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F E AT U RE S
Five Feet From a
MILLION DOLLARS Bonner County’s Mining History by Cate Huisman
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f ever there was a behavior that testified to the optimism of the human species, prospecting has to be it. “Out of 1,000 mineral occurrences, only two or three become good,” noted Compton White Jr., who owned one of Bonner County’s few profitable mines. “Most prospectors think they’re five feet from a million dollars, when they’re really a million feet from five dollars.” At the turn of the 20th century, a man could come here with enough money to buy supplies for a season and spend the next several months at a lonely cabin engaged in hard physical labor, providing himself with a pile of rocks. (The historical record features few women who were so devoted to this undertaking.) If he could get the rocks out of this remote country for processing, they might produce enough silver or lead to cover his costs. If not, and if the man were as good at buoyant argument as he was at hard physical labor, he could find optimistic investors both nearby and distant to support him through another round of the same. One person in the Priest Lake district found a more reliable formula for success: Leonard Paul started his business in a log
cabin in Coolin in 1906. “Around the time that I opened my store, there were mines scattered all over this area,” Paul told an interviewer years later. “I listened to their stories and sold them supplies, but I didn’t invest one cent with them. They came up here by the dozens. Each one convinced they were going to make a fortune from old Mother Earth. A few of them did, but it wasn’t through the sale of ore. It was through the sale of stock to suckers who had more money than sense.” Over the next hundred years, the Leonard Paul store inventory changed, but it stayed in business until 2018. Mines around Priest Lake, in contrast, barely got into business at all, with one exception: the legendary Continental Mine. Its owner, Albert Klockmann, had heard from a local Indian that the Indian’s ancestors had found material to make rifle bullets “from an immense outcrop of lead on the summit of the hills back of Priest Lake.” His search for and ultimate claim on this outcrop produced the tales of winter hardship and efforts to stave off claim jumpers that made the mine legendary. It also led him to his equally legendary business partner. Klockmann first met Billy Houston while hiking into the San dpoin tM a g a zi n e . co m S A N D P O I N T M AG A Z I N E nd ntM ne
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