RETIREMENT TRIP #7

Nidoto nai yoni -- Let It Not Happen Again

                                                                    This morning the area around Boise had a 30% chance of rain.  The storm could bring snow to Stanley in the mountains.  We could see overcast to the east, but it was just a patch—a 30% patch.  Regardless, winter is coming.

We drove southeast on Interstate #84.  Andy zipped along at 70 m.p.h. in our tiny Ford Fiesta.  Everyone passed him.  Then, we saw the speed limit sign of 80.  “So that’s why everyone was passing me,” he chuckled, and sped up to 75.  “But trucks are only allowed to go 70,” he added.

Just then a Forest Service pick-up went by.  “Wait a minute,” laughed Andy.  “Even the trucks are passing me!”

“Yeah, but that’s a passenger truck,” I told him to soothe his ruffled ego.  “He’s allowed to go 80.”

Just as I said it, a semi whizzed past.

“Man,” said Andy, shaking his head.  “You need to fly out here to get ticketed.  He’s probably doing 78, just fast enough over the limit to avoid getting pulled over.”

The Snake River cuts through cliffs near Buhl, Idaho.

At the exit for Buhl, the windmills churned.  A brisk breeze kept them turning.  “I heard a prediction for 60 m.p.h. gusts today, somewhere out here,” said Andy.  “If that’s true, they’ll have to shut down the windmills.  I think the most they can take is 35 m.p.h.    After that the blades can’t handle it.”

Between the close of the Civil War and the end of World War I, the sheep industry played a major role in southern Idaho history.  Drawn to the abundance of forage on vast unregulated public ranges, sheep transients came from Oregon, California, Nevada and Utah.  Numbers grew enormously after the railroad arrived in 1882.  By 1914, more than 300,000 sheep were being trailed through Ketchum.

A life-size bronze statue of a Basque sheep herder, his sheep
and his dog stands in Hagerman, Idaho.

By the late 1920’s, the Golden Age of sheep ranching, there were nearly three million breeding ewes and rams in Idaho.  It declined after World War II because of the unavailability of sheep herders, a disinterest in eating lamb as a meat, and the creation of synthetic fabrics to replace wool.

Most sheep herders were Basque, and Hagerman Valley was the prime winter location.  To pay tribute to the Basque contribution in developing Idaho sheep ranching, Danny Edwards of Twin Falls created this sculpture at his Twin Falls studio in 2012. 

In Hagerman, Andy found a statue of an Indian.  “That’s really cool,” he said, stopping for a picture.  A few blocks beyond was the Hagerman Visitor Center with a ten-minute movie about the combined Fossil Beds/Minidoka National Monument.  We watched the movie and looked at fossils of the Hagerman Horse and juvenile Mastodon elephants.  Many of the displays were by local school children who had toured the museum rooms.

Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument is most famous for the Hagerman Horse, which is also the state fossil.  No other fossil beds preserve such arid land and aquatic species from the time period called the Pliocene Epoch.  The evidence allows scientists to study past climates and ancient ecosystems.   More than 200 species of plants and animals have been found at hundreds of sites in the park.   Complete and partial skeletons of this zebra-like ancestor of today’s horse have come from these fossil beds.  Paleontologists from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., made the first scientific excavations in 1929.  During the 1930’s the Smithsonian scientists excavated 120 horse skulls and 20 complete skeletons from an area now called the Horse Quarry.

Bluffs that contain Hagerman Fossil Beds rise 600 feet above the Snake River.  They reveal the environment at the end of the Pliocene Epoch.

Wagon ruts from the Oregon Trail are still visible
below the rim.

The Oregon Overlook offered views of the valley below.  “The sign said that the main road actually follows 3.5 miles of the Oregon Trail,” said Andy.  We walked out along the rim.  A second trail took us to views of the ruts from Conestoga wagons.  Timing was everything then since pioneers still had 700 miles of territory to cover to reach their destination in Oregon—the Willamette Valley.  Most had already been traveling for five months, 1,200 miles.   They covered about ten miles a day, and this wasn’t easy terrain.  Intense summer heat, dust, wind and lack of water made crossing the Snake River Plain an ordeal.

In 1862, the Idaho gold rush increased traffic on the Oregon Trail.  In 1882, the Oregon Short Line railroad arrived north of the valley, and farming settlement increased here.  Today’s farmers grow corn and potatoes as the major crops.

Along the rim, the wind lashed at our faces.  “It has to be sustained at 40 m.p.h.,” guessed Andy.  He didn’t exaggerate.  It was brutal to even walk the cinder trail, and 54 degrees was COLD!

Andy pretends to be a paleontologist as he studies the
pretend "dig site" near the cliff edge.

American Indians now known as the Shoshone-Bannocks and the Shoshone-Paiutes have lived in the Hagerman Valley for 12,000 years.  They caught and dried salmon, steelhead trout, whitefish and sturgeon.  They dug camas lily and other roots and harvested seeds, fruits and other plants.  They hunted small animals and deer, elk and mountain sheep.

At the Snake River Overlook we could see fossil strata across the river.  Here layers of sand and silt were deposited during floods of the Pliocene Era as the Snake River emptied into ancient Lake Idaho.  Flood water carried the bodies of animals, plants, and pollen that were eventually preserved in the sandstone.

Melon gravel litters the fields around Hagerman Valley.

Here, at the Overlook just below the rim, the wind wasn’t quite as brutal.  We stopped for snack lunch, hoping the sun might break through.

Down by the river we stopped at an irrigation control dam.  A warning sign said levels could change rapidly, but it was way too cold to think about approaching the water.  A couple hundred mallards swam on the river near the dam.  They didn’t seem to mind the chill at all.

Typical of this area are boulder fields of lava rocks.  Most of these were deposited in one particularly devastating flood of the Snake River about 15,000 years ago.  The Bonneville Flood lasted up to eight weeks, but it was so extreme it carved the high bluffs, exposing the layers and fossils.  It also deposited the fields of melon gravel—the lava boulders the size of watermelons and as big as cars—from today’s river level up to gravel bars that are 225 feet higher than today’s river.

The road took us past Jerome with a huge cheese factory and lots of feeding lots for dairy cows. I didn’t see any barns, so I wondered if the cows stayed outside all winter.

Andy said the largest yogurt factory in the world was in Twin Falls.  Some of the milk was probably being sent to Chobani in Twin Falls.   Fields of potatoes appeared on both sides of the road.  And then fields of sugar beets.  This is a farming region.

One reconstructed guard house marks
the entrance to Minidoka War Relocation
Center, locally known as Hunt Camp.

With some searching along country roads, we found the Minidoka National Historic Site.  More than 13,000 people were imprisoned at Minidoka War Relocation Center, known locally as Hunt Camp, between August of 1942 and the end of World War II in 1945.  It started on February 19, 1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, depriving more than 110,000 people of their freedom.  All were of Japanese Nikkei ancestry, two-thirds were American citizens and half were children.

Shikata ga nai, the Japanese said.  It can’t be helped.  A certain Presidential candidate should come here and learn.  It CAN be helped.

Japanese incarcerees at Minidoka live in tarpaper barracks,
left, that start out as wooden apartments, right.

Andy and I walked the 1.6 miles of cinder paths.  We were the only visitors, and the 50 m.p.h. winds were withering.  I covered one ear with a gloved hand and tilted my head to protect the other ear.  We had gusts close to hurricane force.  Those poor, poor people of Minidoka!  October is the month of wind here.

We read the signs.  For the first six months from August 1942 to February 1943, everyone had to use open pit toilets until the sewer treatment plant was finished.  The 33,000-acre site had 600 buildings, but most of them were crowded onto 946 acres.  More than 13,000 incarcerees came through the gates, with a peak population of 9,397, the seventh largest city in Idaho on March 1, 1943.

All that remains of the original welcome station at Minidoka
casts an ominous shadow at the entrance.

Barracks were simple tarpaper and wood shelters with six “apartments,” each housing two to eight people.  Meals were held in the Mess Hall to break down family bonding.  Five miles of barbed wire and eight guard towers went up three months after Minidoka opened, but so resented was t he fence that it soon came down and the guard houses weren’t staffed.  Minidoka was the “quiet” camp. 

Incarcerees organized churches, recreational activities and a consumer cooperative.  They planted gardens to bring beauty and familiar food back into their lives.
They helped their Idaho neighbors too.  Thousands of volunteers from Hunt Camp helped cultivate and harvest the sugar beet crop for Amalgamated Sugar Company, and in 1943 the Minidoka firefighters helped subdue a wildfire 60 miles away. 


The Snake River winds through carved canyons along
 a 16-mile scenic gorge.

Idaho residents came to better understand these people who had been imprisoned by prejudice.  Many had sons and father s fighting in the war.  The Congressional Medal of Honor was awarded to 19,000 Japanese American soldiers.

Nidoto nai yoni.  Let it not happen again.  The Civil Liberties Act of 1888 provided a Presidential apology from President Gerald Ford when he formally terminated Roosevelt’s EO 9066.  Reparation payments to 82,000 former incarcerees were made.  But only those still alive received payment.  Today Japanese Americans around the country commemorate February 19—the day FDR first signed EO 9066 – as a “national day of remembrance.”

Hansen Bridge towers
over the canyon.

It CAN be helped.  Nidoto nai yoni.

Lookouts on both sides of the Snake River at Hansen Bridge gave us lovely scenic views of the water.  Even more impressive was the bridge over the 16-mile-long gorge.  Hansen Bridge was completed in 1966, to replace a suspension bridge that had been constructed in 1919.  The original bridge carried wagons across in two lanes.   It cost $100,000 in 1919.  Before 1919, the only way across the 16-mile gorge was by rowboat.

Life in this farming country
depends on the Snake River.

In the dry season, the Snake River still flows.

Another Snake River crossing at Murtaugh Launch Site brought us closer to the water on a lower bridge.  Here, even in the driest of the dry season, water spewed from the cliffside lava.  Maybe it was just irrigated fields draining down to the river, but the farms here look lush and thriving.
This was beautiful country.