Logging the Wild West

Interviews by Sam Schrager

This month’s Spotlight City focuses on a northern Idaho logging town’s heyday in the early 20^th Century. It draws from a few of more than three hundred interviews collected in the mid-1970s through the Latah County Historical Society’s Oral History Project. The town was named after Hugh Bovill, an Englishman who built a hotel there in 1899. Over recent decades, its population has slowly declined from 305 in the 2000 census to 191 in 2020, but in 2018 the historical society’s then-director Dulce Kersting-Lark noted Bovill is “a town whose history exemplifies many of the elements that today we associate with the Wild West.” The oral history project’s audio cassettes were converted to digital audio files at the University of Idaho and transcribed. The following excerpts from interviews conducted by Sam Schrager are published with the university’s permission. They have been edited and rearranged for concision and clarity.

Dan Murphy

Born in 1888, Dan was a logging clerk and a scales and cedar pole inspector in Bovill.

I was clerking for Big Gil [Pippin] one time, way up on Cougar Meadows [about eleven miles northwest of Bovill]. Baker was cooking there, old Ed Connor was running the donkey and Gyppo John was tending hook for him. Anyway, Connor had a shack, and he said, “I got some chickens, and as soon as they start laying eggs, I’ll bring ’em over.” He says to Baker, “Will you cook ’em ?” [Connor ] was tellin’ about he read in a poultry journal where if you give chickens warm water, that’d make ’em lay.

And Baker said, “Well, I won’t need to cook ’em. They’ll be hardboiled.”

“What do you mean, hardboiled?”

“You’re givin’ warm water,” he says. “They’ll lay hardboiled eggs.”

“Why, you fool, you’re crazy.”

Every day Baker’d slip over there in the afternoon, and whatever fresh eggs was there, one or two, he’d put in hardboiled ones. So the fellow brought over a dozen or so one night. “Well,” Baker says, “what do you want ’em, deviled?”

“I want ’em fried.”

And, he said, “How in hell you gonna fry a hardboiled egg?’ And he cracked three or four. “See, I told you givin’ those chickens that lukewarm water they’d lay hardboiled eggs.”

So the guy didn’t say nothin’. He said, “I’ll get even with him.”

So the guy killed a chicken and smeared blood all over his nightgown and the pisspot and everything was all blood. And he got the other fellow, he said, “Moe, go over and tell Baker that I’m having hemorrhages, and that you’re going to town for the doctor and ask him if he’d come over and stay with me until you come back.”

So Baker come over and the guy was crawling up the wall and a whoopin’ and hollerin’ and blood all over. Baker got him quieted down and sittin’ in the rockin’ chair, and pretty soon he’d doze off, and just the time he’d get off, the guy’d have another fit, hollerin’. And that went on all night. About four o’clock in the morning, the guy says to Baker, “What time is it?”

Baker looked at the clock. “Four thirty.”

He says, “Alright, you S.O.B., go home and get breakfast for the crew. I’ll learn you to hardboil my eggs.”

They had lots of good tricks. That’s what kept ’em human, you know. Playing tricks on one another. Yeah. Nothing to do, you know, in the evenings. And they’d do something like that, make amusement for the whole crew. And if there was some real good storyteller, boy, I tell you, they could really put ’em out. Manufacture them. Think about anything, you know, and start a story out of it.