Randy Stapilus - Idaho Myths and Legends: The True Stories Behind Historys Mysteries

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Map by Melissa Baker

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ISBN 978-1-4930-4037-7 (paper : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4930-4038-4 (electronic)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

A book may have one parent of record, but far more who stand in the background...

I received lots of help, as I have on other Idaho book projects, from a long list of Idahoans with deep background in the state. They include Judy Austin, Martin Peterson, Rick Just, Cort Conley, Steve Steubner, Ernest Hoidal, Jennifer Okerlund, Mark Mendiola, Tim Marsano, Sal Celeski, and Marty Trillhaase.

Many people helped with specific information in the various chapters. They include Dolli Massener, Dick Southern (thanks for help with both information and images), J. D. Williams (for sharing his personal story of Samaria Hills exploration) and the sta at the Shoshone Ice Caves (for their overall help and especially their tour of the place), the Boise City Department of Arts and History, and Radek Konarik at the Butch Cassidy Museum / the Bank of Montpelier.

David Bond, whos lived and reported in the Silver Valley so long he probably knows it better than it knows itself, helped greatly with the Noah Kellogg section (and thanks for his book loan). The report on the Ridgerunner would not have been practical, or at least comprehensible, without the groundwork done by my old newspaper colleague Rick Ripley, who wrote the book The Ridgerunner . The good people at Big River Paranormal helped bring some perspective to the stories surrounding the old Idaho Penitentiary.

Thanks too to the fine editors at Globe Pequot Press.

And of course, my wife and chief proofreader, Linda Watkins.

O ne of the oldest original Idaho documents in my collection is a little booklet, dating to somewhere around 1930, called Copper Camp Mining Co., Inc.A Prospectus. It was a call for investors, and so includes financial and technical information, but much of it reads like a short story from the dawn of the twentieth centurya short story without an ending.

It was written by William A. Edwards, a native of Georgia who became a lawyer for the General Land Office. He reported that in 1901 my health broke down and I was compelled to resign and seek an outdoor life. The story generations later in Idaho was that the operative phrase there was compelled to resign and that his health actually was sound. He went on: Because of my knowledge of mining law, I decided to go to some new mining camp in the Rocky Mountain States. In Spokane, he heard about fresh activity in the Thunder Mountain region in southwest Idahoeast of present-day McCalland he ventured there to check for opportunities. He found none at first, but continued to prowl the nearby area, and soon came to Big Creek.

Big Creek is well known today by Idahos backcountry enthusiasts as a spot an hour or so away from paved roads and telephone lines and on the very border of the Frank ChurchRiver of No Return Wilderness. Its human development includes a landing strip and a lodge and not much else. In 1904, Edwards saw not even any of these things, but he did perceive a massive mining opportunity, for gold, silver, and lead. That was the heart of his prospectus.

There is today a tiny dot on some very fine-grained maps of Idaho marking a place called Edwardsburg. It is located about a half mile from Big Creek; today, like Big Creek, it has a guest lodge and also several vacation homes, along with the ruins of the house Edwards built generations ago for his family. But although prospectors have occasionally wandered through and several small mines were developed in the surrounding hills, the Big Creek area never developed into a major mining center.

Locally, Edwards and his family became most identified with the old house, which returned to the ground aer decades of abandonment. But for those who know the deep history of the place, Edwards became something of a legendary and even shadowy figure. He and his family were not quite hermits, but they rarely ventured into the outside world. Over the years, to raise money, Edwards would reach out to people trying to sell pieces of his property, but he became a figure of mystery. His reasons for leaving the General Land Office so long before are unclear; his protests of bad health didnt seem to converge with his ability to thrivepersonally build a substantial house and seriously prospect for precious metalsin some of Idahos most remote and tough backwoods country. What was he doing back there for so many years? What might he really have found?

He became a local legend, and is almost a figure of myth now. In another generation or two, his name will still be around... and who knows what may be said of him?

Idaho generates people like that.

As well it should. Idaho has a distant feelSilver and gold in the sunlight blaze, and romance lies in her name, runs the state songa little elusive, always imperfectly understood, and in many ways anything but prosaic.

To the cartographer Karl Musser, Idaho is a myth and a legend. Or so he says. We will not be silenced, he writes on his website Fantasymaps.com: Theres growing evidence that only forty-nine states are real, and Idaho is a fake.

Supposedly, he acknowledges, there are more than a million residents of Idaho. No matter, Musser wrote: Some people have come forward and claimed that they were born and raised in Idaho. But every single person who made this claim have been shown to be frauds and charlatans. The mapmakers who have drawn Idaho onto their national maps are biased, he said. And isnt it odd that so large a space has so few peopleso many fewer than most other states?

Musser concluded: We have much more material on this conspiracy, and we have yet to uncover one iota of evidence that Idaho has ever existed. All of the so-called evidence is a mixture of falsifications, coercions, lies and exaggerations.

Karl Musser is not alone. Others around the Internet also proclaim the idea that Idaho is a mythical place, its unusual shape devised to separate actual statessuch as Oregon and Wyomingfrom each other. On a map.

Orand this idea should be a favorite in a state where suspicion of government oen reaches near-religious levelstheres also the theory that Idaho is a massive mind-control experiment: Cross the border into it, and your mind is taken over by nefarious forces. (The borders, presumably, are monitored by black helicopters.)