Special Collections at the University of Idaho Library offers a changing showcase of highlights from our collections. Here are the entries for 1999:
Football fever and school spirit were as much a feature of university life seventy years ago as they are today. Rallies, contests, and bonfires added to the spectacle. The big event, of course, was the then annual game with Idaho's cross-border rival.
Reminiscences and photographs in the library's collections recall that sense of excitement. Among these is Martin Larson's novel Plaster Saint (1953). This novel recalls the author's two years, 1925-1927, as Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Idaho. Included is the excitement and drama of the big pep bonfire on the eve of the big game with the nearby state university. It is possible to read Moscow as the town he describes as Belle Ridge in this excerpt:
On this Friday night the great annual bonfire would take place on the slope just east of the Engineering Building. Half the men in the university were engaged in preparing this enterprise. They searched every nook and corner of Belle Ridge for lumber, boards, sticks, tarpaper, corrugated boxes, stumps, logs, coal, oil, gasoline, kerosene - anything, everything, that would make a tremendous blaze. Wagons, carts, automobiles, trucks - every type of conveyance - had been used to transport the fuel. But the pyre would not be constructed until almost the last minute, because no greater victory was conceivable - except winning the great game itself - than that of setting fire prematurely to an opponent's pyre.
Every imaginable sort of stratagem was used to accomplish this purpose. Last year the university had attempted to fire State's pile from an airplane, which dropped flaming torches just before the celebration was to begin. Two years before, a very energetic young man who had been working all day with the students in Belle Ridge, gathering logs, suddenly turned out to be an enemy, who lunged at the pile as it was nearing completion and threw gasoline upon it. As he almost succeeded in firing it, he was pounced upon and severely beaten. This had been a close call.
The novel also offers a very personal view of the university seen through the prism of unhappy recollection. Filled with Jazz Age chicanery, embezzlement, adultery, failed idealism, and the triumph of evil over naivete, Plaster Saint offers a not very attractive picture of the university's inhabitants and habitues.
Is it autobiographical, a reminiscence of a real experience in Moscow? There are many parallels between the novel and the University of Idaho in the 1920s. Not the least is that Larson left teaching to return to Michigan where he sold insurance for several years before opening a paint store. Many of the libertarian ideas his hero espouses in the book are reflected in his service to Americans United for Separation of Church and State in the mid 1960s. He died in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1994, author of a number of political and philosophical works, and one novel.
Caption: University of Idaho freshman bonfire. 1931. Photo by Hodgins. Historical Photograph Collection, University of Idaho Library. #2-102-7c.
Hollister, Cal
Sept 7th '77
Dear Friends,
Your letter has just come. I reply right away hoping this will reach you before you start. In the first place let me tell you what it will pay to bring with you. Every one here sleeps on mattresses, it is not cold enough to need a feather bed, and the others are considered the healthiest. It will pay you to bring your pillows and bed covers, but I would advise you to sell off everything else for what they will bring.
In the way of clothing lay in clothing before you start for you can get things here as cheap as you can there. Tell your wife to have a dark woolen suit to travel in, so she can come through without change.
Start with a provision basket with enough in it to do you two days anyway, and don't forget to put in a tin-cup or small coffee pot and ground coffee and sugar. You can then save lots by making your coffee on the car stoves.
Put up soap and towels, or you will suffer from the dust, Have a strap and buckle to put up a pillow and blanket or shawl for each of you, and unless the cars are crowded you can come all the way without the expense of a sleeping car.
You may be crowded till after you reach Omaha but after that you will have plenty of room. We got through tickets at Chattanooga to San Francisco by way of Grand Junction, Miss, Cairo, Ill, St. Louis, Council Bluffs and Omaha. They will only check your baggage to Omaha. There get it rechecked to San Jose, Cal. Have it put up very securely, or it will be smashed certain.
Put a little wash-pan and tin cup to drink out of in your basket and have as little loose baggage as possible, for you often have to change cars in a hurry.
From Omaha to Ogden, three days travel, you don't change cars. At Ogden, you can lay in provisions right at the depot for the rest of the way, two days.
When you get to Niles Station, nearly at San Francisco, change cars for San Jose where you will have to stay all night. It costs less than in San Francisco and is right on the road to Hollister. Stop at the New York Exchange Hotel, it is the best and cheapest.
From there, get tickets and checks for Hollister, 40 miles. You have to change cars at Gilroy and will get here at 2 o'clock in the evening. This is said to be the cheapest and best route. My ticket from Chattanooga cost $136.00 to Niles, $5.00 from there here.
If you want to come by emigrant train you will take it at Omaha. I did not try it, it is so slow. Gold or silver is used here but you can exchange your greenbacks at the banks here as well as you can there. You will have to look out for your money for a set of smooth-faced roughs frequent the cars.
Mrs. McCroskey and I got here without being the least tired. We tried the sleeping car once, but did not like it. It cost us $2.00 apiece each night and we were glad to get out of...
Travel to the west was made easier with the completion of the transcontinental railway but it was still enough of an adventure to benefit from guides from friends who have gone before. J.H. McCallie was Moscow's first dentist, arriving here in 1878. His daughter Margaret attended the University of Idaho and graduated in 1898. Between 1899 and 1905 she served as the University's librarian. Before her death in 1972, she donated this letter, and other materials, to the University of Idaho Library.
This letter illustrates the common tendency of primary sources to locate themselves in archives which scholars can only find through painstaking research in unlikely places. In this case, the letter was written in California as advice to an prospective emigrant in Tennessee who carried it west in his well-secured baggage. And further, he carried it with him from California to Idaho; where, years later, his daughter in Spokane donated it to her alma mater. In such ways, are manuscripts materials located in what is clearly the perfectly logical repository; yet so difficult to anticipate. Only after all the relationships are known is it possible to discern the logic of its eventual resting place.
Letter fragment, from a McCroskey to J.H. McCallie, September 7, 1877, describing provisions needed for train journey from Tennessee to California. Part of the Margaret McCallie Moore Papers, MG5159, University of Idaho Library.
Neatly stacked on shelves, or presented to researchers in well organized containers, archival collections in repositories conceal a past that is frequently gritty and disarrayed. The effort of producing an inventoried, reboxed, properly labeled body of primary source material is hidden from the researcher by the antiseptic neatness of its presentation in the reading room.
While inventories may suggest that processing the material occupied months (or even years) of staff time, even that statement glosses over the sheer physical labor of moving boxes from where they might have been stored (be that basement, attic, barn, or shed) to the library or archives. Nor is the subsequent shelving of the accessioned materials, their transport to the workroom for processing, a three stage pass for processing, reboxing and reshelving. A thirty-five pound box quickly (or more likely slowly) becomes 280 pounds when moved several times.
Documenting this effort in more than vague generalities is seldom undertaken. A photograph of the process is not a necessary part of the mechanics of acquiring, arranging, and describing primary source material. In this photograph we catch a glimpse of the early stages in the process. Here, Special Collections Librarian Charles A. Webbert, assisted by Librarian Paul Conditt, pack the first shipment of an estimated 100,000 glass and film negatives produced by the Barnard Studio of Wallace, Idaho over a ninety year period. The darkness, dust, and claustrophobic closeness of the space is, however, only hinted at; making this less a true picture of the experience and more another example of the effort to keep hidden the essential physicalness of the work of guarding and preserving Idaho's heritage.
Caption: Librarians Charles Webbert and Paul Conditt pack the Barnard Studio glass negatives in a Wallace basement for transport to the University of Idaho Library, 1965. Photograph by Glenn E. Sprouse. Historic Photograph Collection, University of Idaho Library. #1-400-08.
That the roiling waters of the Snake River were "tamed" and transported over the canyon walls to water the sagebrush desert of Southern Idaho owes much to eastern financial resources exemplified by industrialist Frank Henry Buhl. Born in 1848, Buhl made his fortune as a steel mill owner in Pennsylvania, selling out to the expanding U.S. Steel in 1902. Soon after he was approached by banker Stanley B. Milner of Salt Lake City with a western land development proposition. Milner had placer mining claims on the Snake River and was thus receptive to Ira B. Perrine's idea, based on irrigation engineer A.D. Foote's studies, to dam the river above the Twin Falls and shunt the water out to irrigate the surrounding lands.
Milner persuaded Buhl and his associate Peter Kimberly to invest in the project, and Buhl became president of the Twin Falls Land and Water Company. Using their contacts to bring in European investors and $3.5 million, the 244,000 acre Twin Falls Project became one of the country's first large irrigated land reclamation projects, and a Carey Act success story.
George Fraser was a publicist for Boise's Clinton, Hurtt & Company which managed the real estate sales for the irrigated tract. He was also editor of the Twin Falls News, which magnified his community booster role. In this letter, Fraser refers to the efforts of others to capitalize on the success of the Twin Falls project and seeks Buhl's help in publicizing his own efforts.
Although Clinton, Hurtt published an illustrated booklet -- The Lure of the Land -- promoting their operations in late 1909, the only portraits are those of company employees. It does say that George Fraser is "a close student of human nature, an observer with a practical turn of mind" and that he is "thoroughly conversant with conditions and how they were brought about, and is one of the best posted men on irrigation development in the West."
Fraser's letter, plus some Boise newspaper clippings, all separated from Buhl's files (he died in 1918), were donated to the University of Idaho Library in 1953.
Letter: G.B. Fraser, Boise, to Frank H. Buhl, Sharon, PA, November 5, 1909. MG 5001. Special Collections and Archives, University of Idaho Library.
Through the ring of poplars that once surrounded the campus stands Ridenbaugh Hall in this image. Though the poplars are long since gone, Ridenbaugh still stands today. Although the building has fostered many uses, presently music rooms and an art gallery, it was originally constructed as a girls' dormitory. It is the oldest remaining building on the University of Idaho campus, erected in 1902, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Mary Ridenbaugh, then vice president of the Board of Regents for the school, was honored at the building's dedication, recognizing her commitment to the school and the young women of the University of Idaho.
An appreciation of this addition is evident in the 1903 Gem of the Mountains, the University of Idaho yearbook, where this description of the building appeared:
Just a little further east of the School of Mines is situated the Girls' Dormitory, known as Ridenbaugh Hall. This too is a three story brick building, and presents a very comfortable appearance in the cosy corner of the campus. The interior is a network of rooms which are artistically arranged to meet the requirements of beauty, comfort, and economy. It is capable of accomodating 75 ladies. The want of proper care for the young ladies from surrounding cities and towns has long been a hinderance to the development of the institution, but this want has been obviated, for with this elegant building in the hands of such competent women as Mrs. Young, Preceptress, and Mrs. Henderson as Matron, the young ladies of our state have at their disposal an ideal home.
An amazing woman in her own right, Mrs. William H. Ridenbaugh was active in politics, education, and social circles. She served on the Board of Regents at the University of Idaho for three terms. One of the most prominent women of her day, Mary Ridenbaugh was well read and well traveled, viewed as a gracious and entertaining hostess. With her grace and persistence, she played an integral part in the formation of Idaho's dormitory and Domestic Science program, two significant steps for the education of women at the University of Idaho.
Idaho's Department of Domestic Science was established the same year Ridenbaugh Hall was completed. The University of Idaho was the first institution in the Pacific Northwest to adopt such a program. In the 12'x12' kitchen at Ridenbaugh Hall, the first domestic science cooking classes began, and they remained there until a wing of the new Administration Building was designated for their use.
Photograph selected, and text written, by University of Idaho student, Kerry Brent.
Caption: Ridenbaugh Hall (on left). 1902. Historical Photograph Collection, University of Idaho Library. #1-58-17.
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