Living with Lead: An Environmental History of Idaho’s Coeur D’Alenes, 1885-2011

288 Pages·2017·14.306 MB·English

by  Bradley D. Snow

LIV ING

WITH
LEA D
Intersections: Environment, Science, Technology
Sarah Elkind and Finn Arne Jørgensen, Editors
LIV ING

WITH
LEA D
An Environmental History of Idaho’s
Coeur D’Alenes, 1885–2011
BRADLEY D. SNOW
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 2017, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6448-3
ISBN 10: 0-8229-6448-1
Cover design by Bruce Gore
To Reilly and the people of the Coeur d’Alenes

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction
3
1. Uncle Bunker’s Town
13
2. The Useful Metal: A Brief History of Lead
37
3. Lead Creek
47
4. Foul Humours
86
5. Raining Down Poison
111
6. On Lead’s Front Lines
140
viii
7. A Brave New World
168
Conclusion
190
Epilogue
197
Notes
199
Glossary
261
Selected Bibliography
263
Index
271
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written and published without the help of numer-
ous people. Friends, family, teacher-scholars, librarians, fellow graduate students,
editors—all played a critical role in helping me to do the work you have before you.
And much work it has been. This book has been nearly a decade in the making.
I began doing archival research for the book in the late spring of 2007. Years of
research were accompanied and followed by years of writing and rewriting. The
original drafts of what became my doctoral dissertation have been rewritten at
least a score of times.
From the Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies at Montana
State University–Bozeman I received an excellent graduate education. My disser-
tation committee—Mary Murphy, Tim LeCain, Rob Campbell, Michael Reidy,
and Dale Martin—provided great support and guidance, along with much-needed
critique and occasional prodding, which vastly improved the quality of this work.
Dale and Mary deserve the credit and/or blame for steering me to the eminently
“heavy subject” of lead and the Coeur d’Alenes that since has become one of my
chief preoccupations.
Mary Murphy, my committee chair, trained her keen eye for social history and
bad writing on the project from its inception. She read and edited every line of
every draft of the work through its publication as a dissertation, cutting reams of
unnecessary verbiage, and greatly enhancing the quality of my prose. I owe Mary a
great debt. Almost unfailingly upbeat, endlessly patient, relentlessly professional,
Mary kept me going throughout the long years I spent “dissertating.” Tim LeCain
also read through multiple drafts of my dissertation and brought to my attention
any number of important and relevant concepts and scholarly works from environ-
mental and technological history. Michael Reidy did a line-by-line edit, including
pointed margin notations, of a late version of the dissertation that did much to
improve the work. Rob Campbell provided forceful and pointed critique of the
dissertation that—much as it pained me at the time—pushed me to make the work