Rick Just's Blog, page 176

A Message in a Bottle

​In the fall of 1893, W.E. Carlin, the son of Brig. Gen. W.P. Carlin, Commander of the department of the Columbia, Vancouver, Washington, gathered together some friends for a hunting party in the Bitterroots of Idaho. They hired a Post Falls woodsman named George Colgate to cook for their little expedition.
 
A.L.A. Himmelwright, a businessman from New York who was on the trip, would later write a book about it. The details he provided painted a picture of a well-outfitted expedition: 125 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of bacon, 40 pounds of salt pork, 20 pounds of beans, eight pounds of coffee, and on and on. He described the guns, including Carlin’s three-barreled weapon that had two 12-gauge shotgun bores side-by-side with a .32 rifle beneath.
 
The group got to Kendrick by train, where they gathered together the supplies, five saddle horses, five pack horses, a spaniel and two terriers, and set out for a hunt.
 
Six inches of snow fell on September 22. That concerned guide Martin Spencer. He figured it would only get deeper as they moved higher into the mountains. Carlin decided to push on despite the snow, and although their cook had become ill. George Colgate’s legs had swollen to the point where he could barely hobble around. Everyone else shared in cooking duties as his abilities waned.
 
In the days to come Colgate rallied, then got progressively worse. One day he couldn’t even stay on his horse. As more snow flew, members of the hunting party nursed the cook while he lay in a tent.
 
Fifty miles from anything like civilization the Carlin party found themselves in a desperate situation with snow blocking trails and a man who could not be moved on their hands. Colgate was so sick he couldn’t talk. The men debated what to do. Should they stick it out where they were and hope the weather would break? Should they send someone ahead to bring back a rescue party?
 
While they pondered, another storm struck. Food was running short. They had to get out of there.
 
Someone struck on the idea of building a raft to float down the Lochsa. They lashed together some logs with cord and wire and attached a long sweep with which to guide the contraption. Before setting out on the raft, Himmelwright would make a dark entry in his diary: “It is a case of trying to save five lives or sacrificing them to perform the last sad rites for Colgate.”
 
The men set out downriver, leaving their cook behind seemingly on death’s door.
 
Cutting the story short, the hunting party lost their raft in a rapid several miles downstream. They survived by shooting a few grouse, catching a few fish, and even eating one of their dogs before a rescue party found them on November 21.
 
And now the story gets strange.
 
The men of the party were well known, so the tale of their failure to return when expected and their ultimate rescue had been carried in many newspapers, including the New York Times, which also carried the story of the bottle.
 
What bottle? The one that was purportedly found in the Snake River by one Sam Ellis at Penewawi, some 60 miles below Lewiston. Inside the bottle was this note:
 
FOOT OF BITTER ROOT MOUNTAINS, Nov. 27.—I am alive and well. Tell them to come and get me as soon as any one finds this. I am 50 miles from civilization as near as I can tell. I am George Colgate, one of the lost Carlin party. My legs are better. I can walk some. Come soon. Take this to Kendrick, Idaho, and you will be liberally rewarded. My name is George Colgate, from Post Falls. This bottle came by me and I caught it and wrote these words to take me out. Direct this to St. Elmo hotel, Kendrick, Idaho.
GEORGE COLGATE
“Good bye, wife and children.”
 
The small bottle was corked and fastened to a piece of driftwood with a rag tied to it.
 
The writing on the note was compared to Colgate’s signature on a hotel register and “was found to be wonderfully close.”
 
Two relief parties set out to rescue Colgate in the coming months. Neither met with success. Meanwhile, Carlin was adamant that the note in the bottle was a fake designed to somehow extort money from him and ruin his reputation.
 
The note seems a little pat and the finding of the bottle incredible, so maybe Carlin was right. In any case, his reputation suffered. There was debate for decades about the ethics of leaving a man to die in the wilderness.
 
And die he did. On August 23, 1894, the remains of George Colgate were found about eight miles from the spot where he was said to have been abandoned. How did he get there along with a matchbox, some fishing line, and other personal articles? Had he rallied long enough to drag himself through the snow that far? Had he lived to write a message in a bottle?
 
#idahohistory #georgecolgate

Capt. Parker's Totally Awesome Flight

​Oh, the humanity! Fortunately, Boise’s airship crash involved neither fire or death.
 
The year was 1908, and it was Fair time. Fairgoers were excited because officials had booked an amazing exhibition. The Strobel Airship, which had just won first prize in the International Races in St. Louis, was coming to Boise.
 
Charles J. Strobel of Toledo, Ohio had built the contraption. The dirigible looked a bit like a flying sausage. The silken bag was filled with hydrogen and had a rudder and 15 horsepower motor spinning a propeller installed on the framework that hung suspended beneath.
 
The Strobel Airship was to be piloted by Captain Evan Jenkins Parker. He made some bold promises to Boise Mayor John M. Haines. The Idaho Statesman quoted him as saying he would sail his big aerial craft from the fairgrounds to the business district and guide its course around the peaks on the city hall building and play with his toy over the tops of business buildings.
 
On October 20, Parker made a couple of successful runs at the fair much to the delight of the crowds. Then, on October 24, he set out to keep his boast to the mayor.
 
Parker took off and was making rapid progress toward his circumnavigation of city hall when a gust of wind twisted the gas bag in such a manner that the propeller caught one of the airship’s suspension ropes. The whirling prop pulled the rope down tight against the bag, tearing a 12-foot hole in the air sack.
 
The hydrogen began escaping and the ship started to drop. Parker scrambled to the front end of the frame to tip the airship at an angle that would keep some of the gas from leaking out. In that unconventional manner he brought the dirigible down on River Street without further damage to the ship or to himself.
 
It was Parker’s first crash with the Strobel Airship. It wouldn’t be his last. A gust of wind pushed the machine into a roller coaster in Manchester, New Hampshire in 1910. In 1911 he hit electrical wires at a fair in Lynn, Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter he retired from flying gas bags, going to work for Eastman Kodak where he had a 38-year career.
 
Thanks to the Early Birds of Aviation, Inc. website for much of this story.

Captain Parker flying the Strobel Airship at an exhibition, site unknown. ​

Dan Valentine

​So, here’s a guy (me) who writes quirky little stories about Idaho history, writing about a guy who wrote quirky little stories about Idaho history. This post may eat its own tail.
 
Dan Valentine wasn’t from Idaho, and he didn’t live here. Still, he was a purveyor of Idaho history, not in a scholarly sense, but in a storytelling sense. Valentine was a columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune for more than 30 years, retiring in 1980. In the 1950s and 60s, that paper was widely read in Southeastern Idaho. Enough so that Valentine included many humorous observations about the state.
 
Valentine published several books that grew out of his columns. They were often sold in restaurants and truck stops across Idaho and Utah. I ran across one of his publications recently while going through some family memorabilia. It’s a four-page newsletter quarter-folded into a book-sized pamphlet, called Pioneer Pete’s IDAHO Scrapbook, dated 1960. The amount of information he was able to squeeze in there is jaw-dropping. It included the story of Peg Leg Annie, a piece about Little Joe Monaghan, stories about Lana Turner, Polly Bemis, Ernest Hemingway, Diamondfield Jack, the lone parking meter in Murphy, and a dozen more. A better understanding of history has since put several of the stories into the apocryphal category, but at that time they were widely believed to be true.
 
Valentine’s material was featured on the Johnny Carson Show, as well as programs hosted by Tennessee Ernie Ford, Garry Moore, and Art Linkletter.
 
A taste from the pamphlet:
 
Cats were allegedly worth $10 each in Idaho City once, because of a mouse problem.
 
Boise (at that time) was said to boast the only wooden cigar store Indian factory in the world.
 
If the state of Idaho was flattened out it would be larger than Texas.
 
Valentine was once accused of being a bit chauvinistic in his columns, but he’s also the guy who once said "I don't know why women would want to give up complete superiority for mere equality."
 
Dan Valentine passed away in 1991 at age 73.
 
#idahohistory #danvalentine

Earl Parrot

​Earl Parrot had a good job as a telegrapher until his eyesight changed. He went color blind in 1898. Those operating a telegraph key had to be able to distinguish the colors on railroad signals and he could no longer do so.
 
Parrot tried a little prospecting in the Klondike for a bit, but by 1900 he was in Idaho. Exactly when he established his nest on the rim of Impassable Canyon overlooking the Middle Fork of the Salmon River is anyone’s guess, but he was there by 1917 and remained there for most of his remaining 28 years.
 
The best researched sketch of Earl Parrot’s life can be found in Cort Conley’s entertaining book, Idaho Loners . I got the bulk of this post from that book and encourage you to read it to find out more about Parrot as well as other Idaho loners from Sylvan Hart to Claude Dallas.
 
Conley quoted Francis Wood who was working on a Forest Service survey crew when he bumped into Parrot. Wood said, “One day we spotted a small cabin and noticed smoke coming from the chimney. We decided to stop and have lunch with the occupant. He was busy at a stove cooking some kind of berries. The mixture had not come to a boil. Above the stove, lying on a shelf, was a big cat. When he saw us he made a pass at the cat, knocking it into the fruit. Reaching into the pot, he pulled the cat out and ran his hand over it, draining the berries back into the pot. He then threw the cat out the door. Needless to say, we did not stay for lunch.”
 
It seemed that everyone who encountered him came away with a good story about the recluse.
 
Parrot panned a little gold for his annual trips to civilization (often Shoup) to purchase a few supplies. He raised a garden, had a menagerie of animals worthy of a petting zoo, trapped, and hunted. He lived off the land and wasn’t particularly thrilled when visitors dropped by. Your standard hermit stuff.
 
Conley’s book has some great photos of Parrot, who is said to have thought getting his picture taken was “a peck of foolishness.” The photo included in this post is courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society’s physical photo files. It shows Parrot, on the left, with Frank Swain at Parrot’s cabin.
 
Earl Parrot passed away in 1945 at age 76 in a Salmon nursing home after a couple of strokes and a lengthy illness.

Not that Bigfoot

​I’ll probably put my foot in it on this one. My average-sized foot.
 
Bigfoot was a legendary Indian. He was known for the enormous tracks he left. Those tracks were alleged to be 17 ½” long, large even for a man 6’ 6” tall. Allegedly.
 
Bigfoot’s tracks were said to have been seen often at the site of depredations perpetrated by indigenous people on immigrants, especially in Idaho and Oregon. He was always one step ahead of anyone trying to catch him. Stepping was part of the legend. He always walked or ran rather than ride a horse, the better to leave moccasin tracks, not doubt.
 
In November of 1878, The Idaho Statesman ran a sensational story about the death of Bigfoot, written by William T. Anderson of Fisherman’s Cove, Humboldt County, California, who had heard it from the man who killed him. It detailed the 16 bullets that went into Bigfoot’s body, fired by one John Wheeler, who caught up with him in Owyhee County. Both of the big man’s arms and both of his legs were broken by bullets in the fight with Wheeler. Knowing he was at death’s door, Bigfoot decided to tell Wheeler his life story. He did so in prose that Dick d’Easum who wrote about it years later for the Idaho Statesman said was packed with enough “frothy facts of his boyhood and manhood to fill a Theodore Dreiser novel.”
 
In the Anderson account of the death of Bigfoot, the man had an actual name. He was Starr Wilkinson, who was a lad living in the Cherokee nation when his father, a white man, was hanged for murder. His mother was of mixed blood, Negro and Cherokee. The drama of Bigfoot’s life went on for thousands of words, many of which were quite eloquent for a man gurgling them out with 16 bullet wounds in his body.
 
Odd that Wheeler himself never said anything about killing one of the most notorious bad men in the West. Odd that he didn’t collect the $1,000 reward on the man’s head. Wheeler had an outlaw record to his own credit. He killed a man on Wood River in 1868 and got away with it. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for a stagecoach robbery in Oregon. After leaving prison, he was eventually sentenced to hang for a murder committed during another stage robbery, this time in California.
 
Awaiting certain death, Wheeler wrote a series of letters to his wife, his sister, his attorney, and a girlfriend reflecting on his life. He wrote not a word about Bigfoot. His musings complete, Wheeler took poison in jail rather than face the rope and died.
 
Many historians discount the whole legend of Bigfoot. Dick d’Easum put it this way: “Just as nobody is ever attacked by a little bear, no pioneer of the 1860s ever lost a steer or a wife or a set of harness to a small Indian. Little Indians were sometimes caught and killed. Dead Indians had little feet. Indians that prowled and pillaged and slipped away unscathed were invariably possessed of huge trotters.”
 
So, if Bigfoot was a myth, why would you name a town after him? That town is Nampa, reportedly taking its name from Shoshoni words Namp (foot) and Puh (big), and by some reports named after the legendary Bigfoot. Historian Annie Laurie Bird did research on the name Nampa in 1966, concluding that it probably did come from a Shoshoni word pronounced “nambe” or “nambuh” and meaning footprint. She did not weigh in on the Bigfoot connection.
 
A marauding giant is such a good story that it may never die. It was good enough that Bigfoot was killed, again, in New Mexico, 14 years after he was ventilated in Owyhee County. No word on whether he was able to gasp out his life story that time.
 
#Idahohistory #nampahistory #bigfoot
This oddly configured statue of the legendary Bigfoot can be found on the grounds of the Fort Boise replica in Parma. 

The Spalding Letter

​My research methods, though sometimes systematic, are just as of ten serendipitous. I stumble onto something while looking for something else.
 
This chance method rewarded me recently when I found a transcript of Eliza Spalding’s first letter written to her family at home from her new residence on Lapwai Creek. It was reprinted in the 1922 Biennial Report of the Idaho State Historical Society.
 
The letter was dated February 16, 1837 and addressed to “Ever Dear Parents, Brothers and Sisters.”
 
The letter told of the profound eagerness of the Nez Perce for religious instruction: “Mr. S. resolved if possible not to disappoint the unspeakable desire the Nezperces had ever manifested to have us live with them that they might learn about God, and the habits of civilized life.”
 
Tribal members cut and carried pine logs on their shoulders for half a mile for the Spalding residence. Eliza wrote, “A number of them, one chief in particular, has been sawing at the pit saw for several weeks.”
 
It was surprising to me that the Nez Perce already had a rudimentary understanding of Christianity when the Spaldings arrived. They had learned of it from an Iroquois Indian who was in the employ of the American Fur Company.
 
The Spaldings saw in the Nez Perce a readiness to abandon their tribal beliefs and embrace the story of Jesus. Eliza wrote of the “conjurers or medicine men who pretend to heal the sick by their incantations.” She thought tribal members held them in low regard. Her evidence was that several Nez Perce came to her husband, the Reverend Henry Harmon Spalding, seeking a cure for various ailments. “They are very fond of being bled if they are sick, and Mr. S. has really succeeded in doing some of them the favor,” Mrs. Spalding wrote.
 
The efficacy of bloodletting was likely inferior to some of the native cures that had been passed down through the centuries.
 
Eliza went on to describe a Nez Perce vision quest in the most skeptical terms: “A youth who wishes this profession goes to the Mts., where he remains alone for 2 days, after which he returns to his friends pretending to be inspired with qualification requisite for healing diseases, that birds and wild beasts came to him while in the mountains and told him that those who employed him must reward him with blankets, horses and various good things. I hope and trust that the gospel will soon cause them to abandon these notions.”
 
Judge the Spaldings however you will, but I came away after reading the letter with a better appreciation for the sacrifice they had made by coming west. In many ways, they may as well have established their mission on Mars. Here’s what Eliza said about that to her family.
 
“We probably shall not meet again in this world, but if we fulfill the great end for which we were created, we shall be prepared to meet in one never to be separated. If you have received all the communications, we have directed to you, you have heard from us every few months since we left you. We probably shall write you once in six months. At all events we intend to write every opportunity, for this is the only favor we can show you in our remote situation.”
 
Mrs. Spalding was 30 years old when she wrote the letter. The births of her four children and the deaths of her friends and fellow missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman in the Whitman Massacre were still ahead of her.
 
Eliza Hart Spalding died in Brownsville, Oregon in 1851 at age 43. She was originally buried there but was later disinterred and buried with her husband at the Lapwai Mission Cemetery in Idaho.
The Spalding Memorial at the Lapwai Mission Cemetery. Photo courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society digital collection.

The Poisoning of Tresore

​It wasn’t unusual for me to be picking my way across the backs of downed giants, jumping little creeks, and seeking picturesque shafts of light streaming through the cedars. I’d done it many times along the shores of Priest Lake, looking for that picture that would transport the viewer to that same spot to experience my awe of the big trees.
 
I was the communication chief for the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation, and part of that job was to serve as photographer of the parks. I had my favorite vantage point in each park where I could catch a sunrise, or the certain shadow of a dune. At Priest Lake the cedar groves were difficult to capture; their enormity and the cathedral-like nature of the forest they formed did not easily fit into an eyepiece.
 
That day I found a newly downed cedar, roots pointing into the air, still clinging to chunks of earth that had served the tree for at least a century. I walked the trunk toward those roots and looked through them, down to the shallow hole they had left behind and to the grassy area just beyond. There was a familiar formation of rocks, 13 stones in the shape of a cross, placed years before at the foot of a much younger tree.
 
I knew at once what it was. This was a part of the park known as Shipman Point, named after Nell Shipman, silent movie star who had her own movie studio in these woods. She had likely placed those stones there herself, in memory of Tresore, her great Dane.
 
Tresore was a movie star himself. He had played a feature role in one of Shipman’s movies, Back to God’s Country, filmed in 1919 in Canada. Shipman adored animals and was an early advocate for their humane treatment in films. She had a menagerie with her at Priest Lake, including Brownie the Bear, Barney the Elk, cougar, deer, sled dogs, and others.
 
In July, 1923, someone poisoned many of those animals, including Tresore. Shipman always suspected that her landlord, to whom she owed money, had been the culprit. She mourned the loss of her Dane and memorialized him with these words: “Here lies Champion Great Dane Tresore, an artist, a soldier, and a gentleman. Killed July 17 by the cowardly hand of a human cur. He died as he lived, protecting his mistress and her property.”
 
What Shipman could not have known was that Tresore, in his death, played a huge part in the revival of interest in her movies some 60 years later. A BSU professor named Tom Trusky ran across an essay she had written about the poisoning of Tresore in the Idaho State Historical Society Archives. He decided to find out more about Shipman. That led him down a path on which he discovered and restored every movie she ever made, and oversaw the publication of Shipman’s autobiography. Interest in her work as a pioneer woman in films remains high today because of Tom’s efforts.
 
Park rangers at Priest Lake, and some locals, knew where Tresore’s grave was long before I stumbled across it, of course. For me, my personal discovery came just a few months after my friend Tom’s death. It was a quirk he would have appreciated. He would have called it “a little treat.”
Nell Shipman with Tresore, from the Boise State University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Nell Shipman Collection. The cross on Tresore's grave, Rick Just photo.

A Little Skiing History

​We know Idaho has some terrific skiing history. Sun Valley was the first destination ski resort and boasted the first chairlift. Bogus Basin is the largest nonprofit of its kind in the country. But skiing was everywhere in Idaho in the early days of the sport.
 
A great source of skiing history is Ski the Great Potato * by Margaret Fuller, Doug Fuller, and Jerry Painter. They cover 21 existing ski areas in the state and give a hat-tip to 72 areas that have since, let’s say, melted away.
 
Have you seen the big M on the side of the hill overlooking the town of Montpelier? That was a local skiing site in the 60s and 70s. The city ran a rope tow for skiers there. Many sledders used the hill, but they had to trudge up without benefit of a tow.
 
Getting up a hill was always the challenge. Rope tows were a popular method. They used an old Ford engine on the rope tow at Pine Street Hill outside of Sandpoint in the 1940s. Later they used a Sweden Speed Tow. The portability of those units, which had engines mounted on toboggans, made them popular for little ski hills all over the state. They cost less than $350.
 
Downhill skiing wasn’t enough of a thrill for some. In 1924 the City of McCall built a ski jump on land owned by Clem Blackwell a couple of miles out of town. Blackwell’s Jump, as it was called, was the main feature of the first Winter Carnival. In the early years McCall didn’t have the lodging options it does today. Carnival participants would come up from Boise on a train, then ride in logging sleds pulled by horses out to where the jump was. After spending the day enjoying the flying skiers, they rode back into town and slept on the train.
 
Ski jumping wasn’t the only event at the Winter Carnival. They had cross-country skiing and snowshoe races, dogsled racing, and ski-joring. Spectators could become participants in at least one recreational pursuit, if they wished. Snowplanes, basically airplane engines—props spinning—were bolted to skis or toboggans. The brave could catch a thrilling ride. One could theoretically ride to the top of a hill and ski down, but that didn’t catch on.
Skiers on a rope tow at Bogus Basin, circa 1950. Photo from the Idaho State Historical Society digital collection. Ad for a Sweden Speed Ski Tow. Note that they were made by the Sweden Freezer Manufacturing Company of Seattle. The units were a bit of a sideline for them.  ​

Sharks in Idaho

​Why don’t we have a state shark? Just asking. We have a state amphibian, a state bird, a state fish, a state flower, a state fruit, a state gem, a state horse, a state insect, a state raptor, a state tree, and a state vegetable (any guesses?). But, sadly, no state shark. Now, the picky readers out there will point out that to have a state shark, we’d have to have a shark in the state. Ha! I have you there.
 
True, it’s a fossil shark, but there’s precedent for that. Idaho has a state fossil, the Hagerman Horse. The shark I’m talking about is Helicoprion, which once swam the oceans over what is now Soda Springs. “Once” was about 250 million years ago.
 
I’ve seen the famous fossils. Every time I’ve looked at them they puzzled me. I’m not alone. They puzzle scientists, too. Sharks don’t fossilize well because their skeletons are made of cartilage. Shark teeth, on the other hand, can hang around for millennia. So it is with the Helicoprion. All we have to prove that it once existed are teeth. But those teeth are so weird. They make up a spiral with small teeth in the center growing geometrically until those on the outer edge become large (picture, top).
 
With just those buzz-saw teeth to work from, scientists have speculated for years on what the shark would have looked like. Were the teeth in the front of its mouth? In the back? Were they down its throat somehow?
 
In 2013 an international team of paleontologists, including Professor Leif Tapanila of the Idaho Museum of Natural History and Idaho State University published a paper about the shark in the journal Biology Letters, describing a rare fossil specimen that contained enough cartilage to give scientists a better idea of the creature’s jaw configuration. The image, from that publication, shows several previous depictions above the larger version that their findings describe.
 
Cute, huh? Even if you’d pass on the state shark idea, think of the mascot possibilities! Soda Springs Cardinals, have you thought of this?

Poor Coyote's Cabin

​Sometimes the story is that there’s not much of a story there. I ran across this photo of “Poor Coyote’s Cabin” while looking for whoknowswhat in the Library of Congress digital collection. That humble little cabin huddled there beneath a highway overpass intrigued me.
 
Beth Erdey, PhD, archivist for the Nez Perce National Historic Park at Spalding quickly calmed my curiosity. She sent me some documents about the cabin, including a query from 1986 asking if it might be eligible for a National Register of Historic Places listing. The answer: Not really.
 
There simply wasn’t enough information about the old cabin to justify its inclusion. It was moved in 1936 from what may have been its original location in Coyote’s Gulch to a site near Spalding, then moved at least once more to the site beneath the abandoned highway overpass near the NPS visitor center. At least one of the moves was not done correctly and some logs were reassembled out of order. Because of those moves the cabin was no longer in its historical setting and it didn’t retain the integrity of workmanship one would like to see on the National Register.
 
Even so, the cabin might have made the cut if we knew something more about it. It was probably built sometime after 1880. We don’t know who built it or even where it was originally located, but a Nez Perce Indian named Poor Coyote lived in it from 1895 until his death in 1915. Next to nothing is known about Poor Coyote, save for his evocative name.
 
The 1936 move was done by Joe Evans. He and his wife, Pauline, operated a museum at Spalding and they used the cabin as part of their exhibit. It was called the “Jackson Sundown” cabin by Joe and Pauline, and artifacts purportedly belonging to the famous rodeo rider were displayed there. There’s no evidence Sundown had anything to do with the cabin, and the veracity of the “curators” is questionable. They often didn’t let provenance get in the way of a good story.
 
In 1965 or 1970 (records are unclear) the cabin was again moved and placed beneath the old Highway 95 overpass, perhaps to protect it from the elements. NPS deconstructed the cabin in 1990, saving some elements of it for the museum collection.
 
So, little but that curious name, Poor Coyote, remains. We are left to wonder who he was and what his name might have meant to those who gave it to him. Was he not a very good coyote? Was he underprivileged? Are we to simply feel sorry for him? If someone out there in internet lands knows more, please share what you know with us.
 

Poor Coyote’s cabin in its final resting place beneath an abandoned Highway 95 overpass near Spalding. Library of Congress photo.