Labor 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.