At the east end of the Silver Valley, in a sheltered canyon of the Coeur d'Alene Mountains a few miles from the Montana line, sits Mullan, a town that quite literally grew up between two mines. It came into existence in 1884, the year gold was discovered at the Gold Hunter Mine and George Good made his lead and silver strike at the Morning Mine nearby. The camp that rose between the two workings took its future from both, and as the old saying in town puts it, gold brought the people here, but they stayed for the silver.
The name honored an earlier road builder. Captain John Mullan had led the construction of the Mullan Road, the military wagon route between Fort Benton, Montana, and Fort Walla Walla, Washington, and prospectors reached this country over that same road. The Morning Mine was quickly joined by the Hunter, the Evening, and other operations, and construction of the Hunter concentrator plant began in 1885. When the plat for the town of Mullan was filed on August 4, 1888, the village already counted twenty log houses, fifteen frame houses, a sawmill, and about 150 residents.
Railroad lines reached the Mullan area in the late 1880s, tying its ore to mills and markets far beyond the canyon, and the town was incorporated in 1904. Mining paid the bills decade after decade, and at its peak in 1940 some 2,300 people, mostly miners and their families, called Mullan home. It was a wide-open mining town in its early years, with more than a dozen bars and dance halls, but it was also a real community, with churches, schools, and a volunteer fire department organized in 1891.
That fire department earned its legend in August 1910, when the great forest fire known as the Big Burn swept through the Silver Valley. Wallace, seven miles west, lost a third of the town, but Mullan was barely saved after residents set backfires and spent days wetting down roofs and streets. By the local account, only ten homes were lost. It remains one of the proudest stories in town, proof that a mining camp could also be a community that looked after its own.
Most of Mullan's mines closed in the 1950s, and the town is quieter now, but mining never left. The Lucky Friday Mine, its entrance just east of the town center, still produces silver, lead, and zinc, and it remains Mullan's one working mine. For visitors exploring the Coeur d'Alene mining district from Schweitzer, Mullan rewards the drive east: a small town in a narrow canyon where the mines came first, the town grew up between them, and the story is still being written underground.