1911-1915 — Trails and Wedding Bells

While roads were being built in every direction—north to Gibbonsville, east over the Divide, south toward the Camas Prairie—getting one to reach Shoup was beyond the ambition of engineers or the reach of a county budget. We were hemmed in by granite walls, sheer cliffs and a river that defied bridges and laughed at maps.

To reach Salmon from Pine Creek we still had to take the trail over the mountains—climbing past the hot springs, then following Panther Creek upstream through narrow draws and timbered slopes, climbing higher into the backcountry. From there the trail wound toward the Leesburg Basin, then dropped down into the Lemhi Valley. It was a long, hard ride even in the best of weather and treacherous come snow or mud. But it was all we had.

Folks on the other side of the river—those in Shoup or scattered along the north bank—had their own trials with trails. They crossed the Salmon in winter where the ice held solid. The rest of the year there was a seasonal ferry at Shoup, but it wasn’t much for weight. A man and a mule, maybe a light wagon if the current behaved—but no one trusted it with freight worth crying over. Shoupites took the high trail above the river, a narrow ledge clinging to the canyon wall with just enough width to make you overconfident. One loose rock and you’d be gone. That trail passed by collapsed cabins, rusted cans and the bones of played-out claims.

There was a footbridge at Shoup, had been there for some time—nothing grand, just some planks and cables strung across the river by men who’d had enough of getting wet. It swayed in the wind and creaked underfoot, but it held. It never showed up on any official map, yet we knew it was there—just like we knew who built it and who fell off it. I never trusted it fully, but I left my horse on the south shore and hurried across it to pick up my mail and get some good gossip.

Freight didn’t move upriver—not by boat. Pack trains came down from Salmon and up from the lower river. The Colson brothers made that trip regular, same with the Pope’s and old Ebenezer Shell. They packed supplies, mail and sometimes passengers—if you didn’t mind riding behind a salt sack or hanging on to your own frying pan.

Still, some things couldn’t be packed in. A cookstove too wide for a mule, a load of sawn lumber, a new sheet glass for a storefront, or machinery for a mill—those had to come down by freight boat, but once the river started freezing, or ran too low, that means of supplying downriver had to wait until spring. Once a boat launched from Salmon, it was a one-way trip: you made your landing or you didn’t. And if the river had other ideas, you paid the price.

That’s how Shoup kept breathing—by hoof, by hand and sheer stubbornness.

And so, while we weren’t very accessible, I’d grown comfortably ensconced in the valley we called Pine Creek. Sam James had named it back in ’82, and we never saw fit to change it.

Sometime that year I got word from my sister Edna that the old family homestead in South Thomaston, Maine had burned down and Clyde and Ethel were moving to California.

Ethelwyn Barton was born in 1911. I helped Alta bring her into the world—first to hold her, first to bathe her. Three little girls? I tried to tease Peter about it but he was happy as a clam to have another daughter.

After the big fire up north, the Forest Service got serious. No more guessing where the trail was or hoping a fire crew could get there in time, and speaking of time, it took some.

They began by cutting what they called fire roads—switchbacks and ridge-top trails that were wide enough to get a pack string through without scraping your knees. I’ll say this: it made it easier for the rangers to do their job, and sometimes ours too. But it also meant more boots in the brush, more eyes in the hills, and more rules nailed to trees.

Over time fire lookouts were built on high places and wire through the canyons so a fella could ring up Salmon from the far side of Horse Creek. Trails that had once been known only to deer and moonshiners got names. Men in uniform tramping down them with notebooks and fire axes, but a lot of young men got could get a job assisting with all that work ongoing in those years.

Lemhi Herald, September 28, 1911

CLEAN-UP OF $5000 IN GOLD

Good Gibbonsville Mine Enters the List of Profit Producers.

E. E. Edwards, the busy merchant and mine manager of Gibbonsville, was in Salmon Tuesday on business. He is in charge of mine and mill at the Reduction Co.’s plant in that company this season, and says the mine is looking well, and making money for its owners. They have just completed a mill run of 250 tons of ore which cleaned up $5000 in bullion by hand amalgamation and added perhaps 100 tons of concentrates that will run about $25 to the ton.

GIBBONSVILLE ADVANCING

This mine is rapidly coming into prominence as a producer, and its success is hastening the return of prosperity for Gibbonsville, and instilling the pristine life and hope into that camp which was first felt so strong ten or twelve years ago. Recently the miners broke into a new ore body that shows today about four feet of ore they have been milling, although it is not in the same vein. It looks like a fortune in sight, and every shift brings more of the precious treasure to light.

W. E. Taylor is the amalgamator. R. E. Wickham is running the cyanide plant, and everything is moving along with clockwork precision. They are employing about a dozen men at present. Gibbonsville is on the up grade, and the pouring of profits into the hands of mine owners will inspire other owners to greater undertakings.[1]

The first we heard of Ed falling in love was when a photo came in the mail—a formal studio portrait of the bride and groom with a short note saying they’d married on July 11th, 1911 and were living at the camp of the Arrow Rock Dam. As I stared at the picture I had to wonder what kind of gal he had married besides her name of Nora Inez Williams.

Ed had taken a job on a big federal reclamation project—the Arrow Rock Dam, down near Boise. I’d read about it: The federal government was building it right into the canyon wall of the Boise River, a solid mass of concrete. It was meant to hold back millions of gallons, tame the floods and store up water for the farmers in the valley. They said it would be the tallest dam of its kind in the country when finished which seemed a bold thing to promise. But Ed liked a challenge, and with all the talk of steady wages and a camp big enough to hold its own post office, I figured they’d be staying put for a while.

Life was as steady as a sourdough’s coffee pot—always on the stove, always half full, and always just about to boil over, and the years began to roll by so fast I nearly lost my breath. Billy and I patched up our fence—more than once—but that’s not to say we saw much of each other, even after he was working closer to home. It still took the better part of a day and a hard ride to reach Gibbonsville.

Scotty Stewart left for Salmon in mid-January to make final proof on his land—a narrow strip of some twenty-odd acres, hardly worth the trip in weather so bitter. He started out on horseback but before he could change to the stage line, he and the horse went through a hidden creek. By the time he reached Salmon he had all but frozen. He made it home again but took to his bed when on January 19th, his heart gave out. None of us doubted that the soaking in that creek had hastened the end.

I helped Jane prepare his body for burial, while a few of the men went up to the little hillside cemetery at the mouth of the valley and somehow cut a grave from the frozen ground. We buried him there on Sunday. Jane stood straight through the whole of it, her son Tommy at her side. Now she was twice widowed, and the canyon felt the loss keenly—not only of a man but one of its oldest and steadiest fixtures.

In the days before and after Scotty’s passing I did what I could for Jane—bringing meals, tending to small chores and making sure she was not alone in the long evenings. She was quick to return kindness but I knew too well the shock of losing the man who had brought her halfway across the world barely a year and a half before.

As death and life seem to mingle, that year I received two more granddaughters. Julia Frances Barton was born on Pine Creek, another girl to add to Peter’s harem. Ed and Nora had their first baby, a girl they named Lois Viola Callahan, born in Boise on September 19th.

I had to laugh because back in Maine, my brother Clyde had six sons, his wife Ethel still holding out for a girl.

Peter Barton was a supervisor at Ulysses mine in 1913. Alta and the girls moved there. Peter got word to Ed when a job at the mine came up. Ed had been working on the Capitol, another enormous construction project, but with its completion, Ed had the urge to come home. They packed up their wagon and made the arduous trip. By the time they reached Ulysses, Nora must have felt she was on the edge of the world.

There I was—alone on the ranch having to depend on hired help, but not for long. No sooner than Ed and Nora got settled in, the Ulysses cut the workforce. Peter kept his job but Ed got sacked.

I sent word for them to come live at the ranch. While I adored Alta’s baby girls, Ed and Nora’s little Lois stole my heart completely. And with only one baby girl to spoil, she took to me like spring sunlight on a cabin floor.

Turns out Nora was born in Oregon and not long after the family moved to Blaine County, Idaho, her mother passed. She was just a youngster with two little sisters trailing behind her, some older siblings too, with a brother in the mix. She’d never lived in an isolated canyon before, but she knew her way around a garden and made friends easy. And did I mention she could harness a team and ride a fast horse?

I didn’t quite know how to act around all that youth and perfection, I suppose. My sarcasm rubbed her the wrong way—it stung, and she let it show. Ed built her a small cabin across the valley and that made her happy. It wasn’t much bigger than a chicken coop, yet she was content to have a place of her own. And that suited us both just fine.

In April, we had visitors on Pine Creek—not so unusual—but one of the men took notes along the way, and I was delighted to see the journey described in the newspaper not long after.[2]

Billy and Billy Jr. were working as amalgamators for the A.D.&M. in Gibbonsville that summer.[3] By mid-month, Billy had taken out a lease on the Monolith mine above Shoup[4] and while he kept his job up at Gibbonsville, Ed worked the Monolith with a small crew under Billy’s supervision.

Word came in that Mrs. Flora Haynes of Shoup took third place in the Second International Egg-Laying Contest—no small thing when your hens have to ride the rails clear across the country. She shipped her birds east to be penned with the finest stock from big farms back there, all fed and watered under the same rules, and still her birds laid their way into the top three. Folks here always knew Flora kept good hens, but now the whole laying world knows it too. I expect her chicks will be fetching more than a song after this, and rightly so.[5]

Billy Jr. had found love with Madge, the spirited daughter of Charles and Laura Buster. They were married on Christmas evening in Northfork, with the river hushed and the snow deep on the pines. It was a quiet celebration, but a joyful one. We held our glasses high in a toast along with our breath hoping this young love might stand a better chance than most.

With an active sawmill still turning on Pine Creek and a handful of miners around, my table was rarely empty. One of my favorite mill men was Arlin Howell, a steady son of Idaho, born of mining stock. I used to tease him, calling him a bald-faced Mormon—not that he was one. We could banter for hours and for reasons I never quite understood he liked me better than most folks did those years.

When 1914 came rushing in, we were all placing bets on whether Alta’s fifth baby would be a boy or a girl. Most of us lost our wagers when Theo arrived—another bawling baby girl, born in Ulysses. If Peter was disappointed, he certainly didn’t show it.

I subscribed to all the regional newspapers in every direction and when I read that the Spokesman Review was having a contest to answer the question: Should the Young Farmer Every Marry a City Girl?, I penned my answer in the allotted word count, hoping I’d win the contest.[6]

Spokesman-Review, May 22, 1914

SHOUP, Idaho.—To the Editor of the Twice-a-Week Spokesman-Review:

Should the young farmer ever marry a city girl? We will assume that the social environments of the young farmer and the city girl have been such that their ideals of life are to be honorable in all things, and if so, they may or should marry. They will look upon the marriage contract as a business contract—the business of life—in which neither should be remiss in his or her obligations.

Agriculture, on a scientific basis, is the leading vocation in the world today, and in the march of progress the young farmer moves at the head of the procession. Agricultural colleges record and teach tested methods of all branches of farming, and the city girl has only to keep in touch with this work to be as efficient as the country girl.

Whoever made the human race never intended to make any “dog-in-the-manger” culture or religion possible. Under an established social caste system, discrimination, as implied in the question at issue, would follow as the natural outcome of social conditions. Our growing democracy is founded on higher national ideals. Class and creed are obsolete terms. Modern American civilization stands for equality and fraternity—fraternity that is the unifying bond of all humankind.

The great ship, Matrimony, sails from the port of parentage, bound for the shores of posterity. This page is one of the countless to portray in song and story, mirth and tragedy, the events of this voyage. The young farmer and city girl are fellow mariners on the ocean of humanity.

Annee C. Taylor

Nora’s sister Olive Williams came to the ranch for an extended stay that summer. Arlin Howell took one look at her, and I swear I watched love bloom across the table. Nora was overjoyed to have her sister with her—but I suspect Arlin was even happier. Ed, for his part, was thriving. When he wasn’t blasting out a tunnel, he was laying down plans to make something lasting of the ranch.

And then, Jack Bundy finished the pack bridge that connected us to Shoup without having to holler for the ferry or swim the horses. We held a grand celebration and Jack Bundy stood as the guest of high honor.

They called it the European War at first, as if it were something far away, contained—like a fire in someone else’s barn, yet even in Lemhi County you could smell the smoke.

It started in the summer of 1914, when some Austrian archduke got himself shot in a corner of the world most Americans couldn’t point to on a map. Then the whole continent went up in flames—Germany, France, England, Russia—all tangled in old alliances and newer grudges. By August the papers were full of it: armies mobilizing, borders crossed, young men marching off in neat rows, convinced this war would be quick and glorious.

I didn’t believe that for a second.

When Olive Williams had to return to Hailey, you’d have thought someone died. Nora grew melancholy and Arlin stopped smiling—unless someone brought him a letter.

Idaho Recorder, March 27, 1915


W. E. Taylor, the mill man, was a Salmon visitor the fore part of this week. Mr. Taylor has been living on Pine Creek for some time and reports very favorably of the mining prospects around Shoup and Sheep Creek for this coming summer. He is going to Gibbonsville in the near future to take charge of and run the A.D. & M. Mill.

With hindsight, I can say my behavior was erratic. I got wind that some of the neighbors were telling Ed and Nora I ought to be put away somewhere. Well, that didn’t help matters—far as my behavior—and let me tell you, if anyone had hauled me into court to try and prove I was insane, they’d have lost in an instant.[7]

Few people understood the pressure I was under, trying to run the ranch while the men worked out. And through all my married years—two husbands and two very different lives—I never really had a partner. Bill was back to visiting now and then, hanging his hat here or there, but he never stayed long. He did keep me in silk blouses and support though.

My stomach, which had troubled me for years, got worse. The spells were unbearable. When the pain hit, I’d ring the big bell on the porch, and Nora would come hurrying over with Lois, planning to stay until I was strong enough to be left alone.

One day, after I’d recovered enough to be up and around, I turned to her and asked, “Well, what are you doing here?”

Later Ed came storming in wanting to know why I’d called his wife a “scrawny piece of calico.” I told him I didn’t remember saying it. Maybe I had, maybe I hadn’t. If I did, maybe it was meant as a joke. But more than likely—it hadn’t. Oh, I could be cruel those days.

It was around then that Billy Taylor and Johnny Burr took passage downriver on a scow headed for Shoup. Johnny, strong as an ox and a fine swimmer, kept diving off the boat along the way, just to show off. But when they reached their landing and he dove one last time to secure the line, he didn’t come up. They found his body at Cove Creek, ten miles downriver, and buried him there.[8]

Then came word by post: The Lusitania had been torpedoed off the coast of Ireland—May 7th, 1915. A passenger ship, no less, with women and children aboard. Over a thousand dead. And just like that, the world tipped closer to madness.

Folks around here shook their heads. Some still insisted it wasn’t our fight. Others however, had begun to see the writing on the wall.

I wasn’t certain itwould drag us in. Yet something had shifted. Like a door had swung open and no one could shut it again. President Wilson kept us out—for a while—but the tide was turning.

When Olive returned the summer of 1915, Arlin was at the train station with an extra horse. My own love life was hardly worth the ink, but I’ve always been a dreamer. I watched Arlin trip over himself to make Olive happy, and I smiled.

The biggest news out of 1915 though, was the road to Shoup would finally be completed. It would take effort to keep it open, but for now a wagon could start out at Salmon and make it to Shoup.

Alta gave birth to a son at long last. On July 30th, 1915 Peter Joseph Barton, Jr. was born at Ulysses. He was just about the most handsome baby I’d ever laid eyes on.

Just before the middle of August, Arlin Howell and Olive Williams took off on horseback about the same time Billy and I were heading to Salmon for a few days. When we reached town, we learned they’d been married by Judge McCracken on August 14th, then ridden off together for a honeymoon under the stars. For all my grumbling, I’m a romantic at heart and for a brief moment I remembered how Jimmy Callahan and I rode the same mountains together, camping here and there, then riding on.

Billy and I stayed in town to finalize the sale of the ranch to some parties out of Boise. Afterward I rode out to visit old friends in Leadore while Billy headed up to the White Horse mine. I circled back to Salmon, and then on to home[9] where Lois was on hand to greet me.

It had been Billy’s idea to sell the ranch, but as luck—or maybe justice—would have it, he didn’t have the patent on the land, so the deal fell through. We leased the place to Ed and Nora instead and I stayed put.

I had come to expect that a letter from Edna usually meant bad news, so I opened the most recent one with nervous trepidation. Clyde’s second wife, Ethel, had passed away on August 9th, six months after the birth of her fifth son. My sister Millie was making her way by train from the East to California to help Clyde with his seven young, motherless boys.

When the work at the White Horse shut down for the season, which came early on the mountain, Billy took over the A.D.M. mill at Gibbonsville.[10]

Billy filed for a patent on the Pine Creek ranch in September with Ed still hanging on the hopes of being able to buy the ranch if Billy got another go at selling it.

I was delighted when the December 7 issue of the Spokesman Review published my letter in the People’s Column that featured a “Broad Exchange of Views on Political Issues and Community Problems.”

Home Farmer and Tramp Farmer Are Compared

To the Editor of The Twice-a-Week Spokesman-Review:

A few days’ travel in any rural district reveals to the observer two classes of farmers: one we will designate as the home farmer and the other the tramp farmer.

The home farmer, when he takes the situation in hand, has the ability and the ambition to learn what he does not know, then each day finds him better skilled in dealing with new problems and new responsibilities.

There is a tireless little motor located behind the eyebrows and the result is the home farmer grading higher than 75 per cent in efficiency. It may be intuition, inspired by a prenatal influence, or may be knowledge acquired by study, observation, or experience. However, he locates the site and builds his home on elevated ground in compliance with sanitary laws. His style of architecture may vary from the porticoed mansion to the overgrown barn of the Georgian or minor type.

In any case individuality and good sense is equally apparent to one who enters this home by the broad and inviting entrance from the highway. Rooms are spacious, ventilation perfect and sunlight everywhere.

One corner in this home is not to be overlooked. It contains a desk, writing or library table, with well-stocked bookshelves at hand, dedicated to the interests of each member of this cooperative institution. From this corner the day’s work begins and here it ends with the last debit and credit recorded. This home is one of the well-ordered number located in the Rocky Mountain region.

The Augean stables had no lodgment within the home farmer’s domain. The swine family and the orphaned weanlings of the dairy herd each occupy lots with ample room for exercise, and the life-giving privilege of sun baths is given without measure. These lots are supplied with running water, open sheds for shade or shelter, and enclosed with portable fences that once a year are removed to a new location; rotation of feed lots being as essential as rotation of crops.

That the tramp farmer exists is a vexed and unsolved problem of the present. What the future may accomplish is still more problematical. He comes from anywhere, stops anywhere, builds anywhere. His stables, instead of being fit places to house anything made of flesh and blood, are merely propagating plants for disease germs, waiting the opportunity to attack some weakened animal and spread contagion to man and beast. His corrals during the winter wet or spring and fall are seething pools of filth in which cows are kept waiting to be milked from 12 to 18 hours, while he lounges in the corner over the kitchen stove glued to his pipe.

A calf two days old was known to be imprisoned in one of these propagating plants of filth for four weeks without sunlight or exercise, which a kindly-disposed neighbor, whose only desire was for the safety of all live stock, tried to inform Mr. Tramp Farmer that young animals to be kept healthy and in a growing condition should range with other cattle when a few days old, when they would learn to eat all kinds of forage, this affording him as much if not a better use of the cow. Mr. Tramp Farmer was thoroughly imbued with but one idea, and that was that he kept a cow for the use of the milk and he intended to have it, calf or no calf.

His limited degree of mentality would admit of no further argument, and the neighbor withdrew under the firm conviction that the tramp farmer’s gastronomic equipment was in full operation, but the brain cells had reached a most advanced stage of ossification.

From a description of Mr. Tramp Farmer’s home we forbear. The home of the home farmer is the standard, and honor to itself and the country wide, one of the chief assets of a nation’s power. The owner of the tramp farmer’s home must be reconstructed. Is this another “White Man’s Burden,” or is this “The Man With the Hoe,” and we stand aghast to question, “Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?”

ANNEE C. TAYLOR


Shoup, Idaho

A one dollar payment came in the mail the following week and I tucked it into the change can I kept on the shelf above the sink.[11]

In those years the roads that wound through the rugged canyons of Lemhi County were more than just paths—they were lifelines. They carried the burdens of isolation, yet they were also the arteries that kept communities like Shoup and Pine Creek connected, even when the rest of world seemed so far away. We had no roadways or smooth routes leading to the outside world. Our roads were born of necessity, shaped by the stubborn hands of miners, ranchers, and families who refused to be defeated by geography.

The advent of fire roads and government intervention signaled the slow, steady encroachment of civilization—but it also marked the beginning of an era where things, both seen and unseen, would inevitably change. Billy’s trips to Gibbonsville and the continued hustle of the miners at the A.D. & M. mill and the Ulysses and a half a dozen of the old mines kept the local economy churning, while Ed and Nora’s move back to Pine Creek breathed new life into the ranch. The quiet joys of family milestones marriages and births, provided moments of light in an otherwise demanding existence.

But the world outside us, too, was changing. The winds of war were gathering across the ocean and with the sinking of the Lusitania, the future felt uncertain, even here. Yet, as always, we pressed on—building bridges, both literal and metaphorical, to keep us connected to the world outside.

And so, we stayed—stubbornly, determinedly—somehow, still connected to the land we called home. Though the world outside pressed in, the heart of Pine Creek remained the same: a place where family, hard work and love could still bloom despite the roads leading somewhere.

NOTES

[1] A “clean-up” refers to the process of recovering gold from crushed ore or placer concentrates at the end of a milling or sluicing run. In this case, the Gibbonsville Reduction Company processed 250 tons of ore using hand amalgamation—recovering $5,000 worth of gold bullion, equivalent to over $160,000 in today’s dollars. Additional concentrates valued at roughly $2,500 were set aside for later processing. The clean-up marked a turning point for Gibbonsville’s fortunes in 1911, as renewed discoveries and productive ore bodies revived interest and investment in the once-declining camp. W.E. Taylor, serving as the amalgamator, would have overseen the delicate work of mercury recovery and bullion casting.

[2] To read the ull article of the boat ride, see the Appendix, for links to History of the Downriver Mines, reprinted from the Idaho Recorder, May 8, and May 15, 1913

[3] Idaho Recorder, July 3, 1913, Page 1

[4] Idaho Recorder, July 17, 1913

[5] “Second International Egg-Laying Contest,” Southern Planter, November 1913, Vol. 74, p. 1174. The entry, likely part of the coverage of that year’s competition, refers to Mrs. Flora Haynes of Shoup placing third. The contest—hosted by the Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station—required hens to be shipped east for standardized evaluation over a full year, with daily egg records maintained under uniform conditions. Placement in the top ranks offered poultry breeders a powerful selling point for hatching eggs and chicks; Moore’s Rural New Yorker, Vol. 72, p. 1121. The Southern Planter said that Mrs. Haynes hens were Leg Horns, while the Rural New Yorker reported them as being White Wyandotte hens.

[6] The Spokesman-Review’s 1914 contest offered $25 in total prizes: $10 for first place, $5 for second, five $1 prizes, and an additional $5 bonus for the winning reply if submitted before April 30. In 2025 dollars, those amounts would be roughly $320 for first place, $160 for second, $32 for each $1 prize, and $160 for the early-submission bonus.

[7] Family lore, as told to me by Lois (Callahan) Martell, who heard the story from her mother, Nora (Williams) Callahan.

[8] Don Smith, A History of the Salmon National Forest (Salmon, ID: U.S. Forest Service, 1969), The account of Johnny Burr’s drowning, likely occurring before 1900, was related to Smith by Billy Taylor, son of William E. and Annie (Graves) Taylor

[9] Idaho Recorder, August 19, 1915. The White Horse Mine was one of the Kirtley Creek mines, located at an elevation of 9,100 feet, norteast of Salmon.

[10] Idaho Recorder, November 5, 1915, Gibbonsville Locals.

[11] In 1915, Spokane, Washington's Spokesman-Review paid $1 for each published letter. Adjusted for inflation, $1 in 1915 is equivalent to roughly $32 in 2025, making each publication a modest but meaningful reward for Annie’s writing.

[12] While the Bevan family wasn’t sure which Callahan child this was, there were only two Callahan girls, and this child is Lois Viola Callahan who was living on the Pine Creek Ranch, Shoup, Idaho from 1913 to 1918.