Wagon Days brings Ketchum’s frontier era into view | Special Sections | mtexpress.com

Ketchum’s historic ore wagons are pulled down Main Street in Ketchum during Wagon Days. For many years, the wagons were pulled by a trained team of 20 mules, similar to teams that traditionally transported the wagons during Ketchum’s frontier mining era.

Since 1958, the city of Ketchum has celebrated its frontier-era mining heritage with a non-motorized parade featuring the Big Hitch, a collection of six authentic ore wagons that once carried supplies and ore to and from the mountains around Ketchum.

While the Big Hitch parade has been the main feature of Wagon Days over the years, the commemorations have evolved to include a wide variety of events and activities, mixing history with modern-day fun.

Wagon Days is a link to the Wild West of the late 1800s, when frontiersman Horace Lewis started the Ketchum Fast Freight Line shortly after the town’s establishment in 1880. The line’s massive, wooden wagons—typically pulled by a trained team of 20 mules—carried ore from the area’s Elkhorn Mine to a railroad in Utah, and then returned to Ketchum with loads of merchandise for businesses.

Later, the wagons were commissioned to carry freight over steep, winding roads to mines in the region and return with ore rich in lead and silver to the Philadelphia Smelter in Ketchum, near Warm Springs Creek. The sturdy wagons could carry loads of ore—weighing up to 18,000 pounds—as far as 14 miles a day.

At the peak of the Wood River Valley’s mining boom, some 20 to 30 mines produced bountiful, valuable ore, with some of the best ore producing more than 1,000 ounces of silver per ton. Ketchum blossomed, but the area’s fortunes changed circa 1887, when the rich veins of ore started to run thin.

While much of the history was eventually lost, the Big Hitch wagons were not. In 1958, the Lewis family donated the wagons to the city, with an understanding that they be displayed to the public. That year, a few hundred people watched the first Wagon Days Big Hitch Parade in Ketchum.

Wagon Days went through different iterations and even endured a period when the tradition was lost. Now, the celebration is held every Labor Day weekend, with some 15,000 or more spectators watching a team of draft horses—formerly mules— pull the Big Hitch through downtown Ketchum and parts of Sun Valley. The parade—which also features dozens of well-maintained buggies, carriages, tacks, carts and wagons, as well as equine performance groups and eclectic animals—is one of the largest non-motorized parades in the Northwest.

Though the parade has largely been a constant, other elements of Wagon Days have evolved over the decades. Some of the longtime advocates and participants are gone, and ideas on how to best entertain the crowds have changed, but the essence of the event remains.

This year, in addition to the parade, Wagon Days will feature a reception for the grand marshal, pancake breakfasts to benefit the Papoose Club nonprofit organization, children’s activities, cultural performances, and a free concert. (For details on events, see the pages that follow.) 

Ore-wagon trains were once an essential link between civilization and the mining camps that dotted central Idaho before the turn of the 20th century.

One such train operation run by Ketchum entrepreneur Horace Lewis, the Ketchum Fast Freight Line, kept goods—from pick axes to pianos to cloth and whisky—moving into the backcountry. After delivery, the wagons would return with ores ladled from Idaho’s mountains.

Trail Creek Road, which is a modern-day route between the Wood River and Big Lost River valleys, was built by Lewis for his wagon train operation. The original Trail Creek Road was steep and dangerous, inclining at 12 percent.

One of the major routes for the ore wagons was a 160-mile loop leaving Ketchum, going up Trail Creek and heading to mining camps in Clayton, Challis, Bayhorse and Bonanza in the Big Lost and Salmon river valleys. Trips that now take a few hours in automobiles often took ore wagons in excess of two weeks.

At the height of the mining activity in the Wood River, Big Lost and Salmon river valleys in the 1880s, the Lewis operation owned some 700 mules and 30 wagons. The men and the mules hauled 700,000 pounds of ore to the Philadelphia Smelter in Ketchum in a single year.

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