Wallace, Idaho’s basic bibliography

by Ron Roizen

Not many western towns of fewer than 800 souls can boast a bibliography as long as your arm.  Wallace can and, I would argue, even should! 

The historical integrity of Wallace’s celebrated downtown and residential architecture is richly complemented by the colorful histories and manifold stories offered in a number of memorable and authoritative volumes.

Here, then, are my top 13 picks for Wallace’s basic bibliography:

1. Mining Town: The Photographic Record of T.N. Barnard and Nellie Stockbridge from the Coeur d’Alenes (Univ. of Washington/Idaho State Historical Society, 1984): Patricia Hart and Ivar Nelson’s affectionate and learned history of Wallace alongside eloquent photos borrowed from the Barnard-Stockbridge collection at the University of Idaho.
2. Coeur d’Alene Diary: The First Ten Years of Hardrock Mining in North Idaho (Binford & Mort, 1968): Richard G. Magnuson’s graceful recounting of news stories drawn from the local press, 1884-1893.
3. Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (Simon & Schuster, 1997): J. Anthony Lukas’s monumental social history of the Mining Wars in the Coeur d’Alenes, the assassination of an ex-governor, and the trials of mine union officials.
4. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2009): Timothy Egan’s fast-paced account of the Great 1910 Fire, which destroyed the eastern third of Wallace. (For a deeper and more scholarly study of the Big Burn, see Stephen J. Pyne’s The Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 [Viking Penguin, 2002].)
5. A Child’s-Eye View: Childhood memories of Wallace, Idaho circa 1910 (Lulu, 2017):  Mary White Gordon’s touching memoir offering, from a young girl’s vantage point, stories of family life, childhood pursuits, and community in Wallace at the beginning of the 20th century.
6. Selling Sex in the Silver Valley: A Business Doing Pleasure (The History Press, 2017):  Heather Branstetter’s excellent historical ethnography of the once bustling prostitution trade in Wallace.
7. The Rossi Murder and the unwritten law in 1916’s Wallace, Idaho (Lulu, 2021):  The story of Herman J. Rossi’s troubled second marriage, the killing of his wife’s lover, and his acquittal after a weeklong trial.
8. Hecla: A Century of Mining (Univ. of Washington, 1990): John Fahey’s history of the Hecla Mining Company, a mainstay of Wallace’ economy and life until 1985.
9. History of Placer and Quartz Gold Mining in the Coeur d’Alene District (Ye Galleon Press, 1932): Robert Wayne Smith’s very useful pre-history of gold mining in the District.
10. Silver Strike: The True Story of Silver Mining in the Coeur d’Alenes (Little, Brown, and Co., 1932): William T. Stoll’s briskly written account of Wallace’s pre-history at Murray and the great Noah Kellogg trial.
11. John Mullan: The Tumultuous Life of a Western Road Builder (Washington State Univ., 2014): Keith C. Petersen’s biography of the man who first opened Wallace and the Coeur d’Alenes to road travel.
12. Liberated Woman: This volume sandwiches together two books relating to May Arkwright Hutton. The first, James W. Montgomery’s Liberated Woman: a life of May Arkwright Hutton (1974), is a biography of this famous and remarkable Wallace woman. The second, The Coeur d’Alenes Or A Tale of the Modern Inquisition in Idaho (1900) is a volume of contemporary history authored by Hutton herself.
13. The Harry F. Magnuson Biography Project is a manuscript housed at the University of Idaho Library offering an examination of the life and times of this well known Wallace favorite son.

Readers may also wish to consult Wallace’s online Historical Reference Series for a collection of brief articles on the city’s storied past.