Rick Just's Blog, page 202

​Please don’t eat the Beavers

Trappers were most interested in beavers for their pelts. Once a beaver is liberated of its fur, though, another opportunity presents itself to man not too squeamish to eat a rodent. Beaver tail is considered a delicacy by some, and we’re not referring to the Canadian pastry of the same name which is shaped like a beaver tail.
 
All this is by way of giving you a little history on Malad. The river. Okay, both rivers. Idaho is blessed with two Malad rivers, one in Oneida County, the county seat of which—and only town of any size—is Malad City. The other is the Malad River in Gooding County. That one runs through Malad Gorge, the spectacular canyon where the river tumbles into Devil’s Washbowl right below the I-84 bridge near Tuttle. You can see the gorge while traveling on the interstate for 1.35 seconds if you happen to look south while going 80 miles per hour. Next time you drive by, don’t. Stop for a few minutes at Malad Gorge State Park. Walk across the gorge on the scary but safe footbridge and gaze down at the Malad River 250 feet below. Just don’t eat the beavers.
 
Ah yes, the beavers. Early trappers working for the Pacific Fur Company, called Astorians after company owner John Jacob Astor, encountered the river and its tasty beaver in 1811. That’s when Donald Mackenzie led them on an exploratory jaunt after the Wilson Price Hunt expedition met disaster in the rapids of the Snake River at Caldron Linn.
 
Long story short: They ate beaver and got sick. Mackenzie named the river Malad or Malade, which means “sick” in French.
 
Much speculation has ensued in the centuries following the illness the men experienced as to its cause. Had the beaver eaten some poisonous root? Had selenium concentrated in the fat of the beaver tails? No one knows.
 
By the way, the naming of Idaho’s other Malad River has a similar story with different players. The lesson here might be to stick to the Canadian pastry if you insist on adding beaver tails to your diet.

​#malad #maladgorge Malad Gorge circa 1970. Ranger Rick Cummins gazes into the gorge. At the top of the picture is the I-84 bridge across the head of the gorge. Installation of the footbridge in Malad Gorge State Park would come later. ​

Of Statues and Men

Click here to read my latest Idaho Press column.

Possum Sweetheart

​It will come as no shock to you that Idaho is an agricultural state. Knowing this, you would likely display little surprise to learn that there is a statue that honors a famous Idaho cow. What you might not expect is that the statue is in Washington state.
 
Segis Pietertje Prospect was born on a farm near Meridian in 1913 and was owned by George Layton. He sold the Holstein to E. A. Stuart, the CEO of Carnation. She became Stuart’s favorite cow. He nicknamed her Possum Sweetheart. 
 
The company’s tagline for many years was “Carnation Condensed Milk, the milk from contented cows.” E.A. believed deeply in the philosophy that happy cows produced more milk. On the wall in the cow barn on the Carnation Farms spread, were painted these words:
 
“The RULE to be observed in this stable at all times, toward the cattle, young and old, is that of patience and kindness….
Remember that this is the home of mothers. Treat each cow as a mother should be treated. The giving of milk is a function of motherhood; rough treatment lessens the flow. That injures me as well as the cow. Always keep these ideas in mind in dealing with my cattle.”
No cow was more contented than Possum Sweetheart. At least none showed their contentment more in the production of milk. Sweetheart put out 37,380.1 pounds of milk in 365 days. The average production for a milk cow at the time was about 1,500 to 1,900 pounds of milk in that period of time.
 
The Idaho born and bred Holstein lived to be 12 years old, which is a long life for a cow. In 1928 E.A. Stuart commissioned a sculpture of his favorite cow. Well-known sculptor Frederick Willard Potter carved Possum Sweetheart’s life-size likeness into marble.
 
The sculpture to a cow who produced her own weight in milk every three weeks can still be seen today at Carnation Farms, Carnation, Washington.  The dedication of the cow statue. Used with permission of Carnation Farms.

That Idaho Car

In the early days of automobiles many entrepreneurial mechanics tried building their own. A few even started their own brands, some of which live on today. Fords were built in Boise for a time. Many towns in the Northwest had their own automobiles being built in small assembly plants in the teens and twenties. Lost brands such as the Totem, the Spokane, the Tilikum, and the Seattle were the result. By the 1930s most of those upstarts were gone. Then, in 1975 Don Stinebaugh of Post Falls, Idaho decided to build a car.
 
Stinebaugh was an inventor with at least 48 patents to his name. He’d invented a snowmobile engine that made him a fair amount of money, for one. His cars grew out of his tinkering with off highway vehicles. He built several all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) that people liked, including tandem axel models that pre-dated today’s side-by-side utility task vehicles (UTVs) . Had he continued down that (non) road, he might have done well with his vehicles. He got distracted, though, when people started to encourage him to convert his ATVs for street use.
 
Cutting to the chase, the 1975 Leata was born from those early off-road vehicles. It had a hand-laid fiberglass body, an 83-HP Pinto engine, and a diamond tuft interior that would not be out-of-place in a hot rod. The first Leatas looked a bit like a British Morris (left in the photo) with a continental kit on the back. Stinebaugh built about 20 of them. One was returned because it went too fast for the owner.
 
There was no 1976 Leata, but Sinebaugh wasn’t through. He brought out the Leata Cabalero in 1977 (right in the photo). It came in several models, including a convertible and a pickup. The Cabalero was basically a Chevette with a custom body. Where the original Leata could claim snappy performance, the 1977 models were sluggish. The automotive press panned them. Stinebaugh made and sold about 70 of them, then closed up shop.
 
Leata’s were not aesthetically pleasing. They filled no real automotive need that couldn’t be filled by a Pinto for less money. Still, my hat is off to Mr. Stinebaugh for following his dream and creating an Idaho original.
 

#leata #idahocar

Carving it in Stone

Thanks to the Idaho Department of Transportation, the Idaho State Historical Society, and not least, Merle Wells, Idaho has a robust set of roadside historical markers. The inclination to mark historical points in the state was the genesis of the Sons and Daughters of Idaho Pioneers.
 
In 1925 the group was formed to commemorate Idaho history. Their first act was to install a monument to honor George Grimes, one of the men who first discovered gold in the Boise Basin on August 2, 1862. He was killed a few days later and was buried by his partner, Moses Splawn, in a nearby prospect hole. Splawn’s story was that Grimes was killed by hostile Indians. Some suspect the story might have been, let’s say, convenient.
 
The Sons and Daughters of Idaho Pioneers placed 47 monuments in southwestern Idaho alone. Often, they were carved into the shape of Idaho using sandstone from Table Rock.
 
One problem with carving your stories about history in stone is that history doesn’t always stay the same. A prime example is the marker that was placed on Government Island in the Boise River in 1933. It was meant to commemorate the arrival of Colonel Pinkney Lugenbeel who scouted for a location of what would be Fort Boise. He settled on a site on July 4, 1863.
 
Certainly, this was an important link in the chain of events leading to the establishment of Boise. Lugenbeel helped plat the city a few days later.
 
Whoever wrote the inscription for the monument placed by the Sons and Daughters of Idaho Pioneers participated in a bit of hyperbole, not to mention misspelling. Okay, we’ll mention the misspelling, too. The inscription read:
 
GOVERNMENT ISLAND
THE BEGINNING OF CIVILIZATION
IN BOISE VALLEY MAJOR LUGENBILE
SENT BY THE U.S. GOV’T TO
ESTABLISH BOISE BARRACKS.
CAMPED HERE JUNE 1863
 
The spelling mistake was in Lugenbeel’s name. The hyperbole was to call his efforts “the beginning of civilization in Boise Valley.” Had the writer added “European style” before the word civilization, it would have been more accurate. Indians had a civilization in the valley for millennia prior to the major’s arrival.
 
Government Island is no longer an island, and the Lugenbeel monument is no longer in place. Boise City parks personnel removed the monument in 2017 for restoration, then had second thoughts about putting it back up with the original condescending language.
 
Did the history change? Not exactly, but our understanding of it is now more complete. The story is likely to change in six months or a year when this post becomes a rerun. By then something new might have happened to the monument. That’s why I don’t blog in stone.
 
Thanks to Boise City Department of Arts and History. Much of the information in this post, including the photo below, can be found in their publication Government Island Monument—A Sons and Daughters of Idaho Pioneers Artifact.
​

Kit Carson, Horse Thief

​Most of the stories I relate through Speaking of Idaho are well-known and can be corroborated by more than one source. Sometimes I run across a story that is of some interest, but is little more than hearsay. Today, presented as hearsay, is a story about Kit Carson.
 
Christopher Houston “Kit” Carson was well known in his own time through dime novels that told often exaggerated stories of the West. He was an army officer, a mountain man, and famously a guide for John C. Frémont. Nowhere in his resume does it list “horse thief.”
 
However, such a tale was told about the man in the May 20, 1923 edition of the Idaho Statesman. The article was part of a continuing series of stories told by the son of Captain Stanton G. Fisher. The elder Fisher had over the years been an Indian trader, chief of scouts, and the Indian Agent at Fort Hall. The time period when he held various posts and titles seems to have been from the late 1860s into the 1890s. He was involved in what some call the Nez Perce War.
 
Fisher’s son heard from his father that Kit Carson and Jim Beckworth, a freed slave who was a mulatto and himself a well-known mountain man, stole a string of 6 or 8 horses and mules from someone near Fort Hall. The teller of the tale was careful to say that stealing horses at that (unspecified) time was not necessarily looked upon with great disfavor if one didn’t steal them from a friend or neighbor.
 
The tale-teller said the owner of the small herd offered a beaver trap worth $16 for every animal returned to him. Jim Bridger, ANOTHER well-known mountain man who was also at the fort at that time, told a little Frenchman named Meachau LeClair about the reward offer. LeClair and a young Mexican named Thomas Lavatte set out to earn those beaver traps.
 
They caught up with Carson and Beckworth somewhere outside of Soda Springs. The pair waited until well into the night to approach the camp of the two men. They first silenced a bell tied around the neck of one horse, then quietly led the herd away without waking anyone. Not relishing the idea of being overtaken on their way back to Fort Hall by Carson and Beckworth, the men decided to steal the personal horses of the mountain men as well as the previously purloined herd. With some tense moments delivered courtesy of a growling guard dog, they were able to sneak the mounts away.
 
With Carson and Beckworth now on foot, LeClair and Lavatte pounded back to Fort Hall with the herd, which they would trade for the promised beaver traps. Along the way they stopped at Soda Springs where a store proprietor noticed the men had the Carson and Beckworth horses, to which the Frenchman allegedly said, in the third-hand telling of the tale, “Yas, you tell de man Kit Carson and de man Jim Beckworth dat de little Frenchman got his mool. You bet he no folly me.”
 
A grain of truth or a grain of salt? You be the judge.

You Say Eagle, I Say Sagle

I often learn something from the comments I get on my daily posts. I’ve received a lot of them regarding town names and how they came about. My go-to source on this particular topic is Lalia Boone’s Idaho Place Names, published in 1988 by University of Idaho Press. I highly recommend it if this topic is of particular interest.
 
I checked a comment from a reader about Sagle, Idaho. He’d heard that the folks there wanted to call it Eagle, but that the name was already in use in Idaho. Sure enough, Lalia said the same thing. A Mr. Powell applied for the name Eagle for the post office there in 1900. When informed that he couldn’t use that name, he substituted the E with an S, and Sagle was born.
 
I’m not sure if that was creative or lazy. It did result in a unique name in any case.
 
By the way, when you’re in the Sagle area, pop in and take a look at nearby Round Lake State Park (pictured). And if you’re ever in Eagle, check out Eagle Island State Park. Both parks have lakes. One is round. One isn’t. 

You Don't Know What You've got 'til it's Gone

Boise had a street car system in 1890. They were built in many cities in the latter part of the 19th century as an efficient way to get people around town. Boise’s system soon became Treasure Valley’s system, with lines going in a 60-mile loop to Eagle, Star, Middleton, Caldwell, Nampa, Meridian and back to Boise.
 
It was popular for people to pack a picnic lunch and take the loop on a Sunday just for the fun of it. Spurs were extended from Caldwell to Wilder and Lake Lowell, as well.
 
Several companies ran portions of the system, which become generally known as the Interurban, over the years. The light rail trains were powered by electricity, so it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that Idaho Power Company ran the trains for a time.
 
Wouldn’t something like that be a wonderful resource today? So why weren’t “we” smart enough to save the Interurban?
 
First, you need to know that it wasn’t a public system. Several companies were involved over the years, each trying to make a profit, and none really succeeding. Yes, there’s a conspiracy theory that General Motors bought up all the light rail lines in the country and closed them down so that people would have to buy cars. And, yes, GM was convicted for plotting to monopolize transportation systems post World War One. But it wasn’t GM that killed the systems. Not exactly. They were trying to make a profit from their National City Lines (which did NOT run a system in the Treasure Valley).
 
Cars did help kill the trollies when people began buying them. But it was buses that proved their demise. It was simply much cheaper to add a bus route and a few bus stop signs as cities grew. Quicker, too. Interurban tracks were taken out in some places as buses and cars became the dominant forms of transportation. Often they didn’t even bother pulling up the tracks, instead they just paved over them like the useless relics they had become.
 
Ah, but, wouldn’t it be nice to hop on a smooth running trolley and watch the cities and sagebrush go by while you enjoyed an ice cream cone on a Sunday afternoon? 

​#interurban #boiseinterurban
​The photo is a packed Boise and Interurban car from 1910, courtesy of the Idaho State Historical Society digital collection.

D. Boon in Idaho

Daniel Boone was a celebrated frontiersman, back when the frontier included parts of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Kentucky. He first gained fame during the American Revolution when he and a group of men recaptured three girls, one Boone’s daughter, from an Indian war party recruited by the British. James Fenimore Cooper wrote a fictionalized version of the event in Last of the Mohicans.
 
That was in 1776. Why do we in Idaho care? Because his well-documented exploits at that time seem to have placed him some 1,800 miles away from Idaho, not somewhere on the Continental Divide carving his misspelled name into an aspen tree.
 
In 1976 an Idaho Falls woman named Louise Rutledge became intrigued by an inscription on an aspen tree that said, “D. Boon 1776.” The carving was old. Well, maybe not 1776 old, but certainly not as new as 1976. Rutledge wrote a little book called D. Boon 1776 A Western Bicentennial Mystery. According to the Sunday, August 10, 1976 edition of the Idaho Statesman she “began extensive research to prove—or disprove—that frontiersman Daniel Boone was, in fact, in Idaho 30 years ahead of Lewis and Clark.”
 
Rutledge became convinced that Boone had carved his initials into the tree, not in spite of, but because of the absence of the “e” at the end of his name. She had grown up in the Cumberland Gap area of Tennessee which was awash in tales about “Boon trees.” She was certain that because of the misspelling, this carving was genuine. There were many “Boon trees” scattered around the south, often with the added information that D. Boon had cilled or kilt or killed a bar, bar being the way a genuine frontiersman would spell bear. We can’t know how many or if any of those carvings are genuine, but we do know that when signing or printing his name, Daniel Boone always knew how to spell it.
 
Not ready to leave a good story untold, Rutledge and her husband, Gene, and Bonita Pendleton, all of Idaho Falls, wrote a play speculating on Boone’s journey to Idaho, called D. Boone 1776, War Has Two Sides.
 
Tree experts later determined the carving on the Idaho Aspen had been done in about 1895. Undeterred, Rutledge postulated that someone had seen the original, genuine D. Boon tree, and noticed that it was dead. To preserve the history for posterity, they made a copy.
 
Well, it’s a theory.  
  
Image: Clipping from the August 3, 1976 Post Register.

Pop Quiz

​Below is a little Idaho trivia quiz. If you’ve been following Speaking of Idaho, you might do very well. Caution, it is my job to throw you off the scent. Answers below the picture.
 
1). What did Sandpoint’s Ross Hall do for the Navy during World War II?
 
A. He was a spy.
 
B. He invented sonar.
 
C. He took pictures of all the “boots” at Farragut Naval Training Station.
 
D. He sold the Navy land for Farragut Naval Training Station.
 
E. Nothing. He was an Air Force pilot.
 
2). What distinction did The Firth Record hold?
 
A. It had the smallest circulation of any newspaper in Idaho.
 
B. It was the first weekly in the US to put out a special edition for VJ Day.
 
C. It was the only Idaho paper published in Utah.
 
D. The editor was a woman.
 
E. It refused to print anything but good news.
 
3). What killed the Stinker Station Signs in Idaho?
 
A. It just got too expensive to keep them painted.
 
B. The federal government no longer allowed them on federal land.
 
C. Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act.
 
D. The Idaho Petroleum Dealers Association sued Farris Lind for defamation.  
 
E. The company just went another way with their advertising.
 
4). What group was partly responsible for creating the Idaho state parks system?
 
A. The Boy Scouts
 
B. The Friends of Idaho State Parks
 
C. The Jaycees
 
D. The Sierra Club
 
E. The Girl Scouts
 
5) What did Idaho native Samuel P. Cowley do that made headlines?
 
A. He shot “Baby Face” Nelson.
 
B. He was wounded in a gun battle with John Dillinger.
 
C. He was Watergate’s famous “Deep Throat.”
 
D. He was part of the James Gang.
 
E. He helped bring down Bonnie and Clyde. ​ Answers
1, C
2, B
3, C
4, E
5, A


How did you do?
5 right—Why aren’t you writing this blog?
4 right—A true Idaho native, no matter where you’re from.
3 right—Good! Treat yourself to some French fries.
2 right—Okay! Eat more potatoes!
1 right—Meh. You need to read more blog posts.
0 right—Really, you should reconsider your recent relocation. ​