Silver Valley

Of all the buildings in Wallace, the one travelers remember best may be the one built for travelers. The Northern Pacific Depot, with its brick first story, its stuccoed second story, and its storybook turret, has stood at the north end of Sixth Street since the first years of the twentieth century, and for most of that time, it was Wallace's front door.

Every coast-to-coast drive in America once ended the same way: at a red light in downtown Wallace. Interstate 90 runs more than 3,000 miles from Seattle to Boston, and for years the entire route was a modern, limited-access freeway, except for a few blocks in this little silver town in the Idaho Panhandle, where the interstate simply stopped, funneled every car and truck down Wallace's streets, and made them all wait at a single traffic signal.

Eight years after Wallace was founded in 1884, the young silver town found itself at the center of one of the most violent labor struggles in American history. The Coeur d'Alene mining district, a chain of camps strung through the narrow canyons around Wallace, was booming on lead and silver, but in early 1892 the mine owners announced districtwide wage cuts, effective April 1. The miners' unions answered with a strike, and the Silver Valley settled into an armed standoff that would end with a mill in ruins, hundreds of men in open-air prisons, and soldiers patrolling Shoshone County.

Fifteen miles east of Wallace, a gravel trail slips into a tunnel nearly two miles long, crosses steel trestles high above mountain creeks, and descends a canyon wall through the Bitterroot Mountains. The Route of the Hiawatha rail-trail follows the most expensive and difficult stretch of railroad ever built in the Northwest — the Milwaukee Road's crossing of St. Paul Pass — and every mile of it is steeped in the history of the men who built it.

Every May 2, the Silver Valley stops to read 91 names aloud. They are the men who went underground at the Sunshine Mine on the morning of Tuesday, May 2, 1972, and never came home — victims of the worst disaster in Idaho history, and of an underground fire that changed American mining law forever.

For roughly a century, the world's oldest profession operated in Wallace in plain sight. In most American towns, the trade hid in shadows and euphemisms. In this Idaho silver camp, it was an open secret: confined to a known district, watched over by the city health officer, and run by madams whom much of the town regarded as respectable businesswomen. Wallace remembers the era today with more candor than embarrassment.

The summer of 1910 was the driest in memory across the northern Rockies. By August, some 1,700 separate fires were burning in the national forests of northern Idaho and western Montana, fed by a record drought, logging slash, and sparks from locomotives. Forest Service crews — many of them hastily hired immigrants and students — fought the scattered fires for weeks with hand tools. Then, on Saturday, August 20, a violent cold front drove hurricane-force winds across the region, and in about 36 hours the separate fires merged into a single firestorm that burned roughly three million acres.

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.