Bunker Hill Mine and Smelting Complex

The Bunker Hill Mine and Smelting Complex ("Bunker Hill smelter"), was a large smelter located in Kellogg, Idaho, in the Coeur d'Alene Basin. When built, it was the largest smelting facility in the world. It is located in what became known as the Silver Valley of the Coeur d'Alene Basin, an area for a century that was a center of extensive silver and other metal mining and processing. This resulted in extensive contamination of water, land and air, endangering residents including the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, which had traditionally depended on fish from the waterways as part of its subsistence.

In 1983 the United States Environmental Protection Agency added this area to the National Priorities List as a Superfund site for investigation and cleanup. In 1991 the Coeur d'Alene Tribe filed suit against the mining companies for damages and cleanup costs; they were joined by the United States in 1996 and the state of Idaho in 2011. Settlement was reached with the two major defendants in 2008 and 2011, with an agreement for funding of $263.4 million plus interest for cleanup and restoration of habitat.

In the late 1880s, a boom in mining activity in Idaho's Silver Valley followed the construction of railroad lines through what was previously considered by European Americans to be inaccessible "wilderness." The area for centuries had been occupied as part of more than 3 million acres of territory controlled by the Coeur d'Alene Tribe.

The Bunker Hill mine, the largest of the Coeur d'Alene area mines, was founded after discovery of silver here in 1885 by Noah Kellogg. Initially, the ore was shipped out of the Silver Valley by train for processing; but within a few years, mills were built on-site to extract the metals from the ore. The process used by the first mills, known as "jigging," was very inefficient, often recovering less than 75% of the metal from the ore. This meant that large amounts of lead and other metals remained in the tailings, which were dumped in nearby waterways. In 1945, in the last months of World War II, the company added a cadmium-processing facility to the smelter, which recovered high-grade cadmium from the smelter's waste products.

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