The Oregon Treaty of 1846 ended the disputed joint occupation of the area in present-day Idaho when Britain ceded all rights to land south of the 49th parallel to the United States.
When General William T. Sherman ordered a fort constructed on the lake in the 1870s, he gave it the name Fort Coeur d'Alene; hence the name of the city that grew around it.
The name of the fort was later changed to Fort Sherman to honor the general.[11] North Idaho College, a community college, now occupies the former fort site. The lake was also named for the Coeur d'Alene.
Miners and settlers came to the region after silver deposits were found. It became the second-largest silver mining district in the country, generating both great wealth and extensive environmental contamination and damages.
In the 1890s, two significant miners' uprisings took place in the Coeur d'Alene Mining District, where the workers struggled with high risk and low pay.[12] In 1892, the union's discovery of a labor spy in their midst, in the person of Charlie Siringo, sometime cowboy and Pinkerton agent, resulted in a strike that developed into a shooting war between miners and the company.
Years later Harry Orchard, who owned a share of the Hercules Mine in the nearby mountains before it began producing, confessed to a secret, brutal and little understood role in the Colorado Labor Wars.
He later confessed to dynamiting a $250,000 mill belonging to the Bunker Hill Mining Company near Wardner during another miners' uprising in 1899. He later returned to Idaho to assassinate former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905.[13]
In 1986 Coeur d'Alene was presented the Raoul Wallenberg Award for its stand against neo-Nazis.[14]
Raoul's ghost cringes....
Legacy Of Hate: The Specter Of North Idaho's Past Still Haunts Region