Archives West Finding Aid

This collection depicts seventy years of family, community, and business life in the Priest Lake area. Earlier photos show homesteads as well as Prater Ranch, also known as "half-way house," where, during the regular trips from Priest River to Priest Lake, the stage stopped to exchange horses and provide a place for its passengers to have a mid-day meal. Many images also depict logging activity. There are images of logs on sleds drawn by horses, log booms pulled by steamboats moving between Priest River and Priest Lake, and logs on multi-trailer trucks traversing snow-covered roads.

Some photos include Nell Shipman, a Canadian-American "silent screen actress, writer, and producer" who is known as "one of cinema's important female pioneers."[9] She "ran a motion picture company from the isolated woods of Idaho" between 1921-1925 after moving "her production company from Southern California, first to Spokane, Washington, and finally to Lionhead Lodge on the shore of Priest Lake, Idaho."[10] She finished shooting The Grub Stake (1922) at Priest Lake, the first silent picture the company shot in the Pacific Northwest.[11] However, "before leaving for Idaho, Shipman had begun purchasing a zoo located in Azusa, California" and brought her zoo to Idaho with her to star with her in the silent movies.[12] For more information about Nell Shipman, please refer to the Nell Shipman Papers at Boise State University Library, Special Collections and Archives.

Some photos in this collection are related to the history of Blister Rust Disease in the Priest Lake and Priest River area. Blister Rust is a non-native fungus that is extremely damaging to white pine trees.[13] In North Idaho, "white pine populations were dramatically reduced in the early 1900s due to blister rust."[14] As such, the federal government sought to combat the disease and attempt to slow the spread amongst white pines in the 1930s. The photos in this collection depict life as a blister rust control worker, and more information about this history can be found here.[15] The federal government relied on labor from the newly founded Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC), whose memberes not only worked on disease control and fought fires, but also built fire lookouts, campgrounds, and roads. The federal government later used these camps to house German and Italian internees during World War II, also pictured in this collection.