Bayhorse, Idaho: The Silver Camp Above the Salmon

01A Silver Camp Is Born at Bayhorse

The early record is tangled, and the sources do not agree on when Bayhorse began. According to the National Register of Historic Places nomination form, a prospecting party from Stanley Basin looked over Bayhorse Creek in 1864, and W. A. Norton located a claim there in 1872. Legends of America and the state park narrative both credit Norton, Robert Beardsley and J.B. Hood with a silver find in 1872. Serious work began in March 1877, when a lead-silver property was discovered. A mining district covering Bayhorse and nearby Clayton was organized on October 1, 1877, and that is the date most often used as the founding.

The discovery of the Ramshorn, the mine that defined the camp, is told several ways. The nomination form says a party from Bonanza located it in the spring of 1877. Starbuck.org names Tom Cooper and Charley Blackburn in August 1877. The state park narrative offers a more colorful version, in which a hunter who shot a ram found the vein around 1880. The sources do not settle the question.

A town did not appear overnight. The park narrative says Bayhorse grew up around the mines about 1880, and that in early fall of that year roughly 75 people lived in a dozen houses. The name has its own folk story. Legends of America relays a tale of prospectors who met a miner with two bay horses, could not remember his name, and called him the "man with the bay horses." The page itself notes that there are several explanations.

02Smelters, Kilns and the Making of a Mining Town

Once the ore was proven, the infrastructure followed quickly. By 1880 Bayhorse had a water-powered smelter. The nomination form says it could handle more than 30 tons a day, and Starbuck.org also gives 30 tons. The state park narrative describes a 25-ton plant built that year by the Omaha Smelting and Refining Company, capable of producing 80 tons of bullion a month. The Beardsley brothers sold their mine to that company.

In 1882, John T. "Jack" Gilmer and O.J. Salisbury, who owned stage lines out of Salt Lake City, bought the Ramshorn. They built a concentration mill in Bayhorse that same year. According to the park narrative, the Ramshorn had employed 60 men in 1881. An aerial tramway to carry ore down the slope began operating on September 1, 1883.

Smelting needed fuel, and the hillsides supplied it. Western Mining History says the charcoal kilns were built within two years of 1880, and that 48 men produced 80,000 bushels of charcoal. The count and date of the kilns vary by source:

• The nomination form describes nine stone kilns, with five or six surviving in good condition.
• The Idaho Heritage Trust says nine were built in 1882.
• Legends of America counts six beehive kilns.

The kilns did not last long in use. Western Mining History says they were abandoned in 1885, when coke became available from Ketchum. Legends of America says they were abandoned by 1896.

By the time the boom settled, Bayhorse had the usual furnishings of a mining town. Accounts list saloons, boarding houses, assay offices, banks, a general store, a meat market, a post office, mills and two cemeteries. A large stone building is believed to have been a Wells Fargo office. Population estimates range from about 300 (Western Mining History and Legends of America) to about 400 before the 1889 shutdown (the nomination form). Idaho Public Television says the town "probably never had more than a few hundred residents."

The district's output was substantial. The nomination form puts production at about $10,000,000 by 1898. Starbuck.org says the Ramshorn alone yielded about $2.5 million through the 1880s.

The town's post office opened under another name. Volunteer-compiled postal lists show an office called Aetna operating from 1881 to 1882 and again from 1882 to 1884, after which it was renamed Bay Horse. The Bay Horse office ran from 1884 to 1910 and again from 1920 to 1927. These dates come from genealogy pages, not official postal records, so treat them as probable.

03What Happened to Bayhorse?

The sources give several explanations, and they are not necessarily exclusive.

The first blow was physical. On May 14, 1889, a fire destroyed two dwellings, a stage barn, Sing Lee's wash house, and Charles Small's mess house for teamsters. By the nomination form's account, the real damage came in November. It says the town was practically deserted within two weeks because of "Secretary Windom's ruling on Mexican silver lead ores," and that work could not resume until the following summer.

Western Mining History tells it differently. It says a water shortage slowed production in 1889 and that falling silver and lead prices shut the mines in November. The smelter closed that year, reopened briefly in 1893–94, and closed for good by 1897. Ore was then smelted at Clayton. The state park narrative gives high transportation costs as the reason the smelter closed in 1897.

The end of mining itself is also dated differently. Western Mining History says mine production continued to 1925. Legends of America says all mining had ceased by 1915, with short revivals, the last in 1968.

The town did not vanish all at once. The post office reopened for most of the 1920s. The park narrative says that in the 1950s as many as 25 people lived at Bayhorse. Umont Mining leased the site and explored there from 1959 to 1962. By the late 1960s there was one caretaker. A University of Idaho library photograph from about 1946 shows the town from the air during these long, quiet decades.

04What Remains of Bayhorse Today

The abandoned Bayhorse site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 15, 1976. The state of Idaho bought the property in 2006 and opened it to the public in 2009 as the Bayhorse Unit of Land of the Yankee Fork State Park. The unit covers 548 acres.

Several buildings still stand. Legends of America lists the stone Wells Fargo building, the Bayhorse Saloon, the mill, cabins and the beehive kilns. The Idaho Heritage Trust describes the Wells Fargo Building as dating to 1882 and has supported its preservation with grants in 2008, 2014, 2017 and 2018. It also calls the kilns the only known stone-built charcoal kilns in Idaho.

Above the townsite, on the slope, the Ramshorn and Skylark mines still hold a bunkhouse and the headhouse of the tramway that once carried ore down toward the smelter. For anyone exploring this Custer County ghost town, those structures show the whole chain of work, from the ore on the hill to the kilns and mill below.