1921-1922 — Between Strikes and Storms

I settled into life in Ulysses as though I’d been meant for it all along. Bill and I made a comfortable home out of one of old saloons. I took on the role of school trustee[1] —no surprise, since my Barton grandchildren filled a good share of the desks. Without a church or Reverend, Alta and a couple of her friends organized a Sunday School for the children. Every so often I still picked up my quill to send a column to the newspaper.

June 24, 1921, Idaho Recorder

ULYSSES

Those to whom the lure of the wild appeals will find forest glade and sylvan shade arrayed to charm the savage soul.[2] Picnic and parking space is free.[3] The eagle screams on the Fourth and a little bird whispered to ye scribe that a prime batch of brew has just been put in cold storage at a convenient distance.[4]

Fred Bevan is one of the new men at the mine.

The clean-up of the past two days assumed the appearance of a continuous ovation to the mill men.

Mrs. Alice Wolcott is in town from her ranch at Sage creek, this being her post office and base of supplies.

Miss Margaret Westfall, who is with Mrs. Clark at the ranger station, exchanges visits with her girl friends here.

Gerald Ravadal of Gibbonsville, a range rider in the employ of the forest service, passed through on his line of duty.

J.W. Elliot is on a business trip to Montana and is not expected home until the first of next month.

Mrs. Leach of North Fork and brother, Issac Balangee, were in town recently. They are doing some work on the Balangee ranch at the mouth of Sage creek.

Mrs. W.H. Buchanan and Mrs. F.T. Casey walked four or five miles down to the river Tuesday of last week to see the high water.

Mrs. Pat Glennon spent Tuesday of last week at North Fork.

Mrs. Peter Barton and Mrs. John Buster were Shoup visitors last Wednesday.

Mrs. Taylor was visiting Mrs. Wolcolt at Sage creek.

The sixth month of school ended June 16 with the following pupils in attendance every day during the month: Alta Barton, Edna Barton, Opal Buster, Florence Booth, Barton Casey, Ethel Barton, Theo Barton, Grace Buster, Flora Twining, Vivian Buster, Julia Barton, Elizabeth Glennon, Nellie Elliot, Gladys Elliott.

Flag day was observed by all the children taking part in an appropriate program consisting of songs, recitations, dialogs and readings. The children all wore flags.

Mr. Ballangee and sister of North Fork were visiting Mr. Van last week.

Shoup, Pine creek and Ulysses will celebrate the fourth at Ulysses. There will be a dance in the evening.

Mr. and Mrs. John Buster returned to their ranch at Gibbonsville.

The Ulysses Union Sunday school reopened October 2nd after a two-month vacation—just in time for everyone to forget their memory verses. Mrs. J.W. Elliott and her daughters, Nellie and Gladys, spent Thursday and Friday visiting Mrs. Frank Hill, no doubt catching up on every piece of news worth knowing. Frank Casey, missing eggs from his henhouse, set a trap and caught himself a large skunk. He says it solved the problem. I’ll believe him when the smell dies down.

Mrs. Florence Stewart, teacher of the Ulysses school, left Tuesday on the stage bound for Idaho Falls to attend the teachers’ institute. And poor W.E. Taylor, taken suddenly ill Sunday morning, spent the better part of the week in bed—only to rise Friday for the greater torment of a haircut.[5]

Billy and Fred Catlin left Ulysses just before Christmas to spend the holiday in Salmo with. Billy Jr., Madge and Billie.[6] I stayed on the mountain with the Barton clan.

The New Year of 1922 started off lively in Ulysses. Mrs. Buster and Miss Stewart threw a New Year’s dance that packed the schoolhouse wall to wall—you couldn’t have squeezed in another fiddler if you’d tried.

Evangelist J.S. Kilgore of Boise arrived Tuesday on the stage and started a round of evening meetings in the Sunday school room, drawing a good crowd each night.

The grippe’s been making its way through the community early January, leaving hardly a household untouched. On the sick list were Mrs. Booth, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, Opal Buster, and Mary Hale.

Ulysses’ teacher, Miss Stewart sent in her monthly school report and I’m pleased to note the third-month roll of honor for perfect attendance: Duzette Lenbo, Theo Barton, Peter Barton, Julia Barton, Vivian Buster, Barton Casey, Gladys Elliott, Alta Barton, Ethel Barton, and Opal Buster.[7]

Right after New Years, Billy came home and Alta and Peter escorted my granddaughter back to Salmon on the stage. Edna was attending high school in Salmon.[8]

Billy and I had a quiet supper trading stories of the holiday season. He reminded me we’d marked thirty-five of them since we’d first met. I’d been married to Jimmy Callahan for the first five, but Violin Billy was there all the same. We reminisced, raised a toast, and laughed over the years gone by.

At the end of March, Billy headed for Salmon then on to the Oro Cache mine to run the mill for the season[9], but was back in Ulysses for a visit in early April.[10]

The talk in camp that spring wasn’t just about ore bodies and assays—it was the coal strike back East. Six hundred thousand miners had walked out and the price of a ton was climbing like a man on a pay-day spree. Up here on Ulysses Mountain we burned wood in our stoves, but the mills and hoists needed coal and without it a mine could go quiet in a hurry.

Then the railroad shopmen walked out in July, and what coal there was moved slower than a packhorse in mud. Freight piled up at the railhead, and every delay made the men wonder if their shifts would be cut or the mill shut down. We carried on, but you could feel the chill of those strikes even this far from the coalfields and rail yards.[11]

In spite of the troubles we had dances at Ulysses, Shoup, and Northfork, picnics under the pines and my young Barton grandsons to keep me on my toes—Peter Jr., now seven, and Myron was five. My granddaughter, Alta came home early August after spending three weeks visiting friends in North Fork. No sooner did Alta get home, that her mother set off for a three day trip to Salmon with the Harder family.[12]

Just after the middle of the month, the cyanide plant was operational again. Young Alta and Edna left Ulysses for a dance at North Fork then joined their friends on a visit to the Westfall’s ranch.[13]

Such was life—people coming and going and grandchildren getting along well. Every so often Billy took a brick of gold to Salmon, and we were living under the same roof with a surprising ease.

A cloudburst tore into both Indian and Sage Creeks in late August churning up the roads so badly that the mail had to come in by packhorse for two weeks. The telephone line between Indianola and Ulysses didn’t fare much better and is still out thanks to the storm.

My son-in-law Peter Barton left the mines in June to take a job cutting trails for the Forest Service. We didn’t see him again until end ofAugust, when he came in from Owl Creek for a quick visit, then headed back out.

Peter and Alta seemed to get along best when separated by a few mountain ranges. From what I could gather, their marriage wasn’t just on the rocks—it was taking on water faster than a scow in spring flood.

By 1922 the road into Shoup was little more than a dare. Hazards met you every turn—rockfall, washouts, and cliffs that plunged straight to the river, no guard but Providence. For three miles you kept a steady hand and whispered a prayer, hoping the wagon—or, by then, a motor car—made it to the other side.

That didn’t stop Ed and Nora. One day they rattled into Shoup from Pioneerville in Ed’s Overland, dusted from the Sawtooths and beaming like royalty. Lois was ten and hadn’t forgotten me; little Eleanor, only four, was a joy.

Ed was as proud of that car as he’d once been of his cowboy boots.

My little Lois wasn't so little anymore. She won a contest and wore a sash and crown for the afternoon and evening.They stayed a few weeks, visiting kin and friends, then motored on to Hailey to see Nora’s father and her people, before circling back to the mines above Boise, where Ed said the work was steady.

Nels Marsing took a spill from his horse and came out the worse for it. Chris Gruber put up Nels’s hay while he mended, and so, with these little tales, the record of the camp at Ulysses was made.

Come early September, Anna Wright and Viola Benner came to Ulysses to visit Mrs. Buchanan, making the trip as far as North Fork by stage on Tuesday. My granddaughter Edna met them there with horses and brought them the rest of the way, stopping at the spring at “Dead Water” for lunch. They declared it to be a fine trip.

The road between North Fork and Ulysses, washed out in the last storm, is expected to be mended by Tuesday so the auto stage can run again. For two weeks our mail has been arriving the slow way—by packhorse.

Tilly and Violet Downing spent Friday in Ulysses.

R.E. Wickham and Arthur Herndon got around the bad stretch of road Friday by meeting a car from Salmon on the far side. Wickham and F.T. Casey also took on repairing the telephone line between Ulysses and Indianola on Wednesday, after the storm left it in a sorry tangle.[14]

When word came that Jane Stewart was gone, it hit hard. I made my way to Shoup, then on to Pine Creek to attend her burial. I’d heard she had been thrown from her burro and died where she lay. Others said she looked too peaceful for that to be true. I hoped they were right.

She was buried beside her husband and her son, Tommy Hardy. I wept when her body went into the cold ground.

Salmon Herald, November 15, 1922

JANE STEWART


PIONEER LADY, PASSES AWAY

Last week the sad word came to Salmon that Mrs. Jane Stewart, pioneer lady of Shoup, or Pine Creek, had passed away. On Wednesday, Nov. 1, she expired on the trail between Shoup and Pine Creek, about three quarters of a mile from the post office, whither she was going for her mail. She was riding a burro, and feeling a fainting spell coming on, she dismounted, lay down by the trail she had so long traveled, and died.

Death from Natural Causes.

Henry Warnecke, acting coroner, held an inquest over the body, with a jury composed of Charles Twining, Bert Buster, Magnus Bevan, John Rowe, and Mrs. James Hibbs. The jury found that death had resulted from heart failure, due to natural causes.[15] The remains were buried Friday, Nov. 3rd, at the side of her son, Thomas Hardy, who died some years ago,[16] and since whose death Mrs. Stewart had lived alone on a ten-acre tract of garden land on Pine Creek.[17] A few friends gathered for the funeral, read the Holy Scripture, and sang hymns by way of religious obsequy.

Deceased was born in Scotland, May 6th, 1854, and had lived on Pine Creek for more than 40 years, where she bore an excellent reputation as an obliging neighbor and a steadfast friend. Mr. Warnecke, after the funeral, came to Salmon and delivered the foregoing particulars to the Herald.

I will remember the long winter evenings, listening to her tell stories of Scotland in a brogue as thick as the day she stepped ashore, teaching little Lois how to tat. We were the best of friends. She made a home on Pine Creek, tending her garden and making herself indispensable to neighbors. Her absence left the canyon poorer and her friends—myself among them—feeling as though a steady light had gone out.

The holidays in Ulysses always brought more bustle than we’d seen in weeks. I took a respite from grief and joined in.

Pat Glennon came over from Gibbonsville on Thursday and word spread of a dance at the Shoup schoolhouse next Saturday night.

Peter Barton came in Tuesday on the stage from the Pope-Sheanon mine to spend the holidays with his family. Edna Barton and Ruth Leabo were expected up from Salmon on Saturday’s stage—Edna to see her parents (and me of course) while Ruth called on friends.

The schoolteacher, Miss Felitha Smith, set off Wednesday for her home in Victor, with Mr. R. Wordsworth heading toward Dillon the same day. Mr. J. Hibbs hauled them both out to Salmon to catch the train.

Saturday night’s dance drew a good crowd—Mrs. Bert Buster, Blanche Buster, Marjorie Westfall, R. Wordsworth, and H. Mitchell, all from Shoup—and when they headed home, they declared it a fine time.

Before the dancing, Miss Smith and her pupils put on a holiday program that proved my Barton grandchildren could keep the place lively.

The children sang “Anybody Here Seen Jack,” recited verses about buying Christmas Seals to fight tuberculosis, performing “The Neat and Clean Family” to make the point.

Ethel Barton gave a talk on the “Greatness of Daniel Gregg,” Cleal Casey puzzled us with “Who Is It?,” and Barton Casey played a mandolin solo. Theo Barton recited “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” Ashlie Marsing gave “Just Before Christmas,” and Alta Barton read her own composition, “A Good Christmas After All.”

The school sang “Please Hurry Up, Mr. Clock,” Miss Smith read “Caught Susanner Whistling,” and Vivian Marsing read “Help a Child.”

The evening ended with the menfolk—F.T. Casey, R. Wordsworth, H. Mitchell, and O. Lund—putting on a burlesque and song called “The Whole Family,” followed by dancing that carried us into the small hours.[18]

NOTES

[1] Idaho Recorder, July 22, 1921

[2] Sylvan shade refers to the cool, leafy cover of a wooded area. The word sylvan derives from the Latin silva (“forest”), and was often used in romantic or pastoral descriptions of nature.

[3] The mention of “parking space” indicates that by the time of writing, Ulysses could be reached by automobile. Idaho had been developing its rural road system throughout the 1910s and 1920s, making previously remote mining camps more accessible to visitors.

[4] The “prime batch of brew” was almost certainly a wry reference to alcohol, which was illegal in the United States during Prohibition (1920–1933). The “convenient distance” implies it was available nearby but not openly, in keeping with the cautious euphemisms of the era.

[5] Salmon Herald, October 12, 1921

[6] Salmon Herald, December 28, 1921

[7] Salmon Herald, January 11, 1922

[8] Salmon Herald, January 4, 1922

[9] Idaho Weekly Industrial Review, May 24, 1922

[10] Salmon Herald, April 5, 1922

[11] The national coal strike began April 1, 1922, when approximately 610,000 members of the United Mine Workers of America walked out to protest wage cuts and poor working conditions. In July, the Railroad Shopmen’s Strike erupted after 400,000 rail workers left their jobs in opposition to wage reductions and contract changes. Both strikes disrupted fuel supplies and slowed freight shipments across the country, with ripple effects reaching even remote mining camps like Ulysses Mountain.

[12] Salmon Herald, August 2, 1922

[13] Salmon Herald, August 23, 1922

[14] Salmon Herald, September 6, 1922

[15] Acting coroner, Henry Warnecke convened a jury consisting of Charles Twining, Bert Buster, Magnus Bevan, John Rowe, and Mrs. James Hibbs. None had medical training, yet they concluded that Jane Stewart had died of heart failure from natural causes. Whether any of them owned the dog said to have spooked her burro is unknown.

[16] Jane Stewarts’ son, Thomas Hardy had not died “some years ago” as the obituary implied; he died on March 16, 1920—just 2 years and 7 months before his mother’s death.

[17] According to her land patent, No. 582438 it was almost 21 acres.

[18] Salmon Herald, December 27, 1922