Silver Valley Rising

Draft 4.7
July 12, 2026

A local bagpiper plays Amazing Grace as the nearly 4,000 people gather on the outskirts of Smelterville to witness the end of an era. Vendors sell food, drinks, T-shirts, and commemorative hats. The atmosphere is festive.

At precisely 2 p.m. on that pleasant Sunday afternoon in May of 1996 five hundred pounds of carefully placed dynamite explode on cue. Four massive smokestacks crumple into themselves and disappear under a towering cloud of lead-laced dust.

"Good riddance to Bunker Hill stacks!" wrote the Coeur d’Alene Press earlier that morning.

To most of its readership, the explosion signaled a new beginning, a hopeful sign that a century of degradation was behind them. But to others, it was a bittersweet moment. That tallest stack—715 feet and once the tallest free-standing structure west of the Mississippi—represented a time when the Silver Valley was the most productive mining district in the country and one of the most productive in world history. And now, the symbol of that proud history reduced to rubble in the span of thirty seconds.

There is perhaps no place in Idaho where the fortunes of a region have swung so dramatically from immense prosperity to utter collapse and then back again to relative prosperity as northern Idaho’s Silver Valley.

My first encounter with the region occurred in 1985?, for the station’s public affairs series Idaho Reports. Videographer Ric Ochoa and I headed north, already aware that it was not a happy time for the towns of Kellogg, Wallace, Silverton, Osborn, Wardner, Pinehurst, Mullan, and Smelterville.

The mines had recently closed, and the Environmental Protection Agency had just declared a 21-mile region a Superfund site. Nothing says “Poison” like a Superfund label.

 

Outdoor Idaho had devoted several shows to the state’s mining heritage. We tried to be fair in our 2008 “Mining Idaho” show, as we posed the question, “What role should mining play in a society that now puts a premium on clean water and clean air?” One answer we came up with upset many in the mining industry.

Two years before “Mining Idaho” aired, a 2006 study on the accuracy of water quality predictions reported that, while 100% of the mines predicted compliance with water quality standards, 76% of the mines failed to reach those standards. That’s not a great record, and it points to a serious problem. The water we drink and use tends to deteriorate with mining activity.

Twenty years after the initial Idaho Reports story. Outdoor Idaho produced a program, this time with a story about resilience and about a region of the state determined not to let its past define its future.

Like many of our productions, the 2005 “Silver Valley Rising” program blended history, science, and the voices of people who had lived the story. We interviewed miners, historians, geologists, public-health officials, and residents who had watched their communities endure unimaginable highs and devastating lows. The deeper we dug, the more we realized the story was a profoundly human one.

And to understand how the valley began rising again, you first have to understand what made it one of the richest—and eventually one of the most troubled—mining districts in the world.

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Silver isn't found with a gold pan in the bottom of a stream.

Unlike the placer gold that drew thousands of fortune seekers to places like the Boise Basin in the 1860s, silver lies locked inside hard rock, hidden in rich veins that twist through ancient mountains. Finding it is difficult. Extracting it is even harder.

The Coeur d'Alene Mining District proved to be one of the richest silver deposits ever discovered on the planet. Those underground veins also contained lead, zinc, and other valuable minerals, creating an extraordinary concentration of wealth beneath a relatively small corner of the state.

Reaching that wealth demanded remarkable determination. Over more than a century, miners carved hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath the mountains surrounding Kellogg and Wallace, and all the smaller towns that comprise the Silver Valley. Maps of the underground resemble a giant spider web beneath what miners simply called "the Box."

Bunker Hill Mine accounted for 150 miles of tunnels. The Sunshine Mine added another hundred miles. At the Lucky Friday Mine, the Number Four shaft descended 1.8 miles below the surface, making it one of the deepest mines in the United States.

It's easy to admire the engineering. It's harder to imagine the people who made it possible. Every workday, miners stepped into elevators that carried them thousands of feet underground into heat, humidity, darkness, and danger. Long before modern equipment improved conditions, in 1900 it was common for miners to work ten-hour shifts, six days a week, for three dollars a day.

Mining families accepted risks that most of us can scarcely imagine today. The danger wasn't theoretical. On the morning of May 2, 1972, 173 men reported for work at the Sunshine Mine, the largest hard silver mine in the nation. Some stopped at the 3,100-foot level. Others continued even deeper underground, to the 5,600-foot level.

 When a fire broke out near the mine's fresh-air intake, carbon monoxide quickly spread through the ventilation system, trapping men in both upper and lower tunnels. Trapped by the toxic gas, ninety-one miners died in the deadliest mining disaster in Idaho history.

Federal investigators ultimately concluded that the fire began through the spontaneous combustion of refuse near scrap timber. Many people familiar with mining believed outdated safety equipment and inadequate emergency procedures played an equally tragic role.

The disaster became another painful reminder that the Silver Valley's remarkable prosperity came at significant human cost.

Nor were conflicts limited to the dangers underground.

The history of Idaho mining also helped shape the American labor movement. Bitter disputes over wages and working conditions erupted into strikes, violence, and even the use of dynamite. Leaders such as Big Bill Haywood rose from those struggles, willing to take the fight to mine owners, even using dynamite to damage part of the Bunker Hill mine. The mine owners called upon state and federal authorities to restore law and order, and governor Frank Steunenberg did their bidding. Miners considered him a turncoat. It all eventually culminated in the sensational 1905 murder trial of the former governor by a man named Harry Orchard, if indeed that was his name. It’s a story deserving of its own chapter, “The Elvis Version: It’s Now or Never.”

Those who have studied the ledgers believe Silver Valley produced more than a billion ounces of silver, millions of tons of lead and zinc, with wealth measured in billions of dollars.

But an entry on one side of the ledger needs to be balanced on the other side. The Silver Valley's greatest debt wasn't buried underground. It rose up smokestacks to rain poison over the valley, and it flowed directly into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, downstream to its namesake lake.

Perhaps the story of the Silver Valley resonated with me because I had spent decades living near Idaho City, surrounded by the scars of another mining boom.

When most people picture gold mining, they imagine a lone prospector with a gold pan, pick, and shovel, patiently working a creek in search of a few glittering flakes. That may have been true during Idaho's early gold rush. But long after the easy gold disappeared, industrial mining transformed the Boise Basin.

By the 1940s, giant mechanical dredges—some weighing nearly 900 tons and stretching more than 100 feet in length—were chewing their way through Grimes Creek, Elk Creek, Mores Creek, and other waterways. Endless buckets scooped up streambeds, sifted out the gold, and left behind mountains of rounded river rock. The waterways themselves were forever changed.

The dredges had chewed up all available rivers and streams before I arrived in Idaho City, but their handiwork is a permanent reminder that when people dig for treasure, the land always pays a price.

The Boise Basin, however, was only a modest preview. In the Silver Valley, the cost of mining wasn't measured merely in altered streams or piles of rock. It spread through the air, the soil, the rivers, and Coeur d’Alene Lake itself. It especially spread into the bodies of children who called Silver Valley their home.

Think of the name. It evokes images of sparkling streams and forested mountains. It may have been that way in 1885, when Noah Kellogg went looking for his lost donkey. He supposedly found the animal near an outcropping of galena, lead ore that often contains silver.

 But for most of the twentieth century, people knew Silver Valley by less flattering names: Black Basin. Lead Creek. The Valley of Death. Toxic Timebomb.

Smelter smoke blackened buildings and settled over streets. Forests near the smelter withered, leaving denuded hills. Horses, livestock, fish, and waterfowl died from exposure to primarily lead. Children carried so much lead in their blood that outsiders cruelly referred to them as "Lead Heads."

For decades, many people accepted those conditions as simply the price of prosperity. The mines provided good-paying jobs. Families raised generations of young miners. Businesses flourished. Communities grew. Few people questioned the bargain.

The smokestacks themselves reflected that way of thinking. Their purpose wasn't to eliminate pollution. It was to move it.

Smelters separated valuable metals—silver, lead, zinc, and cadmium—from the ore through intense heat and chemical processing. The process released enormous quantities of poisonous gases and lead particles into the atmosphere.

When pollution repeatedly settled over Kellogg, Smelterville, Wardner, Pinehurst, and Wallace during winter inversions, engineers came up with what seemed like an elegant solution.

Build taller smokestacks. The higher the emissions were released, the theory went, the farther the prevailing winds would carry them before they settled back to earth.

The plan worked, up to a point. But instead of poisoning one valley, the contaminants spread across forests, hillsides, farms, rivers, and wetlands near Coeur d'Alene Lake.

Then, in September 1973, disaster gave way to something even more difficult to explain. A fire swept through the Bunker Hill mine, destroying the massive filtration system designed to capture lead emissions before they escaped into the atmosphere.

What happened next was unconscionable and would leave a stain on mine owners that time won’t erase. The destruction of the baghouse should have been a temporary setback. Instead, it became one of the darkest chapters in Idaho's environmental history.

Five years earlier, the Houston-based Gulf Resources & Chemical Corporation had purchased the Bunker Hill Company. For generations, many of the mine's owners had lived nearby, often in Spokane. Miners had affectionately referred to the operation as "Uncle Bunker." That relationship changed when ownership moved hundreds of miles away.

Historian Katherine Aiken explained the difference during an interview for our program. "When many of the owners lived nearby, there was a sense that they were part of the community," she told us. "But now a corporation from Texas was making the decisions, and that made a huge difference."

After the baghouse burned, company officials faced a choice. Repair the filtration system before restarting operations...or continue smelting without it.

According to an internal company memo, Gulf Resources had calculated the hypothetical liability of poisoning 500 children at between $6-$7 million. That figures out to about $12,000 to $14,000 per child.  Profits in 1974 exceeded $25 million.

 

Gulf Resources decided to keep the smelter running. Not for a few days. Not for a few weeks. But for nearly eleven months. In fact, production actually increased during that time.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, approximately thirty-five tons of lead each month entered the atmosphere while the damaged filtration system remained out of service.

Even today, those numbers are difficult to comprehend. Former University of Idaho geologist Earl Bennett didn’t struggle to find the right words.

"Gulf Resources management made the decision to go ahead and continue running the smelter," he told us, "even though they knew there was going to be a tremendous increase in emissions of lead oxide out of the stacks."

Then he paused.

"We talk a lot about the sins of our fathers," he said quietly. "Our fathers committed a real sin. It was illegal then. It's illegal now. And I don't think there's anybody who could justify what they did."

Meanwhile, the Panhandle Health District began testing blood-lead levels in young children throughout the valley. The results stunned even experienced public-health officials.

Some children recorded lead levels among the highest ever measured in the United States. The agencies doing the testing discovered that 99% of the children had a blood lead level greater than 40 micrograms per deciliter. Compare that to the current reference level for children at 3.5 micrograms. The children living within one mile of the Bunker Hill smelter had an average blood lead level of 67.4 micrograms per deciliter. No amount of public relations from Gulf Resources could explain away those numbers.

Lead had infiltrated into yards, gardens, playgrounds, windowsills, and homes. Toddlers simply did what toddlers do. They crawled through contaminated soil, put dusty fingers in their mouths, and absorbed the poison into their growing bodies.

In August of 1981 Bunker Hill finally closed its doors. It was not a surprise to those who had been following the story: metal prices had declined. Severe environmental degradation had finally made it legally and socially untenable to continue. Corporate leadership made the decision to prioritize profits over cleanup. What is also not a surprise is that the lawyers and the financiers were the ones to strike it rich.

Thousands of jobs disappeared almost overnight. Families who had depended on mining for generations packed up their belongings and left the valley. Mainstreets emptied. Businesses closed. Schools shrank. And Gulf Resources, took its pile of money overseas and declared bankruptcy.

Two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency labeled the Bunker Hill complex a Superfund site. The richest mining district in Idaho had become one of America's largest environmental disasters

For many communities, that might have been the end of the story. For the people of the Silver Valley, it was the beginning of another chapter.

By the time our Outdoor Idaho crew arrived in 2005, the Silver Valley residents had spent two decades trying to answer a seemingly impossible set of questions.

How do you reverse the damage caused by 60 million tons of contaminated tailings discharged into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River? Some mines had been dumping 2,200 tons per day directly into the South Fork.

And what can you do about the 2.4 billion pounds of lead dispersed over 95% of wetlands in the lower Coeur d’Alene basin? Migratory birds like tundra swans, ducks and geese forage in shallow water, ingest the lead, and each year hundreds of them die. The pollution extends for more than 150 miles, making the Coeur d’Alene Basin the second largest EPA Superfund site in the U.S.

So the challenge extended far beyond abandoned buildings and polluted streams. It involved poisoned soil beneath neighborhoods, contaminated floodplains stretching for miles, rivers carrying mine tailings into Coeur d'Alene Lake, and a public weary of being known as one of America's largest Superfund sites.

The easy solution would have been to point fingers. Instead, something far more remarkable began to happen. The people of the Silver Valley chose to work together.

Not always gracefully, and not always happily. But together. After years of contentious meetings, lawsuits, public hearings, and political battles, state and federal agencies, local governments, health officials, and residents slowly assembled a cleanup strategy unlike any attempted before.

The state of Idaho accepted responsibility for restoring the communities themselves. Contractors removed the contaminated soil from schoolyards, parks, playgrounds, and thousands of residential yards. Roughly the top foot of poisoned earth disappeared into dump trucks. Protective barriers were installed before clean soil and fresh sod replaced what had been there before. Children could play outside again, and families paid nothing.

The Environmental Protection Agency tackled the industrial landscape. Mine tailings disappeared from the valley floor. The old smelter complex was dismantled. Denuded hillsides slowly turned green again as grasses, shrubs, and trees reclaimed ground that had seemed permanently lifeless. Engineers restored streams like Milo Creek so spring runoff would no longer wash contaminated sediments back into neighborhoods that had already been cleaned.

Meanwhile, the Panhandle Health District focused on perhaps the most important measure of success. Children's blood-lead levels.

Year after year, those numbers continued to fall. The collaboration was working.

The relationship between Idaho and the federal government had always been...complicated. Most Idahoans prefer solving their own problems. The arrival of the Environmental Protection Agency with its regulations, scientists, attorneys, and seemingly endless meetings tested that independent spirit.

As the cleanup expanded, so did the disagreements. When the EPA proposed extending its work beyond the original twenty-one-square-mile "Box" to include Coeur d'Alene Lake and even the Spokane River downstream in Washington, many residents felt the agency had overstepped its authority and needed to leave. Businesses worried the Superfund designation would permanently brand the region as toxic. Editorial writers blasted the EPA. Governor Dirk Kempthorne publicly declared that he had "absolutely had it" with the agency's bureaucracy, earning a standing ovation from an appreciative audience.

Chuck Moss, who directed Idaho's Bunker Hill cleanup effort, summed up the relationship with refreshing honesty during one of our interviews. "You need to remember," he said, "the EPA had two things going for them. One, they had the money. They also had the authority. That makes who the top dog is...the top dog."

I couldn't help thinking that collaborating with the federal government was a little like trying to dance the country two-step with a lamppost. Sometimes your partner simply refuses to move. Yet somehow, despite the disagreements, the work continued.

One Sunday morning, director and videographer Pat Metzler and I stopped at the Central Treatment Plant near the Bunker Hill Mine before heading back to Boise. We wanted video of the highly acidic water pouring from the mine—water we were told that would continue flowing likely forever.

A locked fence surrounded the treatment plant. Pat examined the lock for a moment, then reached into his wallet. Instead of a key, he pulled out his grocery store rewards card.

To our astonishment, the magnetic strip released the lock. The gate swung open. No alarms sounded. No one appeared. We quietly walked inside, filmed the brown, mineral-laden water entering the treatment system from the mine. Then we slipped back out, locking the gate behind us.

Pat looked at the card in his hand and grinned. "Rewards cards are usually worthless," he said, "but not today."

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Anyone visiting the Silver Valley today quickly discovers that the story is no longer underground, although some super-clean mining has started up again. The story is that mountain bikes have replaced ore cars. Skiers ride one of the world's longest gondolas to the top of Silver Mountain. New homes and condominiums occupy ground that once symbolized economic despair.

Families who stroll or bike the 73-mile paved Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes might wonder why there are signs warning people to stay on the pavement, to not wander off-trail or even sit on the ground, and to eat lunch only at specific places along the trail.

 

That’s because the asphalt hides a century of heavy metal mining waste. The train that ran on the tracks that is now the trail carried waste out of the Silver Valley, and did so in uncovered ore carts.

 

Now a thick barrier of gravel and packed earth has buried and sealed most of the waste safely under the pavement. It was an elegant compromise that seems to be holding. The trail of the Coeur d’Alenes is now often described as “a clean ribbon through a contaminated valley.”

 

For most visitors, it's simply another beautiful corner of Idaho. Most have little idea they're traveling through one of the largest environmental restoration projects in American history.

Scientists, miners, engineers, teachers, public-health officials, contractors, business owners, tribal leaders, local residents, and government agencies all helped make that happen. They didn't always agree. Sometimes they barely tolerated one another. But over time they accomplished something that once seemed impossible.

The work, of course, isn't finished. Far from it.

Millions of tons of contaminated sediments still rest beneath the waters of Coeur d'Alene Lake. Scientists continue to monitor oxygen levels, worried that changes in the lake's chemistry could someday release lead, arsenic, zinc, and cadmium back into the water column. The Coeur d'Alene Tribe remains deeply involved in restoration efforts and continues to press for additional cleanup.

During our interviews, I was struck by how few people wanted to dwell on blame. Most were far more interested in talking about tomorrow than yesterday. They had lived through enough hardship. What mattered now was making sure their children and grandchildren inherited a healthier valley than the one they had known.

I've been told that Coeur d'Alene Lake is fairly safe, especially its northern reaches, and I sincerely hope that's true. It remains one of the most beautiful lakes in the American West.

Even so, if I find myself standing beside the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River with a fly rod in my hand, I'll probably pause for a moment before making my first cast.

Can’t help it. Some stories stay with you long after the water begins to run clear.