Far up Monumental Creek, past Yellow Pine and Stibnite and over the high summit beyond them, there is a small lake in the timber. Under it is a town. For a few years at the start of the last century it was the center of the last great gold stampede in Idaho, and then the mountain came down and the creek backed up over it.
The rush
This is steep, heavily timbered country at the heart of the Salmon River Mountains, the homeland of the Tukudeka, the Sheep Eaters, mountain Shoshone who hunted bighorn in these ranges. Prospectors had drifted through for decades. In 1894 two brothers named Caswell began sluicing gold out of Monumental Creek, and a couple of years later they found a quartz ledge with free gold in it. They worked it quietly.
Then, in the fall of 1901, Colonel William H. Dewey, a mining promoter with money, bought the Caswell claims for a hundred thousand dollars. A man of his standing paying that much set off the fever. Word spread that Thunder Mountain would be the biggest gold producer in the country, stage lines were planned, a telephone line went in, and the Union Pacific was said to be scouting a railroad route. In the spring of 1902 thousands of people came over the snow to get in on it.
Roosevelt was laid out that season along Monumental Creek, named for the new president, with lots selling from a hundred dollars. By summer it had fourteen saloons, ten stores, two butcher shops, two drug stores, a restaurant and a barbershop, strung out along the creek. A Boise newspaper warned that year that the slopes above it were so prone to slides that some day Roosevelt would be wiped from the face of the earth. It became the leading town in the district anyway, and a wagon road finally reached it in 1904.
The bust
The gold was real but it was not enough. Production never came near the promotion. Dewey's mine, two miles above town on Mule Creek, ran until 1907, and by the end of 1908 all the major mines in the district had shut down. Roosevelt was already emptying. In winter hardly anyone stayed.
May 30, 1909
The end came in spring, before the seasonal crowd had come back. On May 30, 1909, a great slide of mud and debris broke loose in a draw near the Dewey mine and came down Mule Creek, and within a day or two it had dammed Monumental Creek below Roosevelt. The town did not wash away. It drowned slowly. The water rose over the street, the saloons and the stores, and the few people there had time to get out and nothing they could do to stop it. When it was done Roosevelt was a lake. A caretaker stayed on for a time; everyone else left. By the end of the year the Thunder Mountain boom was over.
Getting there
The lake is still there, and visitors report old timbers of the town in the water. A plaque at the small Roosevelt cemetery remembers the Thunder Mountain dead, thirteen of whom are known to lie there. Getting to it is the hard part. From Cascade or McCall it is a long day on gravel and dirt through Yellow Pine, then past the Stibnite mine and over Monumental Summit, and the last miles are a rough mountain road best taken with high clearance, in summer, with a full tank and a good map. There is no town at the end of it, only the water where one was.