Documentary Profiles Burke, Idaho
If you’re looking for the legacy of Burke, Idaho, just look around Spokane.
You’ll find it in the Paulsen Building, in the Hutton Settlement, the Campbell House and Patsy Clark’s.
All those buildings were constructed by money that came from the mines of Idaho’s Silver Valley - of which Burke once was a leading player.
This is no longer so, of course, which is the point of Irv Broughton’s documentary “Burke: The Story of a Frontier Mining Town.” The Burke of today is a virtual ghost town.
Located in a remote valley so narrow that, as one resident explains, “the dogs had to wag their tails up and down,” Burke by the late 1880s had developed into a booming town boasting 300 buildings - two operating mines, four general stores, two boarding houses, two hardware stores, a bakery and a butcher shop, one beer hall and 17 saloons.
The number of saloons demonstrates the priorities that prevailed in a hard-working, hard-living town boasting two seasons: “Winter and July - and sometimes July is very short.”
It was the kind of town that featured fistfights in the street and produced the world-class fighter Guido Bardelli (a k a “Young Firpo”), but also is remembered by the children who lived there as a great place to grow up.
Broughton, who teaches television and film at Spokane Falls Community College, follows a script written by his wife, Connie Broughton, in telling Burke’s story. Their chief source was Connie’s grandmother, Ann Magnuson, who died in 1988 at age 89.
Magnuson represented at least one aspect of Burke in her refusal, for years, to allow Broughton an on-camera interview. Still, he persisted.
“Connie said, ‘Well, I know my grandmother, and she’ll never give you an interview,”’ Broughton said. “‘She’s pretty stubborn.’ Which she was.”
Then one day she surprised them both. “She said, ‘I’ll be ready next week,”’ Broughton said. “‘Come on over.’ Connie just about dropped her teeth.”
In addition to interviewing Magnuson, Broughton talks to other Burke residents, such as Jim Hoban, Bill Dunphy, Sophie Armbruster, Lennis Hill and Phillis Peters, all of whom talk of harsh winters, union struggles and the ongoing threats of fire and flood.
Their recollections help Broughton provide an intriguing history of a once-prosperous town that lives on mostly in memory.
“I don’t think it’s a well-acknowledged fact around here,” Broughton said, “but a lot of what Spokane is today came from out of those sweltering mines of Burke, Idaho.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: ‘BURKE: THE STORY OF A FRONTIER MINING TOWN’ The documentary, produced and directed by Irv Broughton of Spokane, will be broadcast at 8 tonight on KSPS-Channel 7.