Elk City, ID

Elk City is an Idaho County census-designated place of 170 people at the 2020 census, at the eastern end of Idaho State Highway 14 in the South Fork Clearwater River drainage. The community sits at about 4,003 feet in a mountainous part of western Idaho County. Its origin is the 1861 placer-gold discovery that pulled prospectors from Pierce and nearby camps into the drainage.

ATTRSteve Shook from Moscow, Idaho, USA / CC BY 2.0

By the fall of 1861, more than 2,000 people had reached the Elk City and Newsome Creek diggings. The richest placer ground was largely worked out by the early 1870s, after which Chinese miners worked many remaining claims before discriminatory laws and local pressure curtailed those operations. Hard-rock mining grew around 1902, and dredging continued in the 1930s. Elk City's modern road ends where the old gold-rush story begins, with Highway 14 and the South Fork still fixing the community to its mining landscape. That sequence left a layered mining history behind the present highway endpoint in the mountains.