Did you know there is a town in the Silver Valley so narrow that it never really had a street at all? Seven miles northeast of Wallace, the old mining town of Burke squeezed itself into Burke Canyon, a gorge only about 300 feet wide. There was room for Canyon Creek, a road, and a railroad, but not in the usual side-by-side way. In Burke, everything had to share the same narrow line, and the town that grew up there became one of the most ingenious, and improbable, places in Idaho mining history.
It started with silver. On May 2, 1884, prospectors made the first lead-silver-zinc discovery in what became Burke, staking a claim they named the Tiger. Three days later, the Poorman claim was staked on the opposite side of the canyon. More than seventy additional claims soon lined Canyon Creek, and by 1887 Burke was an established boomtown with a railroad running up its canyon. The Hercules, Hecla, Tiger-Poorman, and Star mines all worked out of this one tight corridor, and the Hercules, the largest of the early mines, operated until 1925, with its mill lasting at least into 1938.
Burke's most famous building grew straight out of that squeeze. The Tiger Hotel, a 150-room hotel that took its name from the Tiger Mine, straddled the main street and Canyon Creek, and the railroad ran right through its lobby. An enclosed walkway crossed above the tracks so guests could move between the two halves of the hotel without stepping in front of a train. In its 1890s heyday, five trains a day passed through the lobby, and the hotel's boardinghouse served some 1,200 meals daily. Old-timers also loved to say that shopkeepers had to roll up their awnings whenever a train rolled through town, and even if that tale grew a little in the telling, it captures exactly how close everything in Burke had to live.
Life in the canyon was never easy. When mine owners cut wages in 1892, miners struck across the district, and on July 11 of that year a gunfight at the nearby Frisco Mill touched off a dynamite explosion that destroyed the mill and killed six people, bringing martial law to the canyon. Seven years later, in 1899, angry miners hijacked a train starting in Burke, picked up more than a thousand armed men along the way, and blew up the Bunker Hill concentrator with 3,000 pounds of dynamite. Avalanches and fire struck too, including a devastating fire in 1923, yet Burke rebuilt and kept mining, in a canyon that tested its people again and again.
The end came slowly. The Tiger Hotel was dismantled in 1954, and when the Star Mine, the canyon's last active mine, closed in 1991, more than a century of mining in Burke Canyon came to a close. Today Burke is a quiet ghost town, but the drive up from Wallace still tells the story at a glance: the Hecla Mining Company's great concrete ore bin and its 1924 brick headquarters still stand in the narrow canyon, reminders of a town that refused to let geography tell it no. If you day-trip from Schweitzer into the Silver Valley, start with the museums in Wallace, then take the short canyon road to Burke and stand where the trains once ran through a hotel lobby.