Forty years ago, on a visit to my home town of Moscow, Idaho, I impulsively bought a book entitled “From A to Z in Latah County, Idaho—A Place Name Dictionary” by Lalia Phipps Boone, a retired professor of English at the University of Idaho. I didn’t have to read very far in the book in order to discover how ignorant I really was about the history of the county in which I was born.
There was an entry for Strychnine Creek which described how the creek got its name “from the strychnine poisoning of the stream to eliminate successful Chinese miners. White miners had abandoned the area and let the Chinese enter. The Chinese worked the area successfully by ditching water from Strychnine Creek across the ridge for their sluicing and for personal use. Thus the white miners killed the Chinese, but never found the gold that had been cached.” Professor Boone cited “an account by Mr. Pankey before 1905.”
As it turns out, this is nearly the full extent of factual information about this atrocity. I later learned that the incident occurred around 1889, and that the poisoners may have found at least some of the gold.
Revisiting Moscow in the summer of 2015 for my fiftieth high school reunion, with the idea of writing a fictionalized account only a vague notion, I decided to drive to the site of the poisoning. I discovered that it was in an area that I knew well, due in part to my having in 1960 attended a Boy Scout camp on the Palouse River called “Camp Grizzly.” I had learned from Prof. Boone’s book that it had originally been a mining community called “Grizzle Camp,” named after a man named Griswold, who eventually married a Nez Perce princess and retreated with her into the wilderness.
And at this point, my blog is in danger of turning into a rant, for I found that the hills around Strychnine Creek had been completely stripped of trees by the most aggressive clear-cutting operation I had ever seen. In truth, it wasn’t quite completely stripped; on one hill, a single, bedraggled fifteen-foot fir tree remained. It wasn’t what the late painter Bob Ross would have called “a happy little tree.” It was a sad, lonely little tree. And along the creek, a few scattered older trees remained, presumably as a faint gesture towards being the legally required “riparian area.” I’m not sure what the purpose of such wholesale tree slaughter would have been, other than a small, quick, one-time profit. It could take a hundred years to again produce saleable timber. This is not Forest Service land; it is privately owned, and is now nearly worthless.
In northwest Montana, I and another family have since 1975 owned 111 acres of forestland. We use it mainly as vacation property, but occasionally will have a small, selective timber sale, thinning overcrowded stands while leaving the healthiest trees of the most desirable species. By doing so, we are able to reduce wildfire danger, pay property taxes, and fund improvements. Every year the remaining trees grow larger and healthier. I expect the available board feet of lumber in our trees has at least tripled since we bought the property. This is what’s known as sustained-yield timber management. It’s not always been perfect; we’ve made mistakes, and we’re still learning, but we have something that we can be proud to pass on to future generations.