Before the miners came, there were very few white settlers. Its only agricultural lands were part of the Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservation. A.J. Pritchard and his partner came to Spokane in August of 1883 with four pounds of gold, having found it in a small tributary to the North Fork of the Coeur d'Alene in Shoshone County. The rush was on. Two weeks later Bill Keeler and his partner returned to Spokane with about five pounds of gold that they had found on what they were now calling Pritchard Creek. Spokane became a boom town as the stopover point for prospectors going to the mines. A town called Eagle City developed near the actual mining spot. It was a tent city that quickly grew to over 2,000 people. Many of them were experienced at mining at Comstock, Deadwood, and other mines. Gamblers were set up with poker and other games to take away the miners' finds. Thompson's Falls, Montana, also boomed from barely a whistle stop to a town of several hundred. It was even closer to the mines and set up shop as a supply depot.
Shortly after that William H. Clagett showed up at the mine. He was a former congressman from Montana. He had led the fight against polygamy and he had introduced the bill that created Yellowstone National Park. He got the miners organized enough to build some log cabins and other buildings at the site of Murray, which was right near the placer diggings. A city a half a mile long sprung up. It had its own lawyers, doctors, gamblers, and women of ill repute. By spring men were ready to get down to business. Right away claim jumping resulted in at least one murder per week.
In March of 1884 a pack train came in from Thompson's Falls with a woman known only as Molly b' Dam'. She was immediately popular with the men, at one moment a kindly charitable woman, the next a vulgar scoundrel. Supplies for the first sawmill were brought to Eagle City about the same time. Soon it was milling lumber from pine and tamarack. The Morning Sun and Evening Record newspapers where soon in a bitter rivalry. A troubadour named Giuseppe, brought his black bear named Josephine and his monkey named Napoleon to town. Someone shot the bear by mistake, thinking it was going to hurt someone. The troubadour was heartbroken and left town angry; the townspeople shrugged and had bear for dinner. Claims that had been staked in the winter with several feet of snow on the ground were now under question. Judge Norman Buck and a sheriff were sent out to Murray to settle the disputes. One had to deal with the ownership of the Golden Chest, the Idaho, and other mines, all of which had the same source of title.
The placers had more or less played out when a fortuitous event happened. N.S. Kellogg, an out-of-work carpenter, came to town to try his luck at prospecting. While trying to make a deal with his cohorts, they were interrupted by the annoying braying of a wild donkey. Kellogg told them to put whatever they could get on the back of that donkey and he would use it as a grubstake. Two days later, while out prospecting, the donkey wandered off. After several hours of looking for it, he finally found it, right next to a rich galena outcropping. The vein was at least four to 25 feet thick and was over a mile long! Galena was commonly found with silver and lead. Kellogg knew he had stumbled on to quite a find at Milo Gulch. He staked two claims and hurried back to town as quickly as he could. He named the mines Bunker Hill and Kellogg.
He didn't bother to tell his too miserly partners anything since they had been so stingy in helping him, plus they hadn't been there with him. So he hitched up with Dutch Jake, Philip O'Rourke, and Con Sullivan and headed back out to the site the next day. They re-staked the claims giving all four men ownership in the renamed mine of the Sullivan, and Kellogg owning the Bunker Hill. The rush was on again. Cooper and Peck lost no time finding themselves a lawyer to enforce their previous claim with Kellogg. They headed up the mountain to confront them. While looking around the lawyers stumbled across a crumpled up piece of paper that was proof that the earlier stake had Cooper's and Peck's names on it.
While lawyer Bill Stoll was working on the legal battle, changes were being made at the mine. Kellogg really didn't know much about mining so he leased his property to Wardner and Esler, who immediately took to blasting with dynamite. D.C. Corbin came from Spokane and put in a narrow gauge railroad from Coeur d'Alene to the mouth of Milo Gulch. In just a few months, ore was being shipped to the railhead, floated across the lake, from where it was shipped to smelters at Spokane, Anaconda, and other cities. Timber was hauled in to build yet another boom town. Soon there were 4,000 people in the area. The town was called Wardner. Stoll and his partner Wood were basically blackballed from any legal business since most of the miners sided with Kellogg. This was largely due to the popularity and affability of O'Rourke.
The trial lasted weeks. Clagett, attorney for Kellogg, et al, had insisted on having a jury ruling. At the end of the trial, the jury ruled in favor of Kellogg. There was rejoicing in the streets. But Stoll and Wood asked for a directed verdict by the judge. The judge overruled the jury. Normally, he said, the judge would stand by the ruling of the jury, unless the evidence was inadequate for a reasonable person to have come to that verdict. He thought that was true in this case. He felt that not only had Kellogg lied on the stand, but that there was unreasonable prejudice by the whole town in advance of the trial. He awarded Cooper and Peck their share of the mine. Clagett appealed, but the local decision was upheld.
Things were relatively peaceful in the minds until 1891. This was one a union organizer from Butte came to the Coeur d'Alene district. He rose the ire of the muckers, who were getting 50¢ less per day than the powder-and-drill men. The fact that the powder-and-drill men were considered skilled and the muckers were considered unskilled was lost on them. The demand for an equal wage came at a very bad time. The mines had been overproducing so the market was becoming saturated. At the time, they were only making the slimmest of profit margins. If they raised the wage, the mine would make almost nothing. Stoll and two other lawyers were hired by the mine owners to form the Mine Owner's Association. This association shut down the mines, but kept the pumps working so that expensive machinery in the mine shafts was not ruined. The association contacted the Pinkerton Detective Agency to send out someone to pose as a miner to infiltrate the union and report back to them the mood of the men. The Pinkertons sent Charles Siringo.
Early in 1892 a financial panic erupted. The bottom fell out of the market for zinc, gold, silver, and lead. The unionn leaders did not understand that the mine couldn't be operated now for any wage. Siringo ingratiated himself with the union organizers and was appointed secretary. The miner owners agreed to meet with the Central Union of Miner's Organization at a meeting hall in Wallace, as one last chance to avoid hostilities. Siringo discovered that Sheriff Cunningham was secretly allied with the union. The mine owners brought in 100 strikebreakers. The sheriff and his deputized union leaders tried to halt the strikebreakers, but to no avail. Skirmishes between mine owners and union members began to take place. The union had discovered who Siringo was but decided to wait until the general fighting and make sure he was one of the casualties. Finally on July 11, the union members struck. Miners from all over the area had been shipped in to the Gem mine. They dynamited the Frisco mine. They took control of all mill properties. The Bunker Hill and Sullivan mines had been dynamited. Many men were killed. On July 13, the governor of Idaho territory declared martial law and brought in the troops from Fort Coeur d'Alene.
General Carlin brought his troops in via the Northern Pacific. But instead of taking the direct route to the mining district, as the union sympathizers would expect, they routed through Spokane, then DeSmet, Montana, then approached the mines from the east. The union had cut the telegraph lines so the troops couldn't communicate with those beseiged by the union; unfortunately they cut themselves off from any information. One thousand black troopers came in and immediately started rounding up the union members and putting them in the stockade. Soon the ringleaders were rounded up too. Each of the ringleaders was sentenced to two years in the federal penitentiary in Detroit. The decision was reversed under appeal, but they had each already served eight months. Peace returned to the district, and galena started coming out of the mines again.
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