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SPECIAL TO THE ALASKA MINER Dennis E. Wheeler, who took a mining company started from his grandparents’ bakery in Wallace, Idaho, and built it into a $2 billion international gold and silver mining enterprise on three continents, including the Kensington mine outside Juneau, died February 26, 2019, at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston, Texas, where he was under treat- ment for leukemia. He was 76. Wheeler was one of the last of the larger-than-life entrepreneurial businessmen who emerged from the mining world of the American West in the late 20th century, the driving force inside his company, Coeur d’Alene Mines Corporation, who had a friendly, en- gaging personality developed from his childhood at the Rice Bakery in the small mining town of Wallace in the Idaho panhandle, that combined with an un- compromising drive to build Coeur into a major silver producer on the world stage. His 40-year tenure at Coeur led to close friend- ships with many national and government leaders, including U.S. Representative Don Young from Alas- ka, U.S. Senators Ted Stevens from Alaska and James McClure of Idaho, and former Idaho governor and Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus.
Wheeler was born in 1942 in Wallace, the coun- ty seat in the heart Idaho’s Silver Valley — the Coeur d’Alene Mining District — one of the major sil- ver mining regions of the world where more than 2 billion ounces of silver would be drawn from deep underground shafts in the 20th century.
WHEELER
His grandparents, Harlow and Anna Rice, had in the 1920s started the Rice Bakery on Main Street in the town of 2,500, which became a major hub of the mining town, where prospectors would often ex- change deeds to claims in surrounding gulches and valleys of the rugged Bitterroot Mountains. It was at the bakery, rising at 3 a.m. to help bake the day’s bread, that a young Dennis developed a strong work ethic and interpersonal skills which would later serve him well in the mining business. Over time, the Rice’s son Justin, Dennis’ uncle, would become President of the new Coeur d’Alene Mines Company, started in the Rice Bakery, with enough deeds accumulated to start a joint venture with ASARCO — American Smelting LYO =PʭYTYR .ZX[LYd ɨ LYO Z[PY _SP .ZP`] LYO Galena Mines outside Wallace in the 1920s. Dennis earned undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Idaho, and joined Justin at Coeur d’Alene Mines, as the company purchased another mine in Idaho — Thunder Mountain in the 1960s — and opened the Rochester gold and silver mine in Lovelock, Nevada, a large open pit, heap leach operation in Lovelock, Nevada, which is still in operation and has produced more than 1 million ounces of gold and 100 million ounces of silver since 1986. In 1989, Wheeler took over as Chairman, President LYO.STPQ0cPN`_TaP:ʯNP]ZQ.ZP`]MPY_ZYXLVTYR the company a major world gold and silver producer. During the next 20 years, the company purchased and developed mines on in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Mexico in South America; in Australia and New Zealand; and in Alaska at the Kensington gold mine outside Juneau, which combined would produce more than 200,000 ounces of gold and 9 million ounces of silver per year with Coeur billing itself as “the world’s largest primary silver producer.” He is survived by wife, Jackie, daughters Michelle and Wendi Wheeler and Maura Schmidt; son Bradley; and granddaughters Taryn, Trista and Tori Wheeler and Sara Carley.
The Alaska Miner
April 2019
42
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