The boomtown that kept blowing up

Mines outside Bellevue produced $60 million in silver

Between 1881 and 1893, the mines outside Bellevue, Idaho tore more than $60 million worth of silver, lead, and gold out of the hillsides. The town sat on a mile-wide plateau with soil good enough for fruit orchards, but it grew rich on ore instead. Mines with names like Keystone, Phoenix, Paymaster, and Silver Tide fed a smelter built right in town. Bellevue had two newspapers. The Bellevue Daily Sun and the Bellevue Chronicle both ran. An International Hotel stood at Main and Oak. It could sleep 75 people. For over a decade it was busy enough to have a courthouse too. From 1889 to 1895 it served as the county seat of Logan County, a jurisdiction that no longer exists.

Then in 1893 the national silver market collapsed. The price crash hit mining towns across the West, and Bellevue's mines could not survive it. The boom that had built the smelter and filled the hotel simply stopped. The town kept its name and its plateau. It did not keep its mines.

A saloon bartender's match burned the business district

In 1905, a fire tore through Bellevue's business district. A bartender at the Seymour Saloon lit a match to check for a gasoline leak. The leak ignited. The blaze spread through the wooden storefronts of the town's commercial core and left much of it in ashes. The mining boom had already ended twelve years earlier. The fire took what the crash had left standing.

The town rebuilt, and for decades the ground stayed quiet. Then in 1957, eight tons of dynamite and 56 rounds of artillery shells went off at a mine west of town. The blast shattered windows across Bellevue and shook the whole community. Nobody had lit that fuse on purpose. It was an accident, but it hit the same streets the fire and the crash had already worked over.

A former mayor killed his ex-wife and himself

In 2012, Jon Anderson, a former mayor of Bellevue, killed his ex-wife and then killed himself. He had once held the town's highest elected office. The killing closed out a difficult decade. In 2003, two people were murdered in town. In 2009, the city clerk was convicted of embezzling nearly $14,000 from Bellevue's own accounts. The plateau that once yielded $60 million in silver had changed. By then it was known more for what its own people did to each other.

A teenage daughter was convicted after her parents' shooting

Nine years before the mayor's murder-suicide, another Bellevue household ended the same way. On September 2, 2003, Murders of Diane and Alan Scott Johnson were shot to death inside their own home. Their 16-year-old daughter, Murders of Diane and Alan Scott Johnson, was convicted in connection with the killings. The case drew national attention to a town of fewer than two thousand people. It sat at the center of Bellevue's own streets, not out at a mine or on a hillside. The crash had gutted the mines. A century later, the violence had moved indoors.

A Bellevue-born ballplayer carried the town's name outward

Walt Doan was born in Bellevue in 1887, in the middle of the silver boom, when the smelter was running and the hotel was full. He grew up to play professional baseball, carrying the town's name out into a career far from the mines. He died in 1935, more than four decades after the crash had already emptied Bellevue's ore veins. He was one of the few things the boom years sent outward instead of losing.

Bellevue served as seat of a county that vanished

The boom had built more than mines and hotels. It had built a county. From 1889 to 1895, Bellevue served as the seat of Logan County, carved out of the territory during the town's richest years. Government followed money to the plateau the way merchants and miners had. But Logan County did not outlast the silver market by much. By 1895, only two years after the 1893 crash, the county was dissolved and its records folded elsewhere. The courthouse that once anchored the town's civic life belonged to a jurisdiction that stopped existing before the century did.