“My mine is where the devil himself can't find it. It's in Death Valley in the mountains where no man can ever go — no man but Wallie Scott …I'm worth $1 million to $20 million and it's all there in the mine.”
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 7 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
At the bottom of Lahontan Reservoir northeast of Carson City in the Nevada desert lie the ruins of the Williams stagecoach station where on May 6, 1860, a terrible thing happened that started a war between whites and three Indian tribes from Nevada and Idaho.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 7 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
Sept. 13, 1834: “We left the Madison Fork with Mr. Bridger’s Camp and ascended a small branch in a West direction through the mountains about 20 miles and encamped on the divide,” mountain man Osborne Russell wrote in his journal.
It would seem improbable that two landscape paintings would affect history, but Thomas Moran’s “Chasm of the Colorado” and “The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone” did just that. And today, another painting titled “The Three Tetons” hangs in the Oval Office.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
Newspapers said Ella Watson was an outlaw and called her “Cattle Kate,” but she was no outlaw — just a small-time cattle rancher. They hanged her anyway.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
John Charles Frémont was one of America’s greatest explorers and map makers of the early West. They called him “The Pathfinder.” But incredibly he was charged with treason and could have been legally shot by one of his own Army officers. In a letter to President James Polk in his …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Less than 130 miles north of Las Vegas is a small, quiet town called Pioche, surrounded by hills and desert. It’s called a ghost town, even though its population is 1,000, with most of them working for the county government because that’s the county seat.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Hungry diners at Mackenzie River Pizza in Coeur d’Alene and its other locations in six states may not know much about the Mackenzie River in British Columbia and the man it was named after, but his story is a remarkable adventure in the history of North America.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
Two-thirds of the continental U.S. lies west of the Mississippi River, and to the east is the one-third where most Americans in the 1800s were born, grew up, worked, raised a family and died. It was the world they understood, felt secure in and where they could enjoy the creature …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
Polly Bemis was one of the lucky ones. Only 4-foot-5 tall, she lived in Warren, Idaho, during a time when not everyone was nice to the Chinese. Born in China and sold into slavery by her parents, she ended up in Idaho and became a legend. Many of her countrymen …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
His Serene Highness Prince Alexander Philipp Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied could have stayed home in Prussia in his family palace, enjoying the luxury of ancient German royalty — his family going back at about 1100 A.D. — but he didn’t.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
His Wallowa band of Nez Perce called him Waaya-Tonah-Toesits-Kahn — meaning “Earth Left by the Setting Sun.” He was a nephew of Chief Joseph, rode with him during the Nez Perce War in the 1870s, and became famous well into the 20th century for his way with horses.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was founded by abolitionists and he earned the accolade of being the Great Emancipator. It’s true that Lincoln’s primary goal in the Civil War was to preserve the Union, with ending slavery second. But he ended up doing both, and when the war was over, freed …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
In the early 1800s, 30 to 50 million buffalo — or bison — roamed the plains of America. For long before the white man, they were a prime source of food and clothing for Indians in those regions. By the latter part of the century there were only about 2,000 …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 8 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
“They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming.” That’s how Sarah Winnemucca described the invasion of the white man into her ancestral tribal lands in northern Nevada. Her native name was “Thocmetony,” meaning “Shell …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
Many consider Ty Cobb the greatest baseball player of all time. Others say Babe Ruth. Ty’s father told him as he left home to join a minor league team, “Don’t come home a failure.” He didn’t. Years later he said of himself, “In legend I am a sadistic, slashing, swashbuckling …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
Just north of the Idaho border in British Columbia, the towns of Castlegar and Grand Forks are home to many Doukhobors, a very unusual community of Christians founded in Russia centuries ago, but migrated to North America in 1899.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
John Day and Ramsey Crooks were two of the many early frontiersmen who suffered incredible hardships, survived and became part of the history of the American West. They endured towering mountains, raging rivers, freezing cold, starvation, and capture by Indians.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
“We’re reporting live from Dante’s Peak, where they’re evacuating the town,” the TV reporter said in a movie with that name, filmed in Wallace. That fictional story of a major volcanic eruption has happened worldwide for real at least 30 times since 1,000 A.D., and now it’s happening more often.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
In the northeast corner of Evergreen Cemetery in Post Falls, Frederick Post and his wife Margaret lie beside each other under a grey marble monument. The city is named after him. And just a few yards further east, players ride their carts carrying golf clubs to the next hole. Probably …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
Jan. 14, 1864 was a grim day in Virginia City, Mont., but 6,000 spectators loved it. "Three-Fingered Jack," "Club-Foot George," "The Kentucky Cannibal" and two others were facing vigilante hangmen. As the box was kicked from under Three-Fingered Jack Gallager's feet and the rope pulled tight around his neck, Kentucky …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
Wanapum Chief Smohalla did not like the white missionaries who came to the Inland Northwest to teach the Gospel and convert the Indians to white man ways.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
Nellie Cashman spent most of her life living in the gritty world of gold and silver mining camps throughout the early West where few women ventured - from Baja California to Alaska.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
"If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny," Idaho Democrat Senator Frank Church told NBC's "Meet the Press" in 1975, "and there would be …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Pioneers who opened up the American West were a hardy lot who knew what they would be facing - no roads, blazing deserts, dense forests, raging rivers, towering mountains, uncertain food, accidents, disease, and possible attacks by outlaws, Indians and wild animals. But they were willing to risk everything for …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
Charles Coulson Rich was 21 when he first learned about Joseph Smith Jr. and his newly founded "Church of Christ" - today's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). He joined, was baptized and in his lifetime witnessed the LDS church's early days of struggle, persecution, violence and role …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
As the 1800s flickered to an end, it must have been culture shock for Nellie Stockbridge to leave central Illinois and move to the rough-and-tumble Wild West of Idaho's Silver Valley, where miners and mine owners were at each other's throats and law and order was on thin ice.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
After Bing Crosby died in 1977 following 18 holes of golf near Madrid, Spain, Bob Hope said, "If friends could have been made to order, I would have asked for one like Bing." Nearly 3,000 mourners agreed and packed St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City for his memorial service.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
When word spread that gold was discovered in faraway California in 1849, thousands of Chinese flocked to American shores - escaping the toil and grinding poverty that have always been part of China's history.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
The former slave was "of medium height, of strong muscular power, quick of apprehension, and for a man of years, very active. From his neck is suspended a perforated bullet, with a large oblong bead each side of it, secured by a thread of sinew: This amulet is just as …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary attended a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. on Good Friday April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth shot and killed the president. Would American history have taken a different direction had Idaho Territory Congressman William Henson …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
On Dec. 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, it also attacked the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Malaya, Hong Kong, Thailand and Midway Island. Army Private Herbert (Bud) Kirchoff Jr. of Coeur d'Alene was at Clark Field in the Philippines and witnessed Japanese aircraft bomb, strafe and destroy American aircraft …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
Who’s ever heard of Lee Morse, the ninth of 12 children raised in the small town of Kooskia, Idaho — a diminutive singer with a remarkable three-octave singing voice whose backup band included future musical giants like Bennie Goodman and the Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey brothers?
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
They might have called him a "gentle giant" in the early 1800s, but it was wise not to mess with him. Finnan MacDonald looked every bit the mountain man that he was - hunting, trapping beaver, dealing with the (often hostile) Indians and just staying alive in the untamed wilderness …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
In 1847, "His fame was then at its height, ... and I was very anxious to see a man who had achieved such feats of daring among the wild animals of the Rocky Mountains, and still wilder Indians of the plains," wrote General William Tecumseh Sherman of Civil War fame.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
The event took place in Pocatello about 100 years ago - April 26, 1915, to be exact - but in the annals of Idaho history it would be little noted nor long remembered. Two boxers battled in the ring, only to end in a draw. One of them was a …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
Bigfoot legends are interesting stories found in many cultures that blurr the line between true history and legend. Never-theless, people find them fascinating and organizations think there's enough credibility to spend time and money investigating.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
It was 1911 and big events were taking place around the world: George V was crowned king at Westminster Abbey, then with his queen went to India to be showered in glory, and Kaiser Wilhelm told the world that the German fleet would assure that "No one will dare challenge …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
As the Civil War raged, Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves and the South was riled. In Idaho, the combined tribes known as the Snake Indians were enraged at white man intrusion, with both sides escalating acts of violence. In turn, that incurred the wrath of U.S. …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
John A. O'Farrell is remembered for being one of the pioneers of Boise in the middle 1800s, having built an historic log cabin that still stands, serving in the Idaho Legislature, being the father of seven children and adopting seven more - including the daughter of an Indian chief - …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 9 YEARS, 12 MONTHS AGO
Everybody knows that President Lincoln was born in a log cabin and that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin - perhaps the greatest fiction best-seller of all time - but Idaho also has an historic log cabin. It's more than 150 years old, standing like an orphan watching the …
President Calvin Coolidge called it "weird," and the NASA astronauts trained there for their Moon landing. There were bear tracks hundreds of years old, a pit so deep a rock hitting bottom could not be heard, and though there were rock rabbits, woodchucks and kangaroo rats, there are no rattlesnakes …
Grover Cleveland was President of the United States, Queen Victoria ruled Britannia, Cole Porter was born and Tchaikovsky died, and in New Orleans, Andy Bowen and Jack Burk fought for 110 rounds in the world's longest recorded boxing match. That all happened in the same year that America suffered a …
Mason Brayman was born in 1813 in Buffalo, N.Y., and knew Abraham Lincoln - and also Stephen A. Douglas, who debated Lincoln and lost to him in a U.S. Senate race. He was a successful lawyer, newspaper editor, major general in the Union Army during the Civil War and wrote …
George Wright graduated from West Point, fought bravely in the Mexican-American War, was assigned far from the battlefields of the Civil War, alternately made peace and war with Native Americans, and devoted his life to serving his country - but will always be remembered as the man who terrorized the …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
In the mid-1800s, most of the explorers, trappers, pioneers and Army troops roaming the Inland Northwest stopped at Antoine Plante's Ferry on the Spokane River in Eastern Wash-ington's Spokane Valley near the Idaho border.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
People like the pioneers of the Old West or folks today who move to a new place bring with them the stories of their lives that happened elsewhere. Two Irishman who connected with each other in Idaho did that a century and a half ago. One was a convict who …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
After the Civil War, many Army generals were assigned the new task of subduing the Native Americans who were resisting the white man encroaching on their ancestral lands. Far from the lines of communication, what happened in the field depended on the decisions and character of the officers and men …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
Beyond the string of low mountains that some Indians called Wolf's Paw, and others called Bear's Paw, rose the outline of a Montana range called the Little Rockies that looked like a man lying on his back. The Nez Perce knew that they were near the safety of their Lakota …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
All ships are born into glory. Ship owners, designers, engineers and workmen bask in the joy of creation - and journalists tell the story. The name of a place or a hero is selected to adorn the hull, flags flutter, the crowd gathers and someone important shatters a bottle of …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
More than a generation after Captain Jonathan Thorn sent 11 men to their doom in 1811 trying to negotiate the dangerous sand bars at the mouth of the Columbia River, the U.S. Navy ship Active made the same trip without mishap, sailing all the way up to The Dalles in …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
An important episode in American history began in 1810 in New York and ended at Astoria on the Oregon coast, with Idaho in between. Hardship, danger, bad decisions and death painted the picture of expeditions gone badly awry, but in the end, it was a good thing for America.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
On Aug. 21, 1992, gunshots echoed through the woods at Ruby Ridge, a few miles southwest of Bonners Ferry. The shootout was between deputy U.S. marshals and the Randy and Vicki Weaver family that lived in a cabin in the woods to home-school their kids and escape what they believed …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
For two years, Richard M. McKenna of Mountain Home, Idaho, patrolled the tributaries of the great Yangtze River in China aboard a shallow-draft U.S. Navy gunboat, and decades later wrote a best-selling novel about it called "Sand Pebbles." It's a story about an independent and rebellious Navy machinist mate first …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
When the kid lost a fingertip in an accident, the doctor admonished his parents for not saving it for reattachment. He was told the chickens ate it. The kid went on to become the richest man in Idaho.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
Chief Pocatello was leader of the Lemhi Shoshone Indians that roamed Idaho's Salmon River Mountains and surrounding areas. They were part of a larger Shoshone Nation which some called "fierce and bloodthirsty." The Shoshone did indeed attack and kill white settlers and white travelers heading west mostly along the Oregon …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
In the years leading to the Civil War, the Oregon Trail was a road of hope for white settlers heading west seeking a better life. For the Indians, it was a trail of tears.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
An Idaho Army National Guard unit had not been in Darwin long before Japanese bombers unleashed a rain of death and destruction on the little tropical town on the north coast of Australia. It happened on Feb. 19, 1942 - a day the Aussies and the families of the Idaho …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Of all the good and evil men who become a part of Idaho history as they roamed the untamed West, Jo Walker was one of the best - an incredible leader of explorers and pioneers across the ruggedest parts of America, braving towering mountains, parched deserts and hostile Indians.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
History has a way of repeating itself. Modern electronics has all but destroyed personal privacy. The tragedy of 9/11 changed the way the world looks at security - opening the floodgates to electronic evesdropping, domestic and international spying and Big Brother intrusion in everyone's daily lives.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Marilyn Monroe was no dumb blonde. She had an IQ of 168 and she was smart enough to know that she would look sexy dressed in an Idaho potato sack. It was all part of a Twentieth Century Fox publicity stunt answering a columnist who called her cheap and vulgar, …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
No one really knows how it all began, but its roots are in the Holy Bible and among its members were Wyatt Earp, once a deputy sheriff in Kootenai County, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and aviator Charles Lindberg. They all belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF).
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
In the turbulent history of the Old West, there were many things that killed people - grizzly bears, hostile Indians, outlaws, violent white men and white-man diseases, natural disasters, and a host of other dangers. But what helped keep the Indians and white newcomers alive in those early days was …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
He stood six-foot-one or two and weighed more than 200 pounds - and that was big in the middle 1800s. He also wore fancy clothes, packed a gun and had a bad temper. That's why few dared mess with him.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
The Coeur d'Alene Indians say that Chief Circling Raven lived to be 150 years old, ruling his people from 1660 to 1760. With the gift of prophecy, he warned of grave dangers ahead. He also said one day the Black Robes will come.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway's devoted wife for six years, bowed out of his life gracefully. She gave him one last chance to give up his affair with Pauline "Fife" Pfeiffer, but he didn't. In January 1927 Hadley divorced him on grounds of desertion. She kept their son John ("Bumby"), …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
Ernest (Papa) Hemingway the literary giant spent his final moments on Earth in Ketchum, Idaho. With a shotgun, he gave up on life when he still had so much more to offer. He was a man of many talents and many flaws. Sad that he's gone, but his legacy endures.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
"Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another," Ernest Hemingway wrote. It could have been his epitaph.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
Count Felix Schaffgotsch was an Austrian-Bohemian nobleman serving as an officer in the German Waffen SS Florian Geyer division during World War II. On Aug. 11, 1942, he was killed in action in a muddy field near the city of Kurgan in Belarus, 333 miles southwest of Moscow, Russia. He …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
Next to where the old Saginaw Saw Mill stood in downtown Coeur d'Alene, where the Third Street boat landing parking lot is today, once stood "Fatty" Carroll's Variety, where sinister things happened nearly 130 years ago.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
Buried somewhere along the old Stage Road between Wallace and Spokane are gold coins worth $32,640 in 1900. Today, the value of the gold alone would be about $2.2 million - a lot more for numismatic value.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
It's hard to believe that after Lewis and Clark opened up the Northwest during their 1804-06 expedition, that by 1860 there were still less than 100 white people living permanently in the area of today's Idaho. How could that be?
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
In 1762, Coeur d'Alene tribal Chief Circling Raven had a vision of a man wearing black robes and carrying crossed sticks bringing them a new spiritual power.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
The Great Depression hit Kansas, and Arden O. (Lanny) Lannigan's parents moved the family to Idaho. When World War II broke out, Lanny was only 16, living near Bonners Ferry and couldn't wait to join the fight.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
The once-thriving mining town of Burke - nestled in the mountains of Idaho's Silver Valley - was bustling with tough miners doing a tough job. One of the toughest was an Italian-American named Guido Bardelli. The boxing history books remember him as Young Firpo, "The Bull of Burke."
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
In 1822, fur trader William H. Ashley placed an ad in a St. Louis newspaper: "To Enterprising Young Men: The subscriber wishes to engage ONE HUNDRED MEN, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two, or three years."
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
Antoine Godin hated the Blackfoot Indians. He was an Iroquois and the Blackfeet had murdered his father. He vowed that one day he would exact his revenge. In July 1832, he got his chance, and committed an act of violence that would trigger the deaths of whites and Indians, trappers …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
In the spring of 1805, the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery was stuck in deep snow that covered the Lolo Trail across the Bitterroot Mountains. Sacagawea's one-year old son Jean-Baptiste was seriously ill. He had a high fever and a swollen neck and throat - maybe mumps or tonsillitis.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
In the early 1800s, Peter Skene Ogden (1790-1854) spent his life exploring, mapping and fur trapping in the great wilderness that extended from Alaska to Baja California. It was a hard life of survival - braving rugged terrain, extreme weather, accidents, grizzly bears, lawlessness and hostile Indians. But he was …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 10 YEARS, 12 MONTHS AGO
In the early 1800s in the newly opened American Northwest, competition between fur trading companies was intense, with rival camps being invaded by armed gunmen, its occupants threatened and beaten; animals wiped out to create a "fur desert' to discourage competition, and murdering an Indian who dared to trade with …
Charles A. Lindbergh was one of the world's greatest pioneer aviators. He lived a life of adventure, danger, fame and great triumphs, but it was also a life dogged by controversy and tragedy. He was an American icon who left his mark everywhere he went - including in Idaho.
In the Idaho Territory days of Chief Joseph, it was the worst of times. Pat Brice was pleading with the Indians for his life; 6-year-old Maggie Manuel was all alone in the forest with a broken arm, having just seen her mother killed; and Chief Joseph knew that for his …
History classes rarely talk about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19, but it was perhaps the greatest natural disaster in history, killing from 40 to 100 million people worldwide. It was a rampaging virus - before science knew about viruses - and no part of the earth was spared, except …
Christmas 1944 was a bitter one for Hitler, and also for the 19,000 American soldiers who fought at the Battle of the Bulge and never made it back home. William Wallace Connelly of Coeur d'Alene was one of the lucky ones.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
In early December 1916, the train stopped at the tiny town of Rogerson in the southernmost part of Idaho with money for the miners in isolated Jarbidge Canyon, 65 miles south in Nevada. The only transportation link was a stagecoach driven by Fred Searcy, but he never made it.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
It was May 1865 when four men met in a Boise City saloon to plot robbing a stagecoach loaded with gold. Like all criminals, they hoped the plan would go smoothly. It didn't.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
York was a black man and slave owned by Capt. William Clark, and Seaman was a black Newfoundland pet dog owned by Capt. Meriwether Lewis. No one knows exactly what finally happened to the two, but they were no doubt Lewis and Clark's most loyal and trusted companions during their …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
When Edgar Rice Burroughs was just 14 and living in Chicago, he proposed to Emma Centennia Hulbert, daughter of a big-time hotel man in Chicago and St. Louis. She said "No." He kept asking Emma to marry him for the next 10 years - while he was in school, out …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
"Wild Goose Bill's eyes were sharp as needles," remembered Robert V. Wallace of Cheney, Wash., one of Bill's wagon masters. Indian Agent Major R.D. Gwydir on the Colville Indian Reservation said he was "Tall, gaunt and slightly stooped, invariably wearing a red bandana loosely knotted around his neck, and a …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
A Lewiston hotelkeeper had a dream about a murder that came true, and sent three men to the gallows. It happened during the lawless days of Idaho Territory while elsewhere in America a Civil War was raging.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
There are still some old-timers around in Idaho that remember Oct. 29 as a painful day in their lives. That was the day in 1929 when the stock market crashed, ushering in the worldwide Great Depression. Fortunes were lost, lives were ruined and people were jumping out of windows plunging …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
Sixteen B-25B bombers with their engines revving up sat on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet waiting for takeoff orders. They were about to make history with one of the most daring air missions of World War II.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, one of Idaho's early pioneers, kept a journal of his adventures in the American West. His friend Washington Irving, the great chronicler of his times and author of the epic Astoria, retold the stories in his book The Adventures of Captain Bonneville.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
The first man to lead a wagon train across the untamed Idaho wilderness was Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville, a French-born U.S. Army officer, explorer and trapper.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
There are still a few hardy souls in northern Idaho who call Burke Canyon's string of ghost towns "home." Thousands once lived there during the late 1800s and early 20th century. Then disasters, death and dying mines began to take their toll.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
It was Sept. 25, 1858 and Qualchan - son of Yakama Chief Owhi - had no idea he had but minutes to live as he rode his horse into a U.S. Army camp at Smyth's Ford on Latah Creek. Accompanied by his wife Whist-alks, he sought peace and found death.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum spent his life thinking big - and the world knows it - with his crowning achievement carved into Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
"The killing of a grizzly bear by a single man is no trifling matter and deservedly ranks next to killing an enemy," wrote American Fur Company trader Edwin Denig nearly 50 years after Lewis and Clark.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
"I never saw a human face that looked so much like a hyena. His eyes were deep set and close together. His upper lip was drawn back, showing teeth like fangs."
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
All wars are ugly. Vietnam was one of the ugliest, but like the other big wars in the 20th century, it was a fight for freedom - and it came at a cost.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
Maxmilian Adelbert Baer was a powerhouse of a man with fists like a sledgehammer and a heart like a marshmallow. On Aug. 31, 1936, a Coeur d'Alene crowd at Memorial Field saw just what a tough fighter he was.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
Elias Davidson Pierce was the first prospector to discover gold in Idaho, near the north-central town that bears his name. But he was not what you might expect.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
It was 1824 and Jedediah Strong Smith was walking along the Cheyenne River near the Black Hills of South Dakota, looking for the Crow Indians to buy horses and find out the best route westward through the Rocky Mountains for him and his men.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Idaho has always been a rough-and-tumble place, so when the federal government was pushing Prohibition nearly 100 years ago, who would think that Idaho would go along with the idea. But it did - and was that ever a mistake!
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Rosie the Riveter's motto was "We Can Do It!" - And they did. They were the women in World War II who filled the workforce at home while other men and women were battling overseas. They served in a time when everyone was proud to be an American.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
Husbands too often receive credit for their accomplishments that should be shared with their wives - or that the credit should have gone to the women folk in the first place. Eliza Hart Spalding was one of those women.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
While the white man was racing into Idaho and surrounding territories 200 years ago in search of land, gold and wealth, missionaries were right on their heels to bring Christian salvation to animist Native Americans.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
On a quiet peninsula on Lake Pend Oreille near Hope across from Sandpoint lies a pile of stones. It's all that's left of Kullyspell House, a fur trader station erected more than 200 years ago by an amazing Welshman named David Thompson.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
Dr. Frank B. Robinson called himself the Archbishop of Psychiana; others called him the Mail Order Prophet. He told the world "I talked with God," and said everyone else could too. And for just $20 he would send a 20-step lesson plan that will bring health, wealth, peace and happiness …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
Long before Ansel Adams, an Irish photographer named Timothy H. O'Sullivan carried his bulky wooden box camera across the harsh and unforgiving wilderness of the American West, making Idaho his last stop before walking into the pages of history.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO
Sometimes crime pays. It did for Caleb Lyon, Idaho's second territorial governor who thought nothing of cheating the Nez Perce Indians out of money rightfully theirs, and getting away with it.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
Survival on the frontier was for the toughest of the tough. It was a life of adventure, hardship, danger and the unexpected. Sometimes it brought riches and fame - but more often an early grave.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
Sacagawea's husband was a very strange fellow. He spoke very little English, bought Indian captives and made them his wives, was temperamental and had a proclivity for teenage Indian girls. But his culinary skill in preparing boudin blanc - a white pudding of chopped buffalo meat and kidneys stuffed into …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
For 22 years, U.S. Army First Sergeant Leonard W. Olson of Coeur d'Alene was proud to wear his uniform around the world. He doesn't call himself a hero - just an American soldier doing his job and grateful he could serve his country.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 8 MONTHS AGO
Abigail Scott Duniway knew how to deal with men and tough times. She married a tough farmer, gave birth to five sons, survived financial calamity and stared down any man who said she shouldn't have the right to vote.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
The last part of the 19th century and first part of the 20th was a tough time for ordinary folks, but a good time for the robber barons. The rich were walking all over the workers, the titans of industry were holding hands with the titans of government, the unions …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
The mining town of Florence nestled more than 6,000 feet high in the Clearwater Mountains used to be the seat of Idaho County. Today, all that is left are some ruined building foundations and an overgrown cemetery. If those remnants could only speak, what a story they could tell of …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
Idaho U.S. Navy veterans Laurence J. Leahy of Post Falls and Sam G. McCarthy of Blanchard didn't witness what happened in Ulithi Lagoon in the central Pacific early on the morning of Nov. 20, 1944, but they sailed on a Navy ship that did - the USS Hector (AR-7).
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 9 MONTHS AGO
In 1945, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons: "Tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the Iron Curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain."
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
At least three artists who drew, painted and sculpted life on the wild frontier didn't just imagine what it was like and then create it - they lived it.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 10 MONTHS AGO
While the Civil War raged in the eastern half of America, nature was wreaking havoc in frontier Idaho and the rest of the Pacific Northwest. People were freezing, cattle perishing and there was little food or shelter for either.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
Starting high in the Bitterroot Mountains of North Idaho near the Montana border, the St. Joe River flows westward, joining the St. Maries River before emptying into the southern end of Lake Coeur d'Alene. From there the water drains into the Spokane and Columbia rivers on its inexorable journey to …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 11 MONTHS AGO
William E. Borah made a name for himself as a U.S. senator from 1907 to 1940, earning the nickname Lion of Idaho. He served through seven presidencies and was a thorn in the side of most of them.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 11 YEARS, 12 MONTHS AGO
Ellie Seidler survived as a little girl in Germany during World War II, suffered hunger and privation, didn't know for years what happened to her father, escaped East Germany's harsh communist rule after the war, and made it safely to Canada and America with her parents and sisters.
May Arkwright Hutton was an orphan and maybe illegitimate. She was also a talented cook, mine owner, champion of the working class, philanthropist, and a powerful trailblazer for women's rights in Idaho and Washington.
There have been some interesting characters over the years in Idaho, but not many as colorful as Jim Wardner, who did a little bit of a lot of things and ended up in the history books.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
Seven years of arduous toil on the Inland Northwest frontier building the now-famous Mullan Road linking Walla Walla, Wash., with Fort Benton, Mont., via North Idaho, earned U.S. Army Lieutenant John Mullan a promotion to captain, but it would be a long time before he saw glory again.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
The Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt has stood for more than 4,500 years as the largest tomb in the world, standing 481 feet high. Built for Pharaoh Cheops (or Khufu), it will no doubt stand until the end of history.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
In winter snow or summer heat, retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Dave Sheldon of Hayden volunteers at military funerals, playing Taps, a haunting 24-note bugle tune honoring another veteran called to eternal rest.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 1 MONTH AGO
Cities are usually named after historic people, geographic entities, ancient mythology, saints, and sometimes lesser mortals. Where did these names come from?
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
On the corner of McCarthy and Second Avenue in the heart of the old part of Rathdrum, St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church has stood for more than a century. It is the oldest brick church in Idaho, and is registered as a historic building.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
Federal army troops posted in Idaho between 1861 and 1865 could have sat out the Civil War raging elsewhere in the nation. But they didn't. President Lincoln pulled them out of the Northwest and sent them to fight the Confederacy.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 2 MONTHS AGO
Wars are usually best remembered by who won or lost and by their heroes, but they are fought mostly by the dog-face grunts who are thrown into combat, shoot and get shot at, kill and get killed, go home alive or in a box - and usually don't have a …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 3 MONTHS AGO
In the cold murky waters of the Spokane River where it leaves Lake Coeur d'Alene and heads west toward the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean lie the remains of the paddle steamer Georgie Oaks. She was one of many steamers that plied the lakes and rivers of the Inland …
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
In walking distance from the Idaho-Washington state line, just north of I-90, stands a lonely granite monument in an open field. It is a sad memorial to man's inhumanity.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 4 MONTHS AGO
Introduced in 1782 by George Washington, the Purple Heart is America's oldest military decoration still awarded. Those who have earned it by being wounded or killed in combat paid a price for protecting our liberty.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
Thanks to the Coeur d'Alene/Post Falls Press, a series of unlikely dots were connected, uniting a son with the history of his U.S. Navy father whom he never knew.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
Who can forget Lana Turner, the miner's daughter from Idaho's Silver Valley, who as a teenager was discovered in a Hollywood cafe and went on to become a movie legend?
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 5 MONTHS AGO
Just northeast of Athol on the east side of Highway 95 lies Hackney Airpark, a private airport, home to 51 small airplanes, 10 ultra-lights, a helicopter and one glider. The runway is just 3,500 feet long, 150 feet wide and made of grass and sod.
COEUR D'ALENE PRESS | UPDATED 12 YEARS, 6 MONTHS AGO
