Burke

A canyon so tight the town, the railroad and the creek shared it

Burke, Idaho, sits seven miles up a canyon from Wallace in the Coeur d'Alene mining district, at 3,700 feet, in a cleft only about 300 feet wide. Miners found rich lead and silver there in 1884, beginning with the Tiger Mine, and by the end of 1885 more than 3,000 tons of ore had come out of it. A narrow-gauge railroad followed, and when its tracks were being laid in November 1887 the town was formally founded. With so little room the railway ran straight up the one main street. Locals liked to say that shopkeepers had to hoist their awnings when the train came through; one old resident, Bill Dunphy, called that an exaggeration, but a good story.

The canyon also made history of a harder kind. In 1892 hard rock miners struck against wage cuts, and the owners brought in replacement workers under armed guard, among them a trainload of 73 men from Duluth marched to the mines by sixty guards. The big Gem and Frisco mines a mile below Burke ran full-scale with nonunion men. On the night of 10 July union miners gathered at Gem with rifles and shotguns, and at five the next morning a shot rang out over the Frisco. In the fighting that followed the Frisco mill was blown apart, six men were killed and dozens wounded. Federal troops and martial law came in, and the shoot-out has been called the first violent clash between the men who worked the western mines and the men who owned them. The war flared again in 1899, when miners dynamited the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mill and the army returned.

Burke kept building. The 150-room Tiger Hotel went up in 1896 as miners' lodgings, straddling both the main street and Canyon Creek, and after the railroad was widened in 1906 the tracks ran right through its lobby, with an enclosed walkway overhead joining its two halves. Disaster kept coming: an avalanche in 1890 killed three people, another in February 1910 killed twenty, the Great Fire of 1910 swept the canyon six months later, a flood piled debris against the hotel in 1913, and fire struck again in 1923. Deep in the canyon, winter brought only about three hours of full sunlight a day. The hotel was torn down in 1954.

The mines closed one by one, and the last, the Star, shut in 1991. Burke had fifteen residents in 1990 and none by 2002. Wyatt Earp once kept a saloon in a tent at Eagle City over the mountain, and Lana Turner spent part of her early childhood here.