BY JOHN W. LUNDIN

PHOTOS courtesy of THE COMMUNITY LIBRARY and JOHN W. LUNDIN

In the 1880s horse racing was big business in Bellevue, but it was not to last.

In March 1884, Miller and his partners sold the Minnie Moore Mine for $500,000 to the London firm of Dent, Palmer & Co. That amount would be worth over $16 million in today’s dollars.

John W. Lundin’s grandmother, Alberta McFall, is the tallest girl. She is standing in front of the McFall Hotel in Shoshone with her sisters in a picture taken in 1905.

Mr. Palmer was one of the Directors of the Bank of England, and this was one of several sales of local mines to outside investors for large amounts of money after the railroad arrived in 1883, bringing a boom to the Wood River Valley.

In 1887, the town of Bellevue decided to improve its water system using private capital.  At the time, Bellevue got its water from Seamans Creek, brought into town via open ditches. There were two wells in the middle of Main Street where residents got their water.

The City Council granted a franchise to provide water to the city to a group of local businessmen that included Henry Miller and Matt McFall, who used the Bellevue Water Company.  

The Bellevue Water Company was incorporated to construct a water works to pipe water into and throughout the City of Bellevue; to furnish and supply the City and the citizens with water; and to fulfill the terms of the franchise.  A total of $30,000 of capital stock was authorized, and the company had $5,000 of paid-in capital.  

This map shows the location of the McFall Hotel in Bellevue.

The company constructed a new water works for the city, which included a wooden reservoir on Seamans Creek at an elevation of 150 feet above Bellevue’s main street to provide gravity-based water pressure.  Wooden water pipes were installed throughout town to bring water into Bellevue and to replace the open ditches and the community wells in the middle of Main Street.  

A 1905 picture of Bellevue’s main street says that “electricity had been brought into town and a water system, constructed of wooden pipes, replaced the need for a well in the middle of Main Street.”  The city and the water company had a number of disputes over the years, resulting in Bellevue buying the Bellevue Water Company in 1907.  

There is no mention of the Bellevue race track after the silver crash shut down mining in the Wood River Valley and throughout the West.  The track, like many other commercial enterprises in the Valley, were victims of the Depression.

“For mining communities...there is a time to be born and a time to die,” according to historian Clark Spence.  

The silver mining boom in the Wood River Valley came to a sudden end as the Silver Depression began in 1888 and devastated the national and local economy, showing how closely this remote place in the mountains of Idaho was linked to the outside world.  Silver prices tumbled in 1888, and fell further in 1892.

On May 5, 1893, a Wall Street panic, “Industrial Black Friday,” caused the price of silver to cave, ending the Gilded Age and creating a full-blown Depression said to be worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.  

By the end of 1893, more than 15,000 businesses and 642 banks closed and 20 percent of American workers, or between 2 million and 3 million, had lost their employment.  Many of the county’s railroads went into bankruptcy, including Union Pacific and its subsidiary, the Oregon Short Line, jeopardizing the Valley’s rail connection to the outside world.

Fortunately, the Wood River Branch would go on to be saved by the emerging sheep industry.  The hard times lasted until the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898 ended the Depression.

The depression hit the Wood River Valley hard, since its economy was based on silver.   The 1890s were Idaho’s “decade of turmoil,” according to historian Carlos Schwantes in his book, In Mountain Shadows: a History of Idaho.

By 1888, “many of the important Wood River mines ceased operations.  Bust had replaced boom, and many inhabitants left in the spring and winter.”   Its mines and smelters closed and inhabitants left, abandoning towns such as Bolton, Bullion, Gilman, Broadford, Gimlet, Doniphan, Hays and Muldoon.

Bellevue, Hailey, and Ketchum survived as centers of transportation and commerce.  But, between 1887 and 1890, Bellevue’s population dropped from 3,000 to 892; Hailey’s from 4,000 to 1,073; and Ketchum’s from 2,000 to 465. Ketchum’s dropped further to 300 by 1900.

“The Wood River Mining Region is deader than a lime fossil,” said the Ketchum Keystone of Oct. 12, 1893.  

In 1893, Matt McFall moved his family to Shoshone, a town on the main Oregon Short Line tracks and the junction for the Wood River Branch. The town was thriving as a railroad town.

In 1900, McFall built the McFall Hotel across from the railroad depot that became the town’s social and political center.  The McFalls took advantage of the next economic boom caused by investment in agriculture in central Idaho under the Desert Land Act of 1894 and the Reclamation Act of 1902.

Matt McFall’s International Hotel in Bellevue, located on Main Street at Oak, burned down on Oct. 15, 1909, in a spectacular fire which almost destroyed much of Bellevue.  McFall still owned the property, but it was operated by his brother-in-law, Neil Campbell.  

The story was told in the Wood River Times: “$60,000 Fire in Bellevue: About Half of it Covered by Insurance - Hailey’s Promptness to Help Appreciated.”  

Henry Miller stayed in Bellevue, and invested in multiple ventures and silver mines.  Along with others, he built the Third Avenue Ditch in 1890 that brought water from the Big Wood River through Bellevue in a ditch to irrigate farmland south of town. But, over the years, the ditch caused a number of problems for the town.

Miller’s fortune rose and fell with the economic times. The Millers and McFalls stayed in touch with each other, as seen by this article from a local newspaper on April 1, 1898:  “Mrs. H. E. Miller returned to her home in Bellevue, Monday, after spending a pleasant weekend, the guest of Mrs. Matt McFall.”       

McFall’s brother-in-law Neil Campbell stayed in Bellevue, continuing to operate his blacksmith shop and livery stable and investing with his sons in farming and mining properties.  The Campbells owned 41 silver mines or claims over the years.

Neil’s son Stewart was Idaho’s elected Inspector of Mines from 1920 to 1932, an important post in those days.  His son George was Blaine County Sheriff in the 1920s and 1930s.

It was the moving of the Miller House, however, that was to go down in Wood River Valley folklore. Learn all about it in next week’s story “Moving the Miller Mansion.”

Editor’s Note: John W. Lundin likes to say that he’s on sabbatical from the law as he pursues his interest in history and writing. He has written several history books, including Images of America’s “Sun Valley, Ketchum and the Wood River Valley” and “Early Skiing on Snoqualmie Pass.”