The Largest Single Silver Discovery Ever Made in the United States

The Largest Single Silver Discovery Ever Made in the United States In 1884, prospectors who had come to northern Idaho looking for gold staked a claim on a hillside that showed nothing. Under it was 1.2 billion ounces of silver, more than any other mining district in the United States has ever produced. This is the story of the Coeur d'Alene, a corridor of ground about 200 square miles wide that has been producing silver for 140 years and is still producing today. Ninety mines went into it. The richest single silver mine on Earth is one of them. And almost none of the silver in it was made there. We cover the gold rush that walked over it, the claim that opened it, the railroad that made it industrial, the ninety mines and the two that are left, and then the six geological conditions that had to line up in the right order to put that much metal in one place. Remove any one of them and there is nothing under that valley at all.