Return to Shoup

The Boarding House

By Lorne Callahan

We took up residence in an old abandoned boarding house on Boulder Creek about a mile and a half above the town of Shoup.

The Monolith mine was across the creek and about a quarter mile from the house. Finally we topped the hill, and came around a curve and saw the big, old two story house. It was enormous—at one time thirty or forty men roomed there when the mine was working good.

There was a wooden bridge across the creek going into the yard. Dad got out of the car, and looked it over good and then we drove on in. We looked over our new home, it was built on the side of the mountain.

You had to walk up a flight of wooden steps to get on the porch and from there you could enter any of the many doors on the first floor. There was one stairway going up into an enormous room which had been used for the sleeping quarters.

The kitchen was the first room that you entered off the porch, it was quite large and had an old elaborate cooking stove that seemed to fill about a quarter of the room. It had two large ovens and a built in water tank so you would always have hot water, and a large grill where Mom use to make hot cakes and Dad his good grilled steaks, running with butter. Mom said the stove was about five times larger than she needed, but thought it was beautiful. She always said it was the best stove that she had ever cooked on and had it not been for its size, she would have kept it the rest of her life.

It was late and we were tired. Mom made us a meal of fried eggs, potatoes and fried apples, biscuits and butter, then we all went to bed.

The next day Dad took Earl and I up the mountain to see his mine. We started up the old winding dirt road to the mine which was about a half mile as the crow flies. There were two switch back curves just before the road ended where a snow slide had destroyed the road. Dad parked the car and by climbing steadily, we were at the mine in a few minutes. Dad took us over and looked at the face of the tunnel and condition of the timbers that were showing. He said it looked pretty good, then we walked over to the tram house and tool shed. There Dad looked over the drills and counted the dynamite and boxes of caps that were still there, and said that there was more, and in better condition than he had expected, all the powder and explosives appearing nice and dry.

We then entered the door to the tram-way house and you could smell the musty smell of ore dust, which has sour-sweet smell I've always enjoyed. We climbed up some sturdy stairs where the tram-way bucket was hanging with the bottom open. Dad closed it and it clapped shut. He looked over the two big winches with their coils of cable and the three big wooden handled levers.

There we stood together, at the opening where the tram-way bucket was, and looked down the mountain. It was a pretty sight for way down below was the boarding house and the creek crashing through on its noisy journey. Off to the left, just below our home was the stamp mill and Dad said we would have to give it a darn good looking over too.

As we stood there Dad explained the tram-way to us. "You see this big bucket here, we'll fill this with ore from the mine—it will hold over a ton. See how it is connected to those two wheels, or pulleys that run that cable? This cable runs all the way down to the mill. The cable is suspended from big branches from those larger trees. Now come over here."

We went over to another opening. "See, on this side we have the very same thing, see the cable going on along those trees?[1] Well, way down there, at the bottom, at the mill, there is a bucket just like this one. When we fill this bucket with ore, it's very heavy and the other bucket down there is empty. We turn loose the gull bucket and as it runs along the cable going down-hill the empty one come up the hill, here on this cable. It is a lot like that clothes line with the pulleys that Mom had in Butte. This is what we call a gravity tram."

We could see how simple this worked and felt real big and important, the way he was talking to us like partners in the operation.

"Now these levers we use as breaks, so that the full bucket don't get away and damage anything. I'm going to have to get me some help, too bad you boys aren't bigger."

When we got home Mom had a hot lunch on the table, it sure was good.

Ed hired a young man named Clyde, who lived with the family and became a close friend. An old work horse named Pete was part of the operation as well, hauling sled after sled load of ore from the tunnels.

Miners and laborers like Ed Callahan were well acquainted with depressed economies long before the Depression. Even so, times could not have been tougher. Prices of farm goods dropped by 44%, while prices to buy them rose. Across the nation, half the workforce couldn’t find jobs.

Ed knew that with a roof over their heads, streams full of trout, woods with abundant game, and a mine with a little precious metals left—the Callahan’s wouldn’t be homeless, cold or hungry. They wouldn’t lack for company either. Alta and her youngest children: Ethel, Julia, Theo, Peter and Myron lived in Shoup and Bill Taylor rented a house there.

With his step-dad’s advice, the stamp mill was overhauled. Eleanor was thirteen years old and after school helped with the work of the five stamp mill which was operated by a large boiler. She took great interest in the work.

“Handled it better than most men I could have found,” Ed would say her.

Lorne didn’t dispute it, “But she sure was a pain to us. Every time Earl and I would go down to the mill to help her or ask to help her, or even to play, she would boss us around like she owned the whole mountain. Generally we would give up in disgust and go somewhere else for amusement.

Eventually, Ross and Lois moved into the boarding house, too. Somehow, working together they managed to make enough money to get by, though sometimes Ed worked day and night around the clock, only taking cat naps.

Lavern Lamar was born to Ross and Lois on December 5, 1932 in the hospital at Salmon. A few days later they got home and in no time everyone was calling him "Buddy.” The boarding house was full and busy.

Earl would say of these days, “My Dad had such a hard life, he worked non-stop to provide for the family. One morning Mom had told Lorne and me to bring in some firewood. Well, we didn’t.

When Dad came in, Mom began complaining about it.

Dad said, ‘Ah Ma, let them play. They'll be men soon enough’.”

By 1933, the Depression had dragged on for four long years. Unemployment was no longer a passing crisis but a permanent condition of life. When Franklin Roosevelt took office that spring one of the first and most startling steps came that same spring. Gold—long held as a private safeguard in uncertain times—was called in. By order of the federal government, citizens were required to turn over their gold coins, bullion, and certificates to the banks, receiving paper currency in exchange at the long-established rate of $20.67 an ounce. It was, on its face, a fair trade—more cash than many had seen in months—but it was no longer gold. What had once been something a man could hold in his hand, save, or hide away against hard times was now drawn under federal control. The reasoning was not explained in everyday terms, but the effect was plain enough: gold was no longer a private refuge. It had become the government’s instrument.

Roosevelt’s next bold move was what came to be called the New Deal—a broad effort to steady the economy, put people to work, and restore confidence in a country that had lost it.

In cities, the New Deal was visible almost at once. Relief offices opened. Men lined up for work programs that paid wages rather than charity. Streets were paved, public buildings rose, schools were repaired, and parks laid out. Families received food assistance, and rent relief followed. The federal government, once distant, became part of daily life—and for many, the difference between endurance and collapse.

In rural and remote places, the New Deal arrived more slowly and took a different shape. There were no long breadlines in towns like Shoup, but hardship was no less real. When relief came, it came as labor. Local men were hired to string telephone lines, clear trails, and improve access through the forest. The work was hard, seasonal, and modestly paid—but it brought cash into places where little had been circulating at all.

That same year, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed by the Twenty-first, and for the first time in thirteen years, a saloon opened legally in Shoup.

And then came a rumor.

The Civilian Conservation Corps boys were coming—setting camps at Shoup and Riggins—to build a road through the Salmon River canyon, working toward one another until the two ends met somewhere in the middle.

Before the year was out, the rumor proved to be true and a camp to house operations was being constructed between Shoup and the Pine Creek rapids. Bill Taylor’s son Billy was the foreman and it was the first time the entire Callahan-Taylor family had been living downriver since Ed left in 1908.

The canyon, quiet for years, was beginning to stir again.

NOTES

[1] Lois and Eleanor Callahan remembered the tram-way connected to hillside boulders. A copywrited photograph I’ve seen, verifies Lois and Eleanor’s accounts.

[2] Tom Christensen, an old-timer on the river.

[3] More likely a 15 foot run of whitewater on a steep descent.

[4] Grouse, a small chicken-like bird that made good eating if you had a half-dozen of them.