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The Mining Men's Club formed in the early twentieth century in Spokane, Washington. From a sleepy frontier town of 350 in 1880, the city's population burst in a decade to almost twenty thousand thanks in large part to its role as the jumping-off point, not only for the booming mining districts of northern Idaho, but also for those of Colville, the Okanogan country of northern Washington, and southern British Columbia. By 1893, the intersection of spur lines into mining districts and the Palouse agricultural area with two transcontinental lines, the Northern Pacific and the Great Northern, marked Spokane as the transportation and commercial center of the region. In the 1890s, mining's dividends poured into the city and Spokane's captains of industry formed the Northwest Mining Association to represent their interests. But quickly the capital demands of deep underground mines could be met only by distant syndicates and legions of anonymous stockholders, and Spokane transformed into a service center for the mining industry, home to mining stock brokers not barons.

As its membership transitioned, the Northwest Mining Association languished in the first decade of the twentieth century until one of its founders, Lyndon K. Armstrong, clamored for "an exclusively mining organization, a miner's club." In January 1911 that club emerged after a meeting at the Spokane Hotel. The men who attended agreed to meet each Thursday and called their conclave the Mining Men's Lunch Club and then the Mining Men's Club of Spokane (MMC). In 1911, a smoker and banquet at the Spokane Interstate Fair introduced the group to the city, but the club's hosting the American Mining Congress (AMC) national meeting in November 1912 established an enduring legacy - not for hard-nosed advocacy for mining interests but for sponsoring bawdy entertainment. The "Spokane Diggin' s" offered the AMC delegates an old-fashioned mining camp reconstructed in an ice rink downtown. Complete with a gurgling stream and mountain backdrops for ambience, the camp contained the usual assortment of gamblers, prospectors, bartenders, dance girls, and burros, and notoriously one evening a female "muscle dancer" who took center stage in her tights and flowing gauze, both of which she lost piecemeal during her dance. "Spokane people," chastised the editor of Spokane's Spokesman-Review newspaper, "are not accustomed to such shamelessness." From 1912 on, Spokane's mining men tried to match the "Diggin's" legacy.

The Mining Men's Club of Spokane met for five years, from 1911 until the fall of 1916, but in that time assumed the role that the Northwest Mining Association had held in representing the interests of the inland Northwest's mining industry in local, state, and national issues and in hosting mining conventions. Gradually, the club evolved from a forum in which to discuss issues to a podium from which to promote the viewpoints of this distinctive mining community. By 1916 the club recognized its ascension to once again represent the region and reassumed the Northwest Mining Association name.

Source: Vetter, Susan M. "The Northwest Mining Association's First Century." Northwest Mining Association 1995 Service Directory. Spokane, Wash.: Northwest Mining Association, 1994. [Copy available in collection processing file.]