Craters of the Moon Historic Context Statements

Mining in the Craters of the Moon Region, 1882-1928:
OVERVIEW OF MINING IN SOUTHERN IDAHO AND THE SNAKE RIVER PLAIN

Mining exerted considerable influence on Idaho's development as a state. Especially in the last four decades of the nineteenth century, gold and silver discoveries, as well as those of lead and copper, generated excitement and interest in southern Idaho. Mining attracted a frontier population willing to take financial and physical risks for the opportunity to gain untold wealth. Despite difficulties locating, extracting, processing, and transporting valuable minerals, Idaho's miners rushed from one promising discovery to another. "Even when judged by Western standards," the historian Rodman W. Paul wrote, "Idaho's gold rush people were extraordinarily unstable." And in the words of noted western historian Hugh H. Bancroft, 'The miners of Idaho were like quicksilver. A mass of them dropped in any locality, broke up into individual globules, and ran off after any atom of gold in their vicinity. They stayed nowhere longer than the gold attracted them." In their wake they helped establish communities of small farming and ranching enterprises that supplied the mining districts. In this way the mining economy drew settlement to the area and led to Idaho's statehood in 1890. Without the mining economy, southern Idaho's agricultural settlement would have grown slowly; the arid country offered little appeal to farmers and ranchers, most likely delaying settlement until railroad service became available on a broad scale by the turn of the century. [1]

In the 1860s gold and silver mining in southern Idaho, as throughout much of the West, produced "years of intense excitement and eager anticipation." Rarely did such anticipation materialize in the Southwest, but for many places in the Northwest "flush times ruled" for most of the decade. Along with Montana, Idaho offered prospectors the closest reality of discovering a new California. It was a place with an abundance of placers, gold deposited in sandbars, gravel banks, or stream beds, which was easily mined with simple equipment. It was also a place with promising gold and silver lodes, or contained in veins, which was not as easily mined, for it required large sums of capital, expensive equipment, and labor. [2]

Gold and silver finds, both small and large, set off a series of rushes to southern Idaho mining districts from 1862 until 1869, when mining declined. Mining excitement created a pattern of successive boom towns in Idaho as it did all over the West. According to Idaho historian Merle W. Wells, "prospecting led to discovery and stampede, and finally to the formation of a new mining district, if there really was anything in the area to develop." In southern Idaho, this pattern varied according to placer and lode strikes and was seen in a "dozen or more early mining areas" in the region. [3]

Up until the early 1860s thousands of men raced to promising new gold and silver strikes all over the West, including Colorado and British Columbia in 1858 and Nevada in 1859. Gold was found in northern Idaho in Nez Perce country in 1860, giving rise to camps like Orofino, only to be hastily abandoned when news of gold in the Salmon River region broke. Florence, the new center for activity, struggled into existence during the hard winter of 1861-1862. But with the discovery of gold in the Boise Basin in summer and fall of 1862, miners deserted Florence as well and headed for "the new mecca" in southwestern Idaho. [4]

Although gold was found in Montana that same year, the great placers of the Boise Basin "turned out to be the most important." Compared to other districts in the Pacific Northwest, the new mines eclipsed anything that had been found. A major gold rush to the Boise Basin commenced in the fall of 1862 and proceeded unabated to 1864. Considered to be easily the most densely populated and most productive placer and quartz mining section of Idaho, the Boise Basin supported a population of about 16,000 in 1864 during the temperate months, and it was estimated that between 1863 and 1866, the mines probably produced about $17 million. More than miners resided in the basin and contributed to the economy. Emigrants headed for the Pacific coast, either on the main Oregon Trail or the more direct route of Goodale's Cutoff, were attracted to Boise valley, settled there, and seized the opportunity to provide the mining camps with farm products and other supplies. [5]

In the mid-1860s interest shifted from Boise to new mines in the South Boise and Owyhee districts, and some less successful rushes over the Snake River Plain. By 1865 and 1866, Montana captured the imagination of gold and silver seekers and its promise lured many away from the Boise area. Any surplus population drifted away from the Boise Basin when new discoveries were made in northeastern Nevada by 1868. Yet unlike its predecessor districts, the Boise mines outlasted their initial discovery and produced continuously even after other districts captured most of the attention. [6]

The future of southern Idaho's mining economy existed primarily with lode mining after 1869; most of the placer areas, except for places such as the Boise Basin, had been depleted. But in order for the more expensive lode mining to be successful, it required capital and awaited, among other things, improved technology and transportation to extract, process, and transport the ore to market. Throughout the West and southern Idaho, the 1870s were discouraging times for mining, particularly with the depression of 1873. But a new mining boom of significant size emerged late that decade and the 1880s. This later boom concentrated on silver more than gold, and base metals such as lead and copper. Recovering base metals led to the development of smelting facilities, their accompanying service industries, and the close affiliation with new technological advancements, new railroads, and a new capacity for attracting large investments of capital. [7]

By the early 1880s lead-silver recovery in Idaho outdistanced gold mining; the major lead-silver operations lay in the northern panhandle in the Coeur d'Alene country, whereas, on a smaller scale, southern Idaho's lead-silver empire lay in the Wood River country. Initial mineral discoveries on Wood River date to the Boise Basin gold rush years of the 1860s. Nothing came of these finds immediately. Indian conflicts during the 1870s delayed any development, but these were resolved with the end of the Bannock War of 1878. By then profitable smelting methods had been proven in other western mining districts, and construction of the Oregon Short Line was making its way across southern Idaho, close to Wood River. With these changes, mining interests revised their opinion of the valley and returned to prospect.

Prospectors located and filed claims for lead-silver mines in 1879, and by the spring of 1880 a rush to Wood River was underway. That summer still other mines were discovered, transforming the region into southern Idaho's leading mining center for at least a decade. By the end of 1899, the Wood River mines had produced more than $14 million in silver and about $5 million in lead. Most of this money had been accrued during the 1880s, the same years that gave rise to the communities and mining centers of Bellevue, Hailey, Ketchum, Bullion, Broadford, Muldoon, Vienna, Galena, and Sawtooth City, among others. As in the Boise Basin, Wood River mining influenced the establishment of ranching and farming settlements in the Wood River and Little Wood River valleys. In 1883 a branch of the Oregon Short Line reached Hailey and further aided both mining operations and settlement. No matter these improvements, mining booms eventually busted. Declining lead and silver prices in the early 1890s, combined with the panic of 1893 and more cost-efficient smelting operations in Salt Lake City, Denver, or Omaha, effectively shut down the Wood River mines. [8] Though mining itself did not fade away, the rushes and small-time operations did, giving way to more industrial and corporate-based enterprises.