Remembering Ott’s Place

The old Jeep my paternal grandparents gave me fifty years ago a month before I turned 16 was already nearly as old as I was.  We had grown up together.

It didn’t have a radio or turn signals, which weren’t common until 1955, or seat belts, which were only becoming common place at the time, and it predated side view mirrors, which were not yet common even on the driver’s side.

Anyone riding in the passenger seat had to use a handle to manually operate their windshield wiper from side to side.

The original paint had worn off so my grandmother Adah hand-painted it the original red leaving brush strokes as a reminder.  Honest…you can’t make this stuff up!

It had plenty of torque, but the top end was between 45 and 50 mph. Marketed as the MC “war wagon,” it was before the “sport” was put in SUV. 

Purely “utility.”

But I loved that Jeep, and even with years of wear and tear around the ranch and the smell of fumes from the gas tank, it was a hit at school, although not the “chick magnet” my daughter called Jeeps of this type when she reached that age.

My first-ever memories of riding in it are with either my dad or my grandfather on quick trips to and from our ancestral ranch and town usually to pick something up from the blacksmith or the coop or if with my grandfather, a quick stop at an old bar called Ott’s Place (smile.)

Apparently, my mom read him the riot act when she learned, but Ott had twice been mayor of Ashton, and besides, my uncle Louie was probably downstairs playing poker.

Slot machines and gaming tables games had been outlawed in Idaho when I was born but in my early years I would still see slots in the entrances of old cafes in remote areas such as ours.

Idaho voters banned both again during my early years but in places such as Ott’s that just meant they were placed out of sight.

Waiting for my grandfather, I would sit on a barstool next to the big picture window in front thumbing through the town calendar with everyone’s birthday on it including surrounding ranch and farm families.

After a little less than a mile on the trip to town, the narrow gravel road dropped steeply down from a bluff to the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River, then crossed over the old Ora bridge beside which I learned to fly-fish long before that river became world-famous.

As the road climbed back up the other side it was suddenly as though you could reach out and touch the Grand Teton Mountains 15 miles to the east.

Ashton, Idaho, then not quite 50 years old, was at its peak population of 1,200 residents.  Its founders had a real estate business along with a drug store and fountain a couple of doors west of Ott’s where we would stop next.

Out front, my grandfather would “kick the tires” with an old friend, Charles C. Moore, who he always called “governor” because a few decades earlier he had been elected from that remote Yellowstone-Teton nook to two terms as the Governor of Idaho.  This was in the 1920s.

Any prescriptions had to be dispensed by Dr. Hargis though, a friend of my grandmother’s who had also been there since the founding and still made house—or in our case ranch—calls, and would for many years hence, although my parents made a mid-summer dash 50 miles downriver to the nearest hospital for my birth.

On each trip, we would drive past the Hummel Motel where a few months after it opened our family took a respite with our friends the Long’s, from cabin fever when our ranch was snowed in much of the winter.

That’s me in one of the images in this essay showing off some of my moves while stealing my first kiss.  Actually, that day my friend Shawna did the stealing (smile.)

Re-clad in logs and river stone, it is the famed Angler’s Inn today.

Back then schools didn’t close when the road closed to buses after a huge snow storm, so my dad would drive that Jeep through the drifts picking up four or five other schoolmates we collected along the way.

Dad hated school when he was that age attending a two-room school house just north of the ranch.  Back then my grandmother, who served on the school board for more than twenty years, also boarded eight school teachers in our small ranch house.

If the buses still weren’t able to run when school let out, I would wait at my aunt Deon’s until dad could pick me up.

I always thought my old Jeep had been selected because my dad saw them used during in WWII by the Army, but I’ve since pieced together that my grandparents had been partial to Willys-Overland vehicles in the 1920s.

J.N. Willys was a serial entrepreneur who parlayed a bicycle distributorship into ownership of a firearms store called the Elmira Arms Co. which was also a manufacturers rep (wholesaler–go-between to dealerships) for cars such as the Pierce Arrow and the Overland Motor Companies Runabout.

When Overland ran into financial trouble, Willys bought it in 1908, scooped up some related technology suppliers, and renamed it Willys-Overland which was soon the largest manufacturer behind Ford, increasing annual output from 400 cars to 200,000 in eight years while relocating manufacturing to Toledo where Jeeps are still made today.

In 1926, Willys-Overland launched a very advanced touring car branded the Whippet.

My homesteading grandparents had done pretty well during WWI providing draft horses to agents who came through on behalf of the British and American armies.

They had switched to cattle during the roaring ‘20s and that’s when my grandfather fell in love with the Whippet and bought one of the Model 96 touring cars.

That’s my dad sitting on the hood in the image in this essay so that Whippet is probably a model year 1927.

By the time I was first taking rides in our Willy’s Jeep, I had discovered that Whippet abandoned in a grove of trees south of our meadow next to an old buckboard buggy.

At first I mistook it for a Ford Model A.  But my grandfather quickly filled me in on the difference.  The two cars were contemporaries but the Whippet came first and was in some ways technologically advanced, although the Ford Model A was far more prolific.

Linked is a Whippet the same vintage as my grandparent’s on display in a Pennsylvania antique car museum today.  It cost $750 before upgrades when they bought it.  His was probably closer to $1,000 with the larger engine.

Seating five, it was still the most compact of American cars back then, setting speed and endurance records during a 24-hour race at the Indianapolis Speedway when the track was truly brick.

I still manifest those Willys’ roots today.

The Carolina Roots of My Native Rockies

The Appalachian Mountains that divide the eastern part of North America and form the western part of my adopted state of North Carolina, come to an end in Mississippi.

It is there, in the Northern Highlands of that state where the southern tip of the deciduous Flatwoods dissect the rich soil of the Black Prairie from the high rolling hills, amid deep densely wooded ravines and rivers of the Red Clay Hills that my great x 3 grandparents, Tom and Sarah Ann Graham, put down roots in 1825, but not for long.

Thomas Bradford Graham was from Kershaw District, the first inland settlement in South Carolina, along the spine of the Occaneechi Path, a corridor of Native American trading paths stretching from Virginia to Georgia (passing through Durham, North Carolina where I live) along where the fall line breaks between the rolling hills of the Piedmont and the Low Country.

His parents were Scotts-Irish and probably unrelated to the Irish Quakers who followed the road blazed up from Charleston to settle along the Wateree River in Kershaw, after their ship bound for North Carolina was blown off course.

He had migrated over the Appalachians with his family led by grandfathers.  Both were veterans the War of 1812, one with McWillie’s 2nd Regiment in the South Carolina Militia and the other with the 2nd Brigade, 5th Regiment, 1st Company detached from the 1st Orange County Regiment of the North Carolina Militia.

That was when Durham, where I live, was a part of Orange County.  When I relocated here from my native Rockies,  part of me was obviously coming home, preceded here by my great x 4 grandparents Thomas Bradford and Mary Miller and my great x 5 grandfather David Miller, both of whom were natives of this part of North Carolina.

Sarah Ann McCrory was from Tennessee, the daughter of a North Carolina Revolutionary War hero, a veteran of six major engagements.  He had also served for a time at Valley Forge as bodyguard to General George Washington and was briefly taken prisoner-of-war near his son-in-law’s birthplace by Tarleton’s Raiders during the Battle of Camden.

The old soldiers were now stranded across the Alabama line from the young couple.

Tom and Sarah Graham’s new home place near DeKalb was midway between the relatively new settlement of Tuscaloosa and the newly-created town of Jackson, up the ridgeline-trace from Natchez to make the state capital more centrally located.  The land had been recently ceded by the Choctaw Nation.

Eight years before my newlywed ancestors settled there, Mississippi had become a state following the lopping-off of Alabama.  As they settled into their new home, Colonel Davy Crockett had just survived the sinking of his flatboat,across state, on the Mississippi River and was readying his first run for Congress.

Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836, a few years after legends began to evolve such as the one that he - “Kilt him a b'ar when he was only 3.”  But within a decade my ancestors left Mississippi for the Rocky Mountains where my great x 3 grandfather’s true story does involve a bear, but a mammoth Grizzly Bear.

The party which included Tom’s parents and my then three-year-old great-great grandmother Amanda probably crossed Mississippi to the river on the wagon route that is now route 16 or possibly across what became Old Route 80 and is now Interstate 20.

Either way, they would have caught a paddle-steamer up the Mississippi River from Vicksburg or two or three other ports.  They possibly rode the sleek, 60-ton, light draft Maid of Iowa.

It specialized in carrying passengers and cargo past the De Moines rapids to a settlement where Mormon converts were gathering at the time at that part of Illinois across from the little jag where Iowa cuts off a corner of Missouri.

There my ancestors joined one of several trains of wagons heading up the Des Moines River on what was to be the first leg of a 1,400-mile journey west into the Rockies.  The Grahams only made it 36 miles upriver before forced to winter over near Farmington, Iowa where I stopped along a cross-country trip last year.

Tom’s wife Sarah Ann and other relatives died there.  He stayed two years and then he and little Amanda and her brothers and sisters continued west.  As they crossed the Missouri in 1852 near Council Bluffs, they hooked on with a train of 64 wagons and a few hundred others headed west along a route blazed five years earlier by four other of my ancestors.

Tom often carried Amanda on his back as he walked beside their wagon, which by then had switched from horses to oxen, because her feet were bleeding.  They arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake in September and settled near along the Rockies at the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon, but again they didn’t stay long.

In 1859, Tom and by then 15-year-old Amanda headed 80 miles further north up into Cache Valley, among the first to settle Fort Mendon snug against the towering Wellsville Mountains.

Located at what was then the best entrance to the valley from near the border with Idaho, Mendon is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the valley.  Nine miles east, on the other side of the valley, tight against the Bear River Mountains lies slightly younger Logan, home of Utah State University, where my lawyer-daughter first attended college.

On a cross-country trip in 2011, I crossed the valley at this point on scenic route 30 as I traveled between the Pacific Northwest to connect with I-80 East in Wyoming.

Route 30 highway crosses the “Big Slough” of the Little Bear River just northwest of what would have been Fort Mendon and 20 miles south of where, two years later, my “Bowman” ancestors would settle Richmond and then Hyde Park.

The “Big Slough” holds significance.  My great x 3 grandfather, Tom Graham, left the fort in search of firewood there one day in the fall of 1864.  He was with young A.P. Shumway, Amanda’s husband, when he was, as is well documented by several researchers and authors, attacked and killed by a giant grizzly bear who was itself then hunted and killed.

While A.P. was bringing around the horse-drawn wagon, Tom had exchanged his rifle for an ax and while wading into some willows had stumbled on to the very entrance to the grizzly’s den.  If he saw it coming, Tom’s last view nay have been of a 12 inch long, 8 inch wide paw with huge protruding claws.

A grizzly stands about 6 foot tall and three feet wide and even at 700 lbs. can run 30 miles per hour.  Even though he was reportedly renowned as a bear hunter, he had appeared unarmed where they would be their most fierce and protective.

People in the tiny fort were shook, but none more than A.P. who had discovered Tom’s body.  As is documented, Tom was seen as invincible and described in his early fifties as “a man of prodigious strength and courage…tall, rawboned, with a pair of heavy wide shoulders tapering to a flat slender waistline…”

He would tease folks by taking a rattlesnake by the neck and spitting tobacco juice in its mouth to kill it.  Much like my uncle Louis Davis did from the bumper of his pickup when I was young, Tom could sit eight feet from the door of his log cabin and spit tobacco juice through the latch hole.

As has been true in my family for at least six generations, he was also very good with horses.

None of these feats were a match for a grizzly and Tom’s body was taken back to Salt Lake City for burial.  In my family, we grew up with an appreciation for grizzlies.

Grizzly Bear population declined from 100,000 across North America when Europeans arrived to less than 50,000 when my great x 3 grandfather’s remarkable life came to an end after spanning 2,500 miles of the continent.

The Grizzly population was near extinction by the 1970s when I was in college and became a protected species because of the unique role these bears play in stimulating ecosystem services.

Now through protection, Grizzlies have been coaxed back to 700, nearly all in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where I was born and the conservation challenge is the threat to their food sources and how to limit conflict with humans.

Now in recovery, one of the areas where grizzlies most like to range is again from Yellowstone across into my native Fremont County, Idaho, two hundred miles north of where my great x3 grandfather had that fateful encounter along what I often term the fault line of my youth.

They are drawn across the Targhee by the migration pattern of the 2,000-strong Sand Creek elk herd as it moves back and forth passing near our ancestral ranch traveling from winter feeding grounds along the creek to their home in the Park in spring, summer and fall.

Since the 1880s, this nook of Idaho has been known grizzlies, drawn even more by the distinctive Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout native to the Henry’s Fork River as they are to elk, deer and moose there.

Another 50,000 Grizzlies across Alaska and northwest Canada, 30,000 alone in Alaska where I lived in the 1980s.

I have a feeling that despite his unfortunate encounter, Thomas Bradford Graham would be impressed as I bet will be my grandsons, his great x 5.

The Basaltic Volcanics Of My First Sense Of Place

When people hear I was born and spent many of my formative years in Idaho they typically have one of two reactions:

• “Oh, where they grow the corn?” – nope, that’s another “I” state, look a little more west, or
• “Oh, on a mountain top.” – Kind of but a mile-high one buried in lava.

Fremont County, Idaho is located right in the very nook between Montana and Wyoming, framed by the three looming Grand Tetons to the east and the Centennial Mountain Range to the north which is crested by the Continental Divide.

The County is forested by the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and dissected by the Henry’s or North Fork of the Snake River as it carves from caldera to caldera, slowly descending from the highlands down onto the Snake River Plain to rendezvous fifty miles downriver with the South Fork.

For all of the forests, mountain ranges and rivers, the area is somewhat flat but dotted with hills and dales and filled with “basaltic volcanics” including unique, columnar rock formations, some ground down into incredible topsoil and rangeland. The calderas are part of a chain of large, smooth, hardened lakes of molten lava created as each was filled and then overflowed into another fed from the eruptions of the Yellowstone Supervolcano.

Ranging in altitude from 10,240 feet decending down to 4,380 feet, Fremont County is 80% larger than the land area of the entire State of Rhode Island but just less than 32% is privately owned. The remainder is held in the public interest, mostly by the National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management as stewards.

The population of the County is currently 13,242 which is up from 9,351 when I was born but about half what it was around the time my ancestors arrived there during a robust period of colonization.

I was born onto a horse and cattle ranch with related meadows and cropland for raising feed. It was homesteaded and then assembled at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century by both my paternal great grandparents and grandparents just one mile west of the Ora Bridge as it crosses the Henry’s Fork. (shown in the recent image taken by Darren Clark and used in this blog)

That world-famous fly-fishing river carves south through one of those calderas that stretches from the grandest of the Tetons which loom a few miles to the east across the rangelands of Clark County and the Bitterroot Range to the west as those mountains arches down from Northern Idaho forming the border with Montana.

I left Fremont County and Idaho decades ago but its views and topography and wildlife and sounds and smells are all part of a unique sense of place that will never leave me.