Between Kellogg and Wallace, in the steep canyon of Big Creek, the Sunshine Mine grew from a modest claim into one of the richest silver mines in the world. In September 1884, brothers True and Dennis Blake filed on the Yankee Lode and neighboring deposits near their homestead at the mouth of Big Creek. They worked the ground for about two decades before other operators took over, and the mine that followed eventually reached 5,600 feet underground, with roughly 100 miles of tunnels. By the time it closed in 2001, the Sunshine had produced more than 360 million ounces of silver, and it stood as the largest hard-rock silver mine in the nation.
That scale is only half the story the Silver Valley tells about the Sunshine. The other half is a single morning in the spring of 1972. On Tuesday, May 2, at about 11:40 a.m., two electricians on the 3,700-foot level smelled smoke near the electric shop and shouted a warning. Supervisors searched for the fire but could not pin down its location, and at 12:03 p.m. they ordered an evacuation. The cruel geometry of the day was that the main haulage drifts also served as fresh-air intakes, so the ventilation that should have protected the men instead carried smoke and carbon monoxide deep into the workings where most of the day shift was at work.
Of the 173 men underground that shift, 80 escaped to the surface. The remaining men were trapped as conditions worsened, and 91 of them died of carbon monoxide poisoning, in what remains the worst disaster in Idaho history and one of the worst hard-rock mining disasters in the nation. Yet even in that darkness there was an extraordinary thread of survival. Two miners on the 4,800 level, Tom Wilkinson and Ron Flory, made their way to fresh air near the No. 12 borehole and held on there, entombed about a mile underground, until rescue crews lowered through the borehole found them alive on May 9, some 175 hours after the fire began.
The mine stayed closed for seven months while state and federal investigators worked, then reopened in December 1972 and slowly climbed back to full production, once again becoming the nation's leading silver producer. Its deeper legacy, though, was change. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration calls the Sunshine fire the catalyst for the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977, the law that still governs mine safety in the United States and sharply reduced mining deaths. The disaster also drove lasting improvements in training, ventilation, escape systems, and the self-rescuer breathing devices that American miners now carry with them underground.
Today the valley remembers in steel and stone. Just off Interstate 90 at Exit 54, the Big Creek exit, a 13-foot statue of a miner with a glowing headlamp stands over the Sunshine Miners Memorial, which carries the names of the 91 men who never came home. Every May 2, families, miners, and neighbors gather there to read those names aloud. If your travels take you across the Panhandle, it is worth pulling off the highway for a quiet few minutes. The Schweitzer country and the Silver Valley were built by people who went underground before dawn, and the memorial asks only that we remember what that work once cost, and what it taught the nation.