Through a Kid’s Eyes By Mason “Doc” McCoy The Silver Valley is in an interesting situation nowadays. Renewable resources are on the rise and many of those products and systems require metals, including silver, which has fueled interest
Growing Up in Kellogg, Part Six By John Vivian This is part of a series of previously unpublished excerpts from the author’s reminiscences of his youth, which he assembled for friends and former classmates. For a kid who
Growing Up in Kellogg, Part Five By John Vivian In those days, young boys delivered newspapers door to door. You had to be twelve. I’m not sure why. At eleven, I decided I was old enough, and when
Growing Up in Kellogg, Part Four By John Vivian Part Four in a series of excerpts from the author’s reminiscences of his youth, which he assembled for friends and former classmates. Behind our house on Railroad Avenue and
Disaster and Survival By Lorie Palmer Russell Photos Courtesy of Lorie Palmer Russell One day when my Grandpa Roy Cooper was a little boy walking to school with his sister May, they encountered a large tree that had
Growing Up in Kellogg, Part Three By John Vivian Excerpts from recollections of the author’s youth in Kellogg, which he assembled for a group of friends and former classmates. The Crash Club In their wisdom or utter lack
Growing Up in Kellogg, Part Two By John Vivian The author, a retired journalist and professor, assembled recollections of his youth in Kellogg for a group of friends and former classmates. This is the second part of a
Growing Up in Kellogg, Part One By John Vivian This is the first installment in an occasional series about John Vivian’s childhood experiences in Kellogg in the 1950s-‘60s. Roughly a decade ago, he emailed his reminiscences to friends
More Than Just a Game By Mike Blackbird It was the bottom of the last inning in a seven-inning American Legion baseball game and our visiting Kellogg team led by one run—but St. Maries had the bases loaded
Approaching from the west on Interstate 90 at the outskirts of my northern Idaho hometown, a billboard proclaims:
You are now near KELLOGG
The Town which was Discovered
By a JACKASS—
And which is inhabited
By its Descendants.
Local legend claims that an old prospector, Noah Kellogg, was camped up Milo Creek in 1885. He awoke one morning to find that his jackass had slipped its hobble during the night and climbed up the mountainside. Kellogg spent all morning trying to catch his jackass, only to watch it scramble out of his reach each time he approached it. Finally, out of frustration, the old prospector threw a rock, hitting the jackass in the flank. Startled, it kicked out its hind legs, knocking the cap off an outcropping to expose a vein of lead and silver, which would prove to be seventy feet wide and half a mile long [for a slightly different version of this tale, see “Kellogg—Spotlight City,” by Erin Stuber, IDAHO magazine, May 2004].
Most likely, the story is apocryphal, but Noah Kellogg did discover the biggest lead and silver mine in the world. It wasn’t long before other rich mines were discovered in the mountains around the Silver Valley. Between 1885 and 1979, the mines produced 907 million ounces of silver—almost five times that produced by the legendary Comstock Lode in Nevada.
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