Mary Tyson, Director of the Center for Regional History
In the early years of Wood River Valley’s mining boom, many small towns sprang beyond Bellevue, Ketchum, and Hailey. Our towns survived the mining boom and bust that occurred in many parts of the West, but many of the smaller towns didn’t survive and became ghost towns.
Initially, in the boom and bust, there was a fevered search for gold and running into silver in pursuit of gold was a nuisance. Then, when silver mining technology developed in Nevada and Colorado, miners sought payday from silver and lead in central Idaho, where a lot of it was found.
This photo is of Bullion, a town seven miles west of Hailey, out of Croy Canyon, nestled in a Y-shaped gulch. Bullion was one of the many small towns that didn’t last, such as Muldoon, Donaphin, Gilman, Zinc Spur, Broadford, Carrietown, Sawtooth City, and more. Seeing Bullion here from a bird’s eye view, a town that was so close to Hailey, but a town that today you would hardly know was there, is remarkable.
Bullion grew as fast as Hailey grew. The immediate area quickly became a big producer of silver from the development of several mines: Bullion Mine, the Idahoan, the Jay Gould Mines, the May Flower, and nearby, on the drainage to Deer Creek was the Red Elephant Mine. Other smaller mines were being worked too. Five hundred miners and another two hundred residents lived in Bullion. There were 13 saloons, 9 gambling places, 5 stores, and a schoolhouse for miners’ children. Bullion had a Sheriff, and it was a voting district, from which delegates were elected to the Democratic Convention in 1889. You can tell from the photo how closely clumped the buildings were and that there wasn’t much room for maneuvering: miners needed logging, smelters, boilers, and supplies.
The disappearance of Bullion is part of the story of the “bust” of the silver boom and bust. When the mines played out and the value of silver crashed, a town had to develop a different economy to adjust to the changing times.
Note this story was originally published in December of 2025 in the Idaho Mountain Express.
