Idaho City

Bannock on Elk Creek, 1862

A gulch near the end of Idaho City’s Main Street still carries the name Bear Run, after prospectors who found richer gold on Elk Creek and kept it secret with a tale of being chased by huge bears.² The National Register nomination says Moses Splawn discovered gold in the Boise Basin on August 2, 1862.³ Later that year Captain Bledsoe took a party into Placerville, and a few days after that Captain Jeff Standifer set up a camp at Idaho City.² The state historical marker dates the founding to early October 1862, about ten weeks after the discovery.¹

The camp was first called Bannock or West Bannock, and the county’s account says the Idaho legislature renamed it Idaho City in 1864 because a town in Montana was also called Bannock.² The National Register nomination dates the change to December 1863, made to avoid confusion with another new Bannock City.³

Six Thousand on the Placers

By the next summer the marker counts 6,275 people, 5,691 of them men, and calls Idaho City the largest city in the Northwest.¹ The county’s history gives 6,267 by the middle of September 1863, including 360 women and 224 children, and says Boise City had nearly 1,000.² Other figures run higher: the Idaho City Historical Foundation puts the town at about 7,000 with some 25,000 living nearby, and the county page says as many as 20,000 miners came.^2,5 Mining was done right in town, Montgomery Street panned at $16.00 a pan, and lawsuits multiplied as undermined houses began to collapse.²

The Governor of Washington named William Noble, Frank More, and John C. Smith commissioners of Boise County in 1863 and told them to set the county seat at Idaho City, with Sumner Pinkham as sheriff.² In September 1863 the printers Joseph and Thomas Butler founded the Boise News, which became the Idaho World in 1864.^3,6 The toll road from Boise was built and stage service began in 1864, a nine-hour ride down and an hour longer back uphill.^2,7 In the winter of 1865 seven feet of snow shut out the pack trains, flour went to fifty cents a pound with none to be had, and the first train arrived in April.²

The 1937 Federal Writers’ Project guide tells of Ferd Patterson, a gambler who killed the sheriff of Idaho City, and of vigilantes who met in the graveyard and went to Boise for a cannon.⁴ The deputy, who had got Patterson safely into the jail, got a cannon too, cut portholes in the jail wall, and won the standoff, and Patterson went to trial and was freed.⁴

Fire, Chinese Miners, and the Dredges

On the night of May 18, 1865, fire swept the town; the county’s history says it lasted about three hours in one account and destroyed 80% of the town in two hours in another.² The merchant Mr. Craft, who held citizens’ gold bags for safekeeping, sent George Dwight out of town with them, and Dwight carried the hundred pounds of gold to a hill and sat down to watch the fire.² Fire came again in 1867, 1868 and 1871, though in 1867 residents were ready and saved more buildings.²

The height of the boom ran from 1863 to 1866, and by 1867 many claims had been sold to Chinese miners; the 1870 census counted Idaho City’s Chinese population at 1,751, more than 45% of the total.² The 1937 guide recalls their Fan-tan Hall, where a lantern was hung at the door each sunset and an attendant called out in Chinese that the game was open.⁴ When the easily worked streams were panned out, miners turned to hydraulics that carved away hillsides, and quartz mining with stamp mills prospered in the 1870s.² Dredging began in 1898 and ran until 1952 except for a wartime shutdown from 1942 to 1946, and the marker says the town stayed a mining center until the war stopped gold production.^1,3 The Historical Foundation traces the decline from 7,000 residents in 1864 to 500 in 1900 and 104 in 1920.⁵ In 1937 the Federal Writers’ Project guide found two hundred people, held together chiefly by the county seat.⁴

Brick Fronts and a Church on the Hill

The National Register of Historic Places lists Idaho City as a historic district bounded by its city limits.⁸ The county’s history says Father A. Z. Poulin built the first Catholic church in Idaho proper here in 1863, that men with wet sacks saved it from the 1865 fire, and that it burned in 1867 and was rebuilt shortly after.² The present white church, St. Joseph’s, sits high on a hill.³ James Pinney built the Masonic Temple, home of Lodge No. 1, in 1865 after fire destroyed the first building, and its marker calls it the oldest Masonic Temple in Idaho.⁹ A mercantile rebuilt as three buildings after the 1867 fire got a brick facade, iron doors and windows, and dirt packed into the attic, and the county page calls it the oldest mercantile in Idaho.² In the drawer of the courtroom desk Judge George H. Stewart wrote in pencil that he sentenced Herman St. Clair to be hung there on November 20, 1897, and St. Clair was hanged on June 24, 1898.² The town has buried its dead in the same cemetery since 1863, where only 28 of the first 200 graves held people who died of natural causes, and an estimated 2,000 graves lie scattered through forty timbered acres.²