Mining History

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.

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.

Edward Crockett Pulaski was not a young man when he joined the fledgling U.S. Forest Service in 1908. Born in 1866, he had spent years in the West as a miner, a railroad worker, and a ranch foreman before pinning on a ranger's badge in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, based at Wallace. "Big Ed," as the men called him, knew the ridges and canyons of the Silver Valley as few others did. In August 1910, that knowledge saved dozens of lives — including, barely, his own.

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.