If you follow the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River into a narrow valley in the Idaho panhandle, you come to Wallace, a town so compact that its homes climb the hillsides on wooden stairs. Did you know the entire town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places? Its story begins in the spring of 1884, when Colonel William R. Wallace, a Civil War veteran, built a cabin at a place he called Placer Center. It was one of the only flat spots in this rugged country, where several streams meet the South Fork, and it sat on the Mullan Road, the main emigrant road across the Bitterroot divide.
Wallace arrived just as the Coeur d'Alene country was changing. Andrew J. Prichard's gold discovery had set off a rush in 1883 to the North Fork, where the camps of Eagle City and Murray sprang up almost overnight. As prospectors fanned out from those gold creeks, they found something far richer to the south. In 1884 the Tiger and Poorman silver lodes were discovered, and other silver finds followed near the future towns of Burke and Mullan. The silver-lead veins of the South Fork would soon dwarf the placer gold that started it all, and Wallace's central cabin site was perfectly placed to serve them.
The little settlement grew quickly around that cabin. By the spring of 1885 Placer Center had a grocery store and several other small businesses, and within a year or so it also had a general store, a sawmill, and a hotel. By 1886 the town's population had passed five hundred. Transportation made the difference: the first narrow-gauge railroad into the valley was built in 1886 and reached Kellogg, and by 1887 the line had been extended another eleven miles to Wallace. Ore, timber, and supplies could finally move in volume, and Wallace grew into the economic center of the Coeur d'Alene Mining District.
Twice, disaster tested that center. In 1890 a fire tore through town and burned its timber buildings, so Wallace rebuilt in brick, hoping to reduce the risk. Then, in August 1910, the Big Burn, a firestorm that burned about three million acres in Washington, Idaho, and Montana, destroyed at least one-third of Wallace. The town had barely recovered when the Great Flood of 1913, driven by heavy rains and a swollen river, inundated northern Idaho towns. Each time, Wallace rebuilt, funded by the mines around it and determined to stay.
The scale of what those mines produced explains that determination. From the beginning of lode mining in 1884, the Coeur d'Alene district has produced more than one billion ounces of silver, along with eight and a half million tons of lead and three million tons of zinc. More than ninety mines worked the veins along the South Fork and its creeks. Today, visitors to Schweitzer and the panhandle can still walk Wallace's brick downtown, built after those fires, and read that history in its storefronts. It is a living reminder that the silver capital began with one cabin on a flat spot by the river.