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The Beast in US

Posted on by Patrick McCarthy / Leave a comment

I first met the embodiment of the wild man at a tender age. I looked up one day and saw my broad-shouldered, well-muscled father hovering above me.

Joseph “Joe” McCarthy was from Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland. Larger-than-life at 250 pounds with just a 22-inch waist, he was a massive man. A lock of rich black hair covered his head. He had large hands, which were weapons for a bare-knuckle boxer, who had become a local legend in Fruitland and the town’s wild man.

Much later I came to understand that the classic wild man—huge, hairy, and violent—is the eons-old exemplar of the half-human, half-beast of medieval times and of worldwide lore and literature. Regarding nearly all wild man sightings, including mine as a little boy of my father, there is an element of truth and a larger piece of fiction. His image exists on three planes: the common man (as my father was), the mountain man (historical and fictional), and the wild man himself.

Like the wild man and mountain man, my father was a stoic, an enduring man’s man. He helped to coach high school athletes in all sports, thereby neglecting me in the 1940s and 1950s. I became a disaffected youth, filled with resentment and unrest. Rebellious against authority, I was later part of the Sixties generation that protested the Vietnam War.

However, as a youngster, I was shy and introspective. I preferred to watch, rather than participate in, the events going on around me. Over the years, I gradually turned my bashfulness and disaffection into positive behavior. I became a keen student of wild man cultures, and eventually deduced that “Old Joe”—as my father was called—was the “lost father” of all of us, because he symbolized the absent and unemotional parent of any child. Continue reading →

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No More Metes and Bounds

Posted on by Dean Worbois / Leave a comment

Whenever I drive south from Kuna on Swan Falls Road toward the Snake River, I pass a little sign indicating a turnoff to a place called Initial Point. It’s a butte just one mile to the east on a good dirt road, but for me there always seemed to be some excuse not to run over and check it out. At last, I decided to do what I had often told myself I should do, and took that turn.

A road leads up the butte, but the steep grade is studded with sharp lava rocks, and rather than chewing up my vehicle’s tires, I opted for an easy climb to the summit. I followed the road on foot about halfway across the east side of the butte, impressed with the expanse of open country between myself and the distant mountains of the Boise Front. A rugged shortcut uphill beckoned. After a brief climb, the butte rounded onto a large flat area used for parking and, I’m sure, partying. At the southwest corner of this area, a lava outcropping rose to a point topped by a concrete platform with guardrails of pipe.

This butte may be only a hundred and twenty-five feet above the desert floor, but the flatness of the surrounding countryside makes for stunning vistas. Whether the Boise Front to the north, the Owyhee Mountains to the south, Oregon’s Mahogany Mountains to the west or the endless desert to the east, the land defines the concept of big sky. My whole life, I have explored its canyons and other features, and the grandeur of its open space. Continue reading →

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Steam Days

Posted on by Linda J. Henderson / Leave a comment

“Oh yes!” he says wistfully, “They have a distinctive sound, and they talk to you. That steam would go into the cylinders and dissipate out through the stack, and that was a sound that you never forget.”

That is how Harlan “Toad” Turner describes running a steam engine when he was a young man working on the legendary Camas Prairie Railroad. Now eighty-four, he still has the frame of a big, strong man. As he reminisces, he waves his brawny hands in the air as though he were still moving the Johnson bar and adjusting the dampers.

Harlan earned his nickname as a youngster. After hopping through a barbed-wire fence with a bunch of his friends, one of them said, “Why, you jumped through that just like an old toad.” The name stuck, he says, and his wife Neva says she has to use the nickname in the phone book or his friends can’t find him.

Now retired, Toad loves to talk about his “railroadin’ days.” He started out in 1944 as a young man shoveling cinders out of the pits at the roundhouse in Lewiston. From there he moved up to clerk in the station at Spokane. A fellow had to wait for an opening in those days, as the ones with seniority got their pick first. Finally there was an opening for a switcher, then for a fireman, and Toad moved up. But he wanted to run those engines. Continue reading →

Digging Up the Past

Posted on by Steven Branting / Leave a comment

Graveyards are traditionally permanent, inviolate resting places deserving of community care. For various reasons, however, some cemeteries have needed to be exhumed and transferred to new land. In 1888, Lewiston found itself in just such a predicament as the town began to stress its original boundaries along the Snake and Clearwater Rivers, the spring floods of which repeatedly destroyed property and hindered business growth.

Lewiston’s cemetery was the stereotypical “Boot Hill,” a plateau above the town where interments had been performed since the early 1860s. Regrettably, the eight-acre site was increasingly perceived as an impediment to civic “progress,” its proximity to the future neighborhood of the town’s wealthiest families considered undesirable. The cemetery’s disturbing lack of upkeep and state of disrepair aggravated the situation. Cows roamed freely among the graves, trampling wooden and stone markers. The stately, whitewashed fencing installed at great expense in 1879 was now drab, decayed, and falling down. The cemetery had become an eyesore, not what one would expect of an emerging shipping center and the site of the Pacific Northwest’s first telephone service.

After several proposals were debated and discarded by the city fathers, a new forty-acre site was selected in an area deemed to be distant enough from the town’s center to pose few problems for city developers. In December 1888, the city council officially banned any further burials in the old cemetery, and in the spring exhumations began. The platting records were woefully inadequate. Indeed, no map of the original cemetery has ever surfaced. By May 1893, the city council was obligated to “devise ways and take necessary steps” for removing the remaining graves and quickly passed an exhumation ordinance, contracting with Dudley Gilman “for the removal of the dead from the old city cemetery.” His costs were to be passed on to the surviving family members. Since he was related to a popular former mayor, no one openly questioned Gilman when it came time to pay his bill—$752.30 for no more than a few days’ work. Later that year, he was authorized to plow and harrow the grounds, taking the more than seventeen hundred feet of cemetery fencing as payment.

However, apparently the city council was not satisfied that every body had been removed. A brief notation in the city council minutes of the May 6, 1895, proclaimed: “It appearing to the satisfaction of the Council that certain persons were buried upon lands owned by the City…the Marshal was ordered to notify the interested persons to remove such bodies at once to the new Cemetery of the City.” The “interested persons” were none other than long-time residents and influential Jewish businessmen Abraham Binnard and Robert Grostein, who had been resisting the exhumation ordinance for nearly two years. But more about that later.

That same year surveyors divided the old cemetery property into four lots for potential sale, but plans for a new hospital, church, and Masonic Temple came to nothing. By 1900 a major portion of the grounds had been dedicated for use as Lewiston’s first municipal park. In 1905 a new Carnegie Library opened, and the Idaho Supreme Court Library was erected. Trees were planted throughout the park. In 1911 a local women’s group spearheaded the construction of a large fountain—complete with a statue of Sacajawea—in time for a speech by President Howard Taft from the park’s band shell, the only time a sitting president has visited Lewiston. The site of the old cemetery had been transformed, its legacy obscured by the circuitous paths of community development.

Adding to the usual graveyard mystique, a persistent story circulated that a mass grave had been dug in the new cemetery (now known as Normal Hill Cemetery) when the unidentified remains from the old burial lots had been gathered and transferred to the out-of-the-way unmarked site. A current lot map shows most of an entire row with the penciled annotation “NR,” which has long been assumed to mean “no room” or “no record.” It would take a group of dedicated students and some space age technology to unmask a truth more interesting than anyone imagined.

As a consultant for gifted programs, and a cartographer for the Lewis-Clark Rediscovery Project, I decided this forgotten cemetery would be a perfect puzzle for my class of seventh-grade students at Jenifer Junior High School. Using geographic information systems (GIS) with the popular software ArcView, we set out to uncover the truth behind the mass-grave rumor. Continue reading →

Mountain Home – Spotlight

Posted on by John Hiler / Comments Off on Mountain Home – Spotlight

After the discovery of gold in the early 1860s, the end of the Civil War in 1865, and the coming of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the little station on Rattlesnake Creek became quite famous. It was here that the famous Overland Stages came up the trail from the East carrying passengers bound for the fabulous gold strikes on the South Boise River.

Rattlesnake Station was founded in August 1864 when Ben Holladay put through his Overland Stage Line between Salt Lake City, Utah, and Walla Walla, Washington. Commodore William Jackson, an early employee of Holladay, acquired the property in 1872.

In 1875 an Owyhee Avalanche correspondent wrote, “I leave this morning by buckboard train for Rocky Bar. I have changed the name of this station, where I have been sojourning since noon yesterday, from ‘Rattlesnake Station’ to ‘Bedbug Station.’ There are no rattlesnakes here but an abundance of the other animals.”

On Feb. 13, 1877, The Idaho Statesman reported, “The station formerly kept at this point was called Rattle Snake and was and is yet the property of Mr. William Jackson. Jackson had a difference of opinion with the owners of the stage line, which resulted in the removal of the stage station to a point higher up the creek to the left of the old road. A post office has been established here with the name of “The Mountain Home,” but as yet there is no service, as no one is willing to serve the county in the capacity of post-master.”

In the summer of 1883 an enterprising drummer by the name of Tutwiler set up a walled tent and some whiskey barrels on sawhorses alongside the survey stakes for the new railroad being built. When the grading and track laying crews, known for having a horrible and almost unquenchable thirst, saw Tutwiler they said, “Hooray for Tut!” and named the camp Tutville in his honor. The first train steamed into Tutville in early July 1883.
Jule Hager, the new postmaster and stage agent at “The Mountain Home,” decided that since the trains brought the mail, the post office should be there to meet it. Without government authorization, he packed up the post office into a fifty-pound soapbox and brought it down the hill to the railroad. With it he brought the new name for the town, Mountain Home. Continue reading →

Disaster at Birch Creek

Posted on by Terry Armstrong / Leave a comment

During the early 1960s, the Idaho Academy of Science, then in its fledgling years, successfully secured a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant provided travel and honoraria to scientists to visit Idaho high school science teachers and their students.

A science teacher and basketball coach in Salmon at the time, I was successful in securing three scientists to spend a day each with my students. These scientists were Ray J. Davis, professor of botany at Idaho State University (1960-61), Edson Fichter, professor of zoology at Idaho State University (1961-62), and Earl J. Larrison, a renowned natural historian from the University of Idaho (1963-64).

Davis was the author of the book Flora of Idaho, published in 1952, which remains as a thorough treatise of Idaho’s 102 plant families and thousands of genera. He was a fine teacher. I recall that he ate lunch at our home during his visit to the Salmon school. I recall that I had found a saprophyte I had frozen and was pleased to show him.

I discovered that Davis was to stay in Salmon for a ride home to Pocatello on Saturday, the next day. The other basketball coaches and I had a game at Shelley on Friday and Davis willingly agreed to ride the team bus with us there, where he would meet his wife. The trip turned out to be an amazing five-hour lesson on Idaho natural history. Continue reading →

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Boot Camp at the Lake

Posted on by Jana Kemp / Leave a comment

“Farragut State Park is one of the places we visited this year,” I said to my uncle, Robert Kemp, on our way to a family reunion in rural Minnesota in the late 1990s. To my surprise he replied, “I trained there.”

This sparked animated praise from me about how impressed I was that such a huge naval facility (more than seven hundred buildings, plus roads and training grounds) at Bayview on the southern tip of Lake Pend Oreille could be built in eleven months to train more than 290,000 men over a four-year period, after which nearly everything was torn down. I said it was particularly impressive considering that with today’s modern engineering skills and equipment, we can’t even seem to get one road built in less than three to five years.

I didn’t learn much more that day about my uncle’s experiences at Farragut Naval Training Station (FNTS), an inland Navy boot camp from 1942 to 1946, because we were nearly to our destination, and because he’s a man of few words. But recently, it struck me that as a friend of Idaho’s state parks, it was high time I got more of the story. With some prodding and much laughter between my uncle and me, this winter he shared more information about his time at Farragut, which I’ve supplemented with further research. Continue reading →

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The Tallest Dam

Posted on by Grove Koger / Leave a comment

When I was growing up on a little farm outside Meridian, water appeared in the Treasure Valley’s canals every spring as if by magic. Irrigation season meant hard work, of course—seemingly endless rounds of setting canvas dams and shepherding rivulets of water between rows of corn and tomatoes and squash—but in the process my world turned from sere brown to green, and there were snakes and frogs to stalk in the fields and ditches.

Now, decades later, I know that our farm’s lifeblood flowed thanks to the Boise Project, the ambitious irrigation system that made southwestern Idaho’s desert bloom. And tracing that lifeblood back through Lake Lowell and up the New York Canal and the Boise River, I’ve learned how Arrowrock Dam—that vast and forbidding structure my parents took me to see as a child—came to be the project’s grandest achievement.
Continue reading →

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Heroics on the Lochsa

Posted on by Jim Fazio / Leave a comment

I’m sitting on the porch of a log building that once served as the assistant ranger’s house at Lochsa Historical Ranger Station in the Clearwater National Forest. It’s now the visitor center and first stop on a self-guided tour of the site, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, but in 1934, it was one of the buildings saved by the heroics of rangers surrounded by raging wildfire.

Looking through the trove of historical items in the visitor center one afternoon, I came across a typed account of this saga, which helped me appreciate how fortunate we are to have this place. The story was by H. D. Weaver, a Forest Service employee of the period. So far as I know, it has never been published. Continue reading →

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Tribute to the Sheepmen

Posted on by Teddy Khteian-Keeton / Leave a comment

June 29 was one of the hottest days this year, but that didn’t deter more than four hundred people from gathering in the shade of trees to witness the dedication of a monument commemorating pioneers who brought the sheep industry to the Hagerman Valley.

From their rows of folding chairs, the audience had a clear view of a triangular- shaped piece of park next to Highway 30 that had been freshly landscaped to include a new mound, upon which bronze figures were assembled. The sun cast shadows at the feet of a tall shepherd leading his saddled horse, while a small dog crouched alongside, guarding a string of eight well-fed sheep.

The Hagerman Sheep Monument, created by renowned Idaho sculptor Danny Edwards, had been donated to the town’s historical society by J.W. “Bill” Jones, Jr. and his wife Deloris, to honor the pioneers and the lifetime achievements of Bill’s parents, prominent sheep ranchers Johnny and Ethel Jones.

The story behind this gift to the community goes back to the arrival in the Hagerman area of Johnny Jones in 1904. He had come from Wales, where he and his sister lived with their mother, who was separated from their father. As soon as he “could hold a pitchfork, he became a stable boy and a carriage boy to a lawyer, who was his mother’s employer,” according to a biography prepared by the Hagerman Historical Society. When Johnny was only twelve, he went to live with a relative in London, where he delivered eggs and milk for only twenty-five cents a day. Continue reading →

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