Coeur d'Alene Diary

COEUR d'ALENE DIARY by Richard G. Magnuson; The First Ten Years of Hardrock Mining in North Idaho; Binford & Mort Publishing 1968

Mr. Magnuson was an attorney in Wallace, Idaho with a life-long interest in local history. He writes in diary format, putting events in chronologic order, but presents a great many threads of dozens of miners and the mines they worked in. Ranging in size from mere prospect holes to some more than a mile deep, they have produced massive amounts of silver, lead, zinc, gold, copper, and a host of chemical by-products over the past 130 years.

Other than a few Catholic missionaries to the Coeur d'Alene Indian Tribe, one of the first explorers of the area was Army Captain John Mullan, charged with building a six hundred mile road connecting Fort Benton, on the Missouri River, with Fort Walla Walla on the Columbia. The one thing he did not want was any gold discovery to distract his 100-man road crew in 1859. It was not until Andrew Prichard and his partners discovered gold in a tributary of the Coeur d'Alene River's North Fork in 1883 that a gold rush started, drawing men from all over the West to what is now the town of Murray, a thirty-mile trek from the nearest railroad at Thompson Falls, Montana. The Mullan Road, built twenty-four years earlier was now little more than a muddy trail much of the time.

Small-time prospectors with only a shovel and gold pan apparently didn't do well on the North Fork; you needed a sluice box with water running through it to catch the heavy gold flakes in its ridges to make much profit. Some men moved to the South Fork finding veins in the rocks, not of gold, but of silver and lead. The towns of Burke, Mullan, Gem and Wallace grew up around some of these early mines, the Poorman, Tiger, Morning, and many smaller operations. Extraction of ore from hard rock involved drilling by hand, in tunnels lit by candles. Ore could be transported in sacks on a wagon to Cataldo Mission, some thirty miles west, transferred to a river barge, then transferred again to the railroad near Spokane Falls, another forty miles dowstream. Shipping in railroad car lots had to wait until the railroad finally reached Wallace and Mullan, around 1888.

In August, 1885, Noah Kellogg received a grubstake (food and equipment) valued at about $18.50, plus a mule,f rom two men in Murray, who sent Noah to explore the South Fork area. The first several weeks, he hadn't much success. Then, twelve miles west of Wallace, up Milo Gulch, as local lore has it, his jackass wandered away. He picked up a rock to throw at it. The weight of the rock made him look more closely: it was high grade galena (lead sulfide) which in this region has a significant percentage of silver also. It became the biggest mine of all, the Bunker Hill, original entrance about 4,000 feet elevation, eventually reached downward to below sea level.

But it wasn't all skittles and beer from then on; in 1887,when a Portland financier bought the Bunker Hill and several nearby properties for $650,000, Noah fought his grub stakers over who would get how much (Noah received $150,000 in cash and stock. A promoter had staked out the water rights in Milo Creek, and was also awarded a portion, as were the lawyers.

The Blake brothers arrived from Maine too late for the gold rush, but staked out farmland in a meadow up Big Creek. They happened to discover a vein of silver ore so rich it didn't need milling. They filled a wagon with it by hand and took it to town every two months, getting $75 to $400 per ton. Their Yankee mine was re-named the Sunshine when they later sold it, and became the nation's largest silver producer, up to seven million ounces per year.

Most of the 42 chapters deal with ordinary town development, and progress in the mines. The local economy turned from mineral exploration to mine production in the mid-1880s--stockpiles of ore piling up while awaiting the arrival of the railroad. Public water distribution came to Wallace, The first electric lights, the first electric drills, then compressed air to power the drilling. The telegraph came, as did miners' union labor. Fires destroyed several towns. , Miners' blew up mills, bringing in the national guard and martial law. Seemingly infinite amounts ore are still in the ground even a century later. A man sold his 1/4^th interest in the Lucky Friday Mine for $750 in 1887. Over a century later, the Lucky Friday is still a major silver producer with workings extending two miles below the surface of the ground.

Magnuson ends his history of the early mining days with an astute observation: “The pride of a miner in his work provides the glue that holds it [mining] together, and the miner's sense of humor is the softening agent that keeps it from drying out and breaking up.”

The reader may find an interesting supplement to Mr. Magnuson's account of mining in Idaho's Silver Valley by reading Bankson and Harrison's book, “Beneath These Mountains” a more personalized portrait of some twenty of the prominent people of the early mining days. Both books were written in the 1960's