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The Silver Boom and Why People Came
In May 1879, a prospector named David Ketchum found lead-silver prospects near Galena Summit, in the mountains above the upper Wood River Valley in south-central Idaho. By July of the same year Frank Jacobs had found the Queen of the Hills near the mouth of the valley, and the rush was on. Within a year, Ketchum, Hailey, and Bellevue had all been founded — three towns strung along the valley floor in quick succession, each one staking a claim on the commerce that the silver mines would generate. Bellevue was platted in 1880 at the valley's southern gateway, where the Wood River emerges from the mountains onto the Snake River plain, earning itself the informal title "Gate City" for its position as the entry point to the richest mining district in Idaho.
Between 1881 and the silver crash of 1893, the mines of the Wood River Valley produced more than sixty million dollars in silver and lead — an extraordinary sum for a remote mountain district, achieved in a little over a decade of hard, dangerous, well-compensated work. The ore was rich and the smelters busy and the towns that served the mines had the particular electric quality of places where money is being made faster than it can be spent. Bellevue was granted a city charter by the Idaho territorial legislature in 1882–83. The Oregon Short Line Railroad arrived the same year, carrying ore out and supplies in and giving the boom the infrastructure it needed to sustain itself. Mines with names like the Keystone, the Palmas, the Phoenix, and the Monday Mine sent their production down the valley to be smelted and shipped.
What Ended the Boom and What Remained
The Panic of 1893 and the accompanying demonetization of silver — the government's decision to stop buying silver at a fixed price — ended the Wood River Valley boom as comprehensively as it ended most western silver mining. The price of silver collapsed. The mines that depended on that price became unprofitable overnight. Many Bellevue residents left. The population that had assembled so quickly in the early 1880s dispersed with similar speed, leaving behind the physical infrastructure of a town that had expected to be permanent: streets, buildings, the church, the smelter ruins.
What the valley had, after the silver was gone, was the land itself — exceptionally beautiful mountain country, watered by the Wood River, sheltered by the Pioneer Mountains and the Sawtooth Range, with the dry high-desert sunshine that the Snake River plain provides in abundance. Ranching and farming sustained the valley communities through the post-boom decades. And then, gradually, the same qualities that had made the country beautiful became the qualities that brought people back: first as hunters and fishermen, then as summer visitors, and eventually as the skiers who discovered Sun Valley.
The Wood River Valley Now: Sun Valley and What Followed
The Sun Valley Resort, opened by Averell Harriman and the Union Pacific Railroad in 1936, transformed the Wood River Valley's economy one more time — from a mining boom to a skiing and recreation economy that has made it one of the most expensive real estate markets in the Rocky Mountain West. Ketchum and Sun Valley at the top of the valley are now resort communities of international reputation; Hailey in the middle is the county seat and the place where the valley's workers can still afford to live; Bellevue at the bottom has retained more of its working character than the towns above it, sitting at the junction of mountain and plain where the agricultural world of the Snake River valley meets the recreational world of the mountains above.
The mines are long closed, their waste piles still visible on some of the slopes above Ketchum and Bellevue, relics of the sixty-million-dollar decade. The O
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