand-new mining district. Gold had drawn thousands of men to the North Fork camps around Murray the year before, and now prospectors were pushing over the divide to the South Fork, where silver-lead claims — including a Canyon Creek claim staked that May that became the Tiger Mine — promised a harder-rock, longer-lasting kind of wealth.
Wallace set about making his crossroads a town. He put his own money into access roads and other improvements and promoted Placer Center as the center of the district, sitting along the route of the old Mullan Road. To secure the townsite, Wallace and his partner Richard Lockey bought "Sioux half-breed scrip" from a bank in Spokane. The scrip — certificates originally issued to people of mixed Sioux ancestry — entitled the holder to claim unoccupied public land, and with it Wallace laid claim to his 80 acres and began selling lots through the Wallace Townsite Company.
His wife, Lucy, joined him in 1885 and became the growing camp's first postmistress. The camp grew quickly around them. By 1887 a sawmill was cutting lumber for the new town, downtown businesses lined the streets, and the railroad reached Wallace, building the town's first depot the same year. Mines dotted the hillsides in every direction, and the settlement at the center of it all was becoming the supply point and financial heart of the district that would soon be known around the world as the Silver Valley.
On May 2, 1888, the citizens petitioned Shoshone County's commissioners to incorporate their town, and they chose to name it Wallace, after the Colonel himself, who was appointed one of the new town's five trustees. It was a proud moment with a shadow over it, for the town's very title to its land was in doubt.
Wallace had applied to the General Land Office at Coeur d'Alene for a patent on the townsite on June 5, 1886. In a letter dated February 3, 1887, the land office in Washington denied the application. The scrip Wallace had bought in good faith had been reported lost by its original holder; a replacement had been issued and already used to claim other land. Neither the Colonel nor his townsite company told lot buyers that their titles were uncertain, and the company went on selling. The cloud over Wallace's land titles took years of legal wrangling to settle, and old-timers remembered the episode long after the town around them was secure.
The town outgrew the trouble. A fire in 1890 leveled much of the wooden business district, and Wallace rebuilt in brick and stone — the beginning of the sturdy downtown that still defines the town. The mines of the Coeur d'Alene district went on to produce more silver than any other mining district in the United States, and Wallace grew up as the district's principal town and the seat of Shoshone County.
Today the whole town stands as a monument to its founder's gamble. Wallace is listed in its entirety on the National Register of Historic Places, a distinction few American towns can claim, and its streets still follow the grid the Colonel laid out on his 80 acres in 1884. He could hardly have imagined interstate highways and ski lifts, but the town he planted at the center of the Silver Valley is still exactly where he put it — and it still carries his name.