Review
A fascinating look back across time and space into a time when railroads were the most exciting mode of transportation and small communities like Council, Idaho held a mystic and charm that made people ride thousands of miles to become a part of. The history is well documented and footnoted. A meticulous work. --EJ Thornton - best selling author
About the Author
We all look back on our childhoods as a time when we were molded into who we are. This book is about the childhood of a community. Dates can be boring, but knowing the year something happened in the history of a community is like knowing the age of a child when an event occurred in their life. If you pay attention to the dates given you will be able to associate them with other things that happened during that time, and the fascinating story of our past will become more real and interesting. I chose to narrow the scope of this book to the area between Mesa, Price Valley, and the Seven Devils Mining District. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, the stories of Indian Valley and the Meadows Valley are somewhat separate from that of the Council Valley and its more closely associated areas. A big reason was that the size and complexity of the story was already intimidating, and I needed to limit the parameters. I covered the Fruitvale area in more detail because there has never been much information gathered and written about it before. Also, because my roots are there, I had access to historical accounts from family and friends. The names of people as printed here may be different from their spellings elsewhere. Standardized spelling didn t come along until fairly recently, and people before that time were on their own to spell words including names as they sounded. The fact that a significant percentage of people were illiterate adds to the problem. I have noted variations of spelling when possible. I have tried very hard to be accurate and factual in my writing, and yet I know that much of the information here is untrue. Everything in this book came from a human being; all history is someone s version of what happened. Often the stories here were filtered through the viewpoint of several people. For example, much of my information came from the newspapers of Salubria, Cambridge, Weiser, and Council. What was written in them was often related to the editor by someone who may or may not have been an eyewitness. The editor wrote his understanding of the story, and then I wrote my understanding of his story and put it into the context of my knowledge and understanding of the bigger picture. One thing that became obvious early on in my research was that people often choose to pass on a good yarn rather than a not-so-exciting true account. This has led to several, inaccurate, local myths. I have tried to use terms such as was said to or was thought to when I was not sure of the accuracy of the information with which I had to work. I have also used terms such as 'evidently' or 'apparently' to indicate that I was drawing my own conclusions from sketchy evidence. When there was more than one version of the same story, I chose the one that was supported by the most evidence, or I included both versions. Another factor in writing history is interpretation. Historian Shelby Foote once said, 'Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.' People often see the same event differently. Even hindsight changes with time. It has been said that what we preserve as history not only tells about the past, it tells a great deal about us and the culture in which we live. Current conditions and social attitudes concerning subjects such as race relations, minorities, natural resources and more have obviously influenced my writing here. You will notice that I have called this a general history. I m proud to say that it is the first comprehensive, general history of the Council area, but it is only one version of it certainly not the only one that could be written.
