1906-1907 — Love and Lines

Lemhi Herald, August 9, 1906

Salmon, Local News

W.E. Taylor the amalgamator arrived in town Tuesday from Pine Creek, where he has been working in the mill. He expects to begin work directly in the Gibbonsville mill for the McQuarrie syndicate.

Peter Barton, who has been working in the Kittie Burton mines for the last few months made a visit to Salmon this week to see a doctor. He was taken with an an acute attack of tonsillitis, which came on with such fury as to alarm his friends. He got fixed up at Salmon, and returned to his place, feeling much better.

Speaking of Peter Barton, he was the younger brother of William Barton, a rancher at Carmen. When Peter showed up downriver, a handsome young lad from Missouri, I knew that Alta would marry him if she had anything to say about it. Then the two stinkers did what a lot of couples did— snuck off to Salmon and came home married. They’d done the deed on September 18th and while I wasn’t as surprised as Alta wanted me to be, it would have been nice to have given her a lovely wedding. Alta moved up to Ulysses, and while I missed her, I was glad she’d found love.

We’d heard whispers—about Washington laying claim to timber and ridges that had never seen a boundary stake. Some said it wouldn’t come to Idaho, but I knew better. The government always arrives late and all at once. They called it a Forest Reserve—some grand plan out of Washington, signed by President Roosevelt himself on November 5, 1906.

“This Reserve was bounded on the West by the total length of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, with Marsh Creek and Valley Creek on the southwest. The Salmon River formed the southern boundary, from Thompson Creek north to the North Fork of the Salmon River and then followed west down the Salmon River to the Middle Fork.”

It didn’t include the lands north of the River, so Shoup and the Boulder creek weren’t included in the Reserve. One day the ridge above Pine Creek was free range; the next, it was fenced in with invisible law. New signs went up: U.S. Forest Reserve, painted bold and nailed to trees like the Ten Commandments. They said it was to protect the watersheds, preserve timber, manage the land. Well, maybe so. But to folks who’d run stock here since before Salmon had a courthouse, it felt like we were being managed right out of our own lives.

The men cursed it first—miners especially. You couldn’t cut a beam for shoring up a tunnel without a permit. Couldn’t build a new cabin without someone from the government measuring how much air you were breathing. Ranchers got notices about grazing limits, and some had to move their stock down early, losing forage and patience at the same time.

Bill took it in stride, mostly. He joked that the forest men would need wings to catch us above the switchbacks. But even he started pacing when the horses and cattle couldn’t graze the upper flats without a visit from the ranger.

The papers barely mentioned it—one small column in the Recorder and a mention in the Herald— but it was all anyone talked about in the kitchen, the post office, the porch steps. When the old-timers stop bragging and just shake their heads, you know something’s shifted. I kept on, of course. Fed the chickens, patched harness, boiled shirts and stew same as always. But I noticed the changes. A sense that we were being watched, and not by God or neighbor, but by men with badges and clipboards.

Ed was seventeen and Billy fourteen years old—full of opinions. They’d grown up on this land, plowing it right along side of me, learning to shoe horses and me hanging wash from pine to pine.

One evening we sat on the porch watching the ridge fade into twilight. Ed asked if I remembered when the first sawmill went in up Pine Creek. I laughed—of course I did. It was noisy, glorious progress. This felt like something else—like a curtain being pulled down, slow and silent. I told the boys I didn’t mind stewardship. We all have to tend the land. But I’d never needed Washington’s permission to split firewood or stake a fence line. And I wasn’t about to start now.

Lemhi Herald, January 10, 1907

Attempts His Own Life

Word comes to Salmon that on the last night of the year Charles H. Spayd, at Dillon, in a fit of despondency, tried to kill himself with a knife. He had cut a great gash in his throat, stabbed both wrists and inflicted an ugly knife wound over the heart. After the deed had been done he walked into the Mint saloon, bleeding from the wounds and a physician was called.

According to the latest advice, his wounds are not serious. He seems to have been in a fit of insanity at the time of the rash act. He had left Salmon only a few days previous in company with John F. Rowe, both intending to go to Butte. Spayd got to drinking in Dillon, and the attempted suicide followed.

Mrs. Spayd, who resides in Salmon, is heartbroken at the terrible tragedy. She was seen by a Herald reporter, and the foregoing story was confirmed. Mrs. Spayd had been talking by telephone with Dr. Poindexter of Dillon, who has the case in charge, and from him she learned that Mr. Spayd is manifesting symptoms of insanity, which at times take violent form. It is not known what will be done with him, but he has been detained at the Dillon hospital for safe keeping till his wounds will have healed. Mrs. Spayd says she hopes her husband will let whiskey alone, and that his reason will be restored. He has written her a letter since the tragic deed, vowing never to drink again, and telling her of his intention to go to his brother’s home in Oklahoma, as soon as he is able to travel. He fully realizes the enormity of his awful deed, asks forgiveness and wants her to go with him.

Stricken with grief, the wife does not know yet what she will do, but thinks she is not able to go to Oklahoma now, but that she may go at a later date.

Charles H. Spayd resided in this county for twenty years, and has acquired some good mining interests. His business has been that of a prospector for mineral, and he has at times kept a saloon. He was once elected as county commissioner and served two years in that office.

Idaho Recorder, January 10, 1907

Dillion Examiner. Dillon, Montana, as republished in the Idaho Recorder

ATTEMPTED SELF-MURDER

Charles H. Spayds of Shoup, Idaho, made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide in this city last Sunday night. The earnestness of his desire to quit this earth is attested to by the number and nature of his wounds. These consist of a large gash across his throat, both wrists cut and three stabs around his heart, none of which are very dangerous.

Spayds, according to a companion who came to Dillon with him from Salmon City last week, had a disagreement with his wife over moving to another part of the country. He became despondent and when he came to Dillon he began drinking heavily.

About ten o’clock Sunday night he walked out into the Mint saloon. He was covered with snow, wet and half frozen with exposure. Staggering up to the bar he called for a drink of whiskey and as it was given to him he fell back on the floor. At first it was thought that he was only drunk, but when they went to his assistance they found that he was bleeding freely from wounds and immediately summoned a doctor. He was placed in a chair and asked about it. At first he said that he had been attacked but later confessed that the wounds were self-inflicted. His talk was rambling and but little could be understood of what he said. It was gathered, however that he first attempted to cut his throat or stab himself but it hurt too much to stick himself and he then tried to freeze himself to death.

As soon as Dr. Poindexter arrived he had him removed to a lodging house where his wounds were attended to. Later he became violent and had to be removed to the city jail where he now is. His wounds are not fatal and he will recover if blood poisoning does not set in. He is said to be a prominent resident of Lemhi county and is extensively interested in mines there. He was at one time county commissioner of that county.

Poor Charley. I was glad that he hadn’t been successful ending his life but sad that the humiliating story was splayed out in the newspapers for all to see.

The tracks for the rail line that would reach Salmon had started going down, and another railroad survey down the canyon was set to begin in 1908. It was music to our ears. Captain Guelke and Dave Sandilands were slated to guide the expedition as soon as the ice broke the following spring.

We hoped the railroad would bring more than just passengers and freight. We were thinking bigger—investors. If the line ever reached past Salmon, maybe folks with deep pockets would finally take an interest in the mines below the forks. There was gold in the hills but not the kind you could chase without backing. We’d seen plenty of promise stall out for lack of capital. Maybe this would change that.

When the signs went up to mark the new lands of the Forest Reserve and the rangers showed their faces, folks acted surprised. But they’d been grumbling for years—about permits and papers, about needing a permission slip to dig a post hole on their own land.

Prospectors were told they could only use timber for the “actual needs of prospecting.” If a mine had employees, they had to pay for the timber they used. Ranchers could cut for their own use but had to pile and burn the brush. No timber could be sold unless it was purchased and marked by a Forest officer. Grazing was regulated, permitted and taxed—fee due just to use the very hills they'd always run cattle on.

ODE TO FOREST RESERVES

From the Poet Lariat, January 10, 1907[1]

If all the trees in all the woods were men,

And each and every blade of grass a pen;

If every leaf on every branch that quivers

Were turned to foolscap;[2] Salmon and Lemhi Rivers

Were changed to ink, and all the local tribes

Had nothing else to do but act as scribes;

And for a thousand ages, day and night,

These hoodoo’s should should write, and write, and write,[3]

Till all the pens and paper were used up

And the great inkstand were an empty cup;

They could not terminate their dissertation,

Or half-express their might indignation

At what they term a curse on all creation —

This bureaucratic forest reservation —

Applied to plains where forest never moan,

Where only sage and bunchgrass hold their own;

While coyotes follow where the cattle went,

And gray wolves chorus in a mad lament,

And deadly hemlock cleans up ten per cent.[4]

Still would the scribblers cluster round the brink

Calling for more pens, more paper, and more ink.

I don’t know who “The Poet Lariat” was meant to be, but that poem had teeth, and knew how to smile while biting. If you ask me, someone around here wrote it. Someone who’d had to pay a grazing fee in a blizzard, or haul wood from a ridge newly “reserved.”

We lived through a time when land got taken with a pen instead of a rifle, but it stung just the same. But no one wrote a poem for the Lemhi Indians when a pen-stroke all but erased them from the county.

When the miners came through in the 1860s—half-starved, gold-mad, and more dangerous than they knew—Chief Tendoy[5] could’ve gone to war. Some tribes did. But Tendoy wanted peace. He made hard bargains with men who would’ve taken everything if they hadn’t been made to shake a hand. And after years of promises and delays, they were finally granted a reservation in Tendoy in 1875. It wasn’t much—not for all they’d given up—but it was theirs.

They kept to themselves mostly. Ran cattle, hunted, fished, assisted during the Nez Perce War, and took jobs that nobody wanted. Never asked for more than what they were promised. And they were promised a lot. But promises don’t hold up long when grass is short and politics get loud.

By 1906, the ranchers and towns men of Salmon had had enough of sharing. They started writing letters, sending delegations to Washington, claiming the Lemhi weren’t making good use of the land. That’s how they put it—not making good use. As if the prayers said in their homelands, or the children buried there, didn’t count for anything.

President Roosevelt was busy setting aside forest reserves insisting by edict we had to protect the watersheds and timber for the good of the nation. Maybe we did. But while he was drawing lines around trees, he let the Lemhi Reservation be wiped off the map without a town meeting, without a word in their defense. Bowed to pressure. Looked the other way.

In January of 1907, they loaded them up—Lemhi Shoshone, Sheepeater, Bannock—over four hundred people. Some went by wagon. Most walked. Through snow, through grief thick enough to stick in the lungs. People living along that trail could hear them crying all the way to Fort Hall. The government called it relocation. Some called it what it was—Lemhi’s own Trail of Tears.[6]

Chief Tendoy never left his home on the Lemhi River but he died that same year. He’d held the line as long as he could, and when he let go, there wasn’t anyone left in power who remembered what had been promised.

Some Lemhi never left, camping in the hills and canyons. Others made their way back over time—quiet, careful, without title or claim. Some lived along the Lemhi River near Salmon, worked in town, buried their elders near the same creeks they'd been taken from. Others stayed at Fort Hall, where the welcome hadn’t been a warm one.

What they lost wasn’t just land. It was rhythm, it was memory. It was a kind of rootedness we settlers never fully understood, because we were always building toward something new. They were trying to hold onto what had always been.

I don’t pretend to know the full weight of it. But I knew the people. I knew their horses and their laughter and the shape their campfires made in the night. I’d stopped calling them savages and made peace with their presence downriver—because they’d always been there. We were the ones still new.

Lemhi Herald, February 7, 1907

Ulysses. Feb. 3. - Ed Callahan came up from Shoup and is spending a few days with his sister, Mrs. P. J. Barton.

Idaho Recorder, July 25, 1907

The Tin Doy Mine

The Tin Doy people have only about twenty feet yet to run of their 380 foot crosscut tunnel. The tunnel has been through the very hardest kind of gravel and has been a herculean task. They are now; forced to haul most of their ore by team to get it to the mill, but when the tunnel is completed the ore will be dumped right from the car into the mill.[7]

Ever since the mill was started, enough ore has been taken out to run the mill, but the crosscut tunnel will tap the old workings, where there is an immense body of ore, carrying good values. In running the tunnel 380 feet a couple of veins of ore has been encountered which can be worked each direction from the main tunnel.

With the present capacity of the mill it will require but a few miners to keep the mill going after the main tunnel is completed which will he by the first of the month.

The mill work is under the charge of W. E. Taylor, one of the best millmen and amalgamators in the county. Mr. Taylor is not only conversant with every department of the mill work but is a machinist. Since the mill has been started there has been no occasion to shut down. The mill is run by water power; a large Felton wheel furnishing the motive power. With the pressure they now have the wheel furnishes power; enough for a mill three or four times; the capacity of the present mill.

The Tin Doy is coming up to the expectations of the investors in every particular. There seems to be plenty of ore in sight, of splendid values, and very easily saved by amalgamation.

There are several prospects not far from the Tin Doy mine where the ore is found in the same geologic formation, which contain good values, but lack development to ascertain how extensive they are. The success with which the Tin Doy management has been meeting with will encourage the holders of other properties in the same mineral ore.

Idaho Recorder, August 29, 1907

W. E. Taylor, who has been working at the Tin Doy for the past year, leaves this week to take charge of the Rabbit Foot mills.

In August, 1907, George Sandilands was assisting Captain Guleke, shipping a load of freight for the Mike Coan claims below Pine Creek. The force of the rapids caused Sandiland's sweep to knock him into the rapids and he was drowned. Those two had been a fixture on the river and we all grieved George’s passing but no one more than Harry Guleke.[8]

Peter Barton got work in one of the Gibbonsville mines and Alta gave birth to my first grandchild on September, 16, 1907. That baby girl was named after my sister Edna, and carried the middle name of Corrine. Sounded rather lovely to me—Edna Corrine Barton.

By this time there were only 300 men employed by the mines of the county, and I could remember when more men than that worked on Mineral Hill alone.

In October, a few cases of double trouble were settled in court and plaintiff Mary F. Spayds got her divorce from Charley.[9] Charley had come back to live downriver but never quite pulled himself out of the doldrums.

Harry Guleke and David Sandilands took yet another trip by boat, scouring the river banks, eddies and mouths of creeks for George’s body. They retuned to Salmon to report that they hadn’t had any chance of finding him now, and with the river so high, if the body was going to ever be found, it would probably be in the Snake River. Harry decided it was useless to make any further search.[10]

NOTES

[1] This satirical poem, Ode to Forest Reserves, appeared in the Idaho Recorder, likely in the January 17, 1907 issue (portions of which are obscured in the surviving microfilm). Fortunately, it was reprinted in A History of the Salmon National Forest by Don Smith (1969, p. 69). The poem’s clever mock-epic tone, frontier indignation, and local detail strongly resemble the style of Annie Callahan Taylor, who had previously published verses under the pseudonym “J.A.C__K.” and other creative by-lines. Her earlier writings often mingled classical reference with plainspoken protest, a hallmark seen here in the over-the-top lament about “bureaucratic forest reservation," but the author isn't named.

[2] Foolscap refers to a traditional size of writing paper, originally marked with a watermark of a fool’s cap (a jester’s hat). Common in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was often used for legal or official documents. By the early 1900s, the term still evoked images of longhand writing, bureaucracy, or satire—making it a fitting poetic symbol for the outpouring of public frustration over the Forest Reserve system.

[3] In early Western slang, hoodoo could mean a jinx, meddler, or bearer of bad luck. Here, “these hoodoos” likely refers to federal officials—particularly Forest Service bureaucrats—whose endless regulations and paperwork are mocked as both tiresome and absurd. The image of them writing “till all the pens and paper were used up” underscores the satirical tone: that bureaucratic overreach had become a never-ending curse on local life.

[4] This line is part of the poem’s crescendo: after describing wolves lamenting, cattle disappearing, and ink running dry, the poet lands a final punch—not only have the people lost land and livelihood, but a grim percentage may pay with their lives.

[5] Chief Tendoy was of mixed heritage—Shoshone and Bannock—and was known for his diplomacy, intelligence, and efforts to maintain peace between Native tribes and white settlers in the Salmon River and Lemhi Valleys of present-day Idaho.

[6] Historians refer to this forced removal as the “Lemhi Trail of Tears,” drawing a parallel to the Cherokee removal of the 1830s. Though painted as relocation by officials, the winter journey was uncompromisingly an attempt to remove them from history and home.

friendsoftheowyhee.orgindians.org

[7] In mining, a crosscut tunnel is a horizontal passage driven at right angles to the main vein or lode of ore. Its primary purpose is to access or explore ore bodies from a main shaft or adit, improve ventilation, or facilitate transportation of ore. Unlike a drift, which follows the vein, a crosscut intersects it perpendicularly—often through barren rock—before reaching valuable mineral deposits.

[8 ] Idaho Recorder, August 29, 1907

[9] History of the Salmon Nation Forrest; Lemhi Herald, August 8, 1907.

[10] Idaho Recorder, October 10, 1907