Bruce Reichert, Host:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, these films are priceless. We’ve rummaged around in the attic and come up with a collection of old movies. So sit back and enjoy a 24-frame per second glimpse into Idaho’s outdoor heritage as we bring you Idaho in the Movies.

Reichert
Talk to some old timers, and they’ll tell you about how Idaho used to be - before the freeways, the cell phones, the population boom.

Hi, I’m Bruce Reichert
You know, those early days may be gone, but they’re not forgotten. A lot of them were captured on film by average folks, enjoying an outdoor adventure.

Author Wallace Stegner says Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere. It seems that’s always been true. Even the earliest movies, made shortly after the turn of the century, show Westerners engaged in an outdoor life. Whether it’s car camping with the Model A in a national park or fishing for wily trout in some forgotten stream, these old films document our long obsession with the outdoors. For historians, the films are a gold mine – a visual catalog of our past, a living, moving record of what life was like.

Marty Peterson, Historian:
Still photography, you can capture a moment. But with motion picture footage, you can capture an event or a long series of moments. And it gives you an opportunity to get that dimension where you’re almost participating and being there. You aren’t into virtual reality, but you’re getting close. You’re certainly a lot closer than just having a simple photograph and looking at it.

Reichert
It seems every family has pictures like this today. With the proliferation of camcorders, it’s easy to forget how hard those early photographers had to work.

Peterson:
Film and a camera was not cheap. Equipment was not cheap, nor was it small. That is a major commitment to have somebody having that bulky equipment hauling it around. And when you get into Idaho’s backcountry, what it required for somebody to box up a motion picture camera and the film and go back there and protect it from the elements and that kind of thing. If you’ve got a piece of movie footage that comes out of the Idaho backcountry from the 1940's, for example, somebody really wanted to record that sight for posterity.

Reichert
Thanks to the diligence of those early filmmakers, however, we have a 24-frame per second glimpse into our past and the way Idaho used to be.

Peterson:
I think the record is very important. For example, I can think of few places that are a better example than Hells Canyon. There are still people around who saw Hells Canyon in its natural state before the dams went in. There is movie footage around of Hells Canyon in its natural state before the dams went in. Now with the dams in there, we’re not going to have the opportunity to experience what Captain Bonneville experienced when he came into that area for the first time, but looking back over that old movie footage, you certainly can.

Reichert
For historian Linda Morton-Keithley, these old films show more than the way things used to be – they show the way we used to be. The dress, expressions, and actions caught on film tell more about those early days than any book.

Linda Morton-Keithley, Historical Society:
Not only do they show the actual image of somebody and something or some location, but they also can show how people dressed, how people moved, how people interacted. And it shows what the filmmaker, whoever was operating that camera, it shows what they thought was important. It may be a type of image that isn’t thought to be collected by anybody else, but to that person, what they’re viewing and what they captured on film was something worthy of remembering.

Reichert
One such film is of a National Geographic expedition on the Salmon River in the 1930’s. Scientists, geologists and a photographer set out to document a scow trip down Idaho’s River of No Return.

Keithley:
There’s wonderful footage of the activities of camp life, of the various rapids and scenery as they were going down the river. They were interested in the scenery of the area. They were interested in what wildlife they could see. They fished. They swam. And you get to see all of those sorts of things that they did. They did stop along the way at some of the homesteads and visit with people that lived there, so there’s good footage of the homes and of the properties where people were living along the river. A moving film is like a picture, it captures a particular place at a particular point in time. It really does freeze that place in time, so that somebody coming along years in the future will know exactly what it looked like. And they’ll be able to compare with what it looks like at their point in time to see what has changed or hasn’t changed.

Reichert
Not only can these old movies tell us how the landscape has changed, they tell us how we have changed. Not too many years ago, feeding bears at Yellowstone was acceptable. No longer. Today, we see, but don’t touch. Innocent actions, caught on film, speak volumes about how, over time, our values have changed. Sometimes, these revelations come from unexpected sources. "Told in the Hills", the first feature film done in Idaho was shot in Lawyers Canyon by Hollywood directors. The only surviving copy turned up in the Soviet Union. Complete with Russian subtitles, "Told in the Hills" shows Idaho in 1919. The film is historic in its own way – it was the first feature film to let Indians play Indians.

Tom Trusky, Film Historian:
That’s a great step forward for Hollywood because up until that time, most Westerns had white guys with grease paint on their faces playing Indians. So although the Nez Perce played Kootenais, I suppose the Nez Perce overlook the plot elements and look more for cultural history and artistic designs and things that have been lost over time. The tribal members are interested in the print of that film as well as stills connected with it, because there are images of Nez Perce that don’t appear anywhere else - the only images of ancestors now - and so they’re quite interested in that. Nez Perce artisans also are interested in the bead work and designs on teepees that were in the film to recapture lost arts and crafts and designs.

Reichert
Anglos have found their own use for the film. It shows the Clearwater River as it was in earlier days.

Trusky:
That film, shot so many years ago, over the course of time, the river has changed its course. And this was used in a litigious sense at least to resolve a case.

Reichert
"Told in the Hills" may have been the first film shot in Idaho, but Idaho’s filmmaker is Nell Shipman. In the 1920’s, Shipman wrote and starred in a number of silent films. The backdrop for many of the films was North Idaho’s Priest Lake – "the edge of civilization." Unlike today, it was a pristine area with no condos, speedboats or airplanes.

Other films show a way of life we can’t recall. "Tornado" - a Dutch film about a natural disaster striking timber country was filmed in logging camps along the Saint Joe. Crude special effects "destroyed" the camps. Years later, economics, regulations and overcutting made the destruction real.

Trusky:
The audiences have always responded pretty well to these scenes of devastation on screen. But in fact, the most interest is generated in state by the picture of the early logging industry in this state, the practices, the saws, the techniques used, the flumes that these big logs come shooting down. There are some really dramatic scenes and those are captured on film and preserved now.

Reichert
These old movie images - flickering and incomplete - tell us much about how much in Idaho has changed, and how much is still the same.

Trusky:
In all these early silent films, we see Idaho really, essentially a wilderness area. We really see Idaho as it was, and perhaps, a model of what we might want to try to recover, at least in part.

Peterson:
I think if you look at a lot of this old footage, what it tells you is that people appreciated most of the same things years ago that they appreciate now. You take a look at what they were shooting footage of. People that were shooting footage down on the Salmon, 60, 70 years ago, were enthralled by the same quality of rapids and the same wilderness experience that people are at the end of the century. If you took a videographer from current day back 70 years ago and popped them in one of those wooden scows and had them start shooting stuff, I think it would be remarkable how similar what that individual would be shooting to what the individual back in 1930 was shooting.

Reichert
About the time photography was becoming popular in this country, Idaho was being discovered. Discovered by miners, drawn by the word of gold and silver in the sagebrush covered hills. Boom towns like Silver City popped up, filled with miners hoping to strike it rich. Others hoped to make their fortune off the miners. In 1865, Matthew Joyce began raising cattle to feed the hungry miners. 80 years later, a Philadelphia woman fell in love with the Joyce Ranch, and its owner, Hugh Nettleton.
In the 1940’s, newlywed Helen Nettleton got a movie camera and began documenting life on the Joyce Ranch. Although Paul Nettleton was just a child, he remembers his mother’s fascination with the ranching life.

Paul Nettleton, Joyce Ranch:
She took pictures of anything and everything involving the ranch operation and she was quite interested in all aspects of the Western way of life - the Indians, the cowboys, and all the operations of a ranch like this. She found everything on the ranch interesting because she had never seen anything like this before. So, consequently even the shots of equipment, the haying operation, combining grain, even that was interesting to her.

Reichert
Helen Nettleton’s other love was the Girl Scouts. She had been active in the Scouts in Philadelphia. Once on the ranch, Nettleton found a new way to be involved.

Nettleton:
She found an opportunity and a place to bring them. They could sleep in the barn and they could cook their meals all at the little campgrounds up here. She’s got a lot of movies of them building fires, cooking on Dutch ovens, just the normal things that the Girl Scout camping involved. That was one of her loves in her life.

Reichert
But Helen Nettleton’s real love was for horses. Every year, ranch hands would round up the 200 or so horses running loose on the range. Helen Nettleton was always there with her camera, capturing all the excitement on film.

Nettleton:
When you get a couple of stallions in and they have their own little mare bands and they have their own little country they run in, you get them in the corral together, there was always some fireworks there. And Mom did a good job of capturing those stallion fights. They didn’t let them fight very long before they separated them because they could scuff each other up pretty darn good.

Reichert
The corrals still stand today, although the horse herd is far smaller.

Nettleton:
In those days, all the neighboring ranches needed 8 or 10 or 15 head of horses a year to break and keep for their cowboys. Nowadays, they need to buy 2 or 3 four wheelers a year.

Reichert
These old movies make Paul Nettleton a little nostalgic. He worries that a way of life is disappearing, and 50 years, maybe even a few years from now, it will exist only on film.

Nettleton:
From the way its going today, like I say, I’m not sure there’s going to be a cattle industry in 25 or 30 years. We might have this all broke up into ranchettes and housing developments. Those were the times when you had a lot of time to reflect. You had a lot of time to think things over. Nowadays, it’s just go, go, go. It’s no better than the city life.

Reichert
In North Idaho, a way of life has disappeared. It’s the springtime log drive on the Clearwater River.

Peterson:
Potlatch had these logging crews that during the fall and winter put up these huge racks of logs along the North Fork of the Clearwater. And in the spring when the high water hit, they cut them loose and floated them downstream to Lewiston dowh to the mill. That was a great event in our family. Dad would load the family in the car on a Sunday and we’d take a Sunday drive and go up the Clearwater and he’d park the car and we’d all get out and we’d watch the log drive. And if you were really lucky, they had a log jam going on so you’d get to watch the loggers out there trying to undo that jam, find that key log in there and free the thing up. For those of us who grew up in timber country, lumberjacks were kind of like the cowboys were in other areas. Cowboys on their horses were very romantic characters and have been romanticized over the years. The lumberjacks were pretty much that thing in the timber areas. These guys, rather than their cowboy hats, they had on their hard hats and had on their caulk boots and instead of riding horses, they were out running around on the logs. With Dworshak Dam going in, they can’t do that anymore, but we have a visual record of that. We have motion picture footage of the wannigans, the floating dining halls and bunkhouses, floating alongside the log drives, pictures of these loggers out in caulk boots out running around on the logs, breaking up log jams that kind of thing - a lost art, that anymore the only time you see it is at Lumberjack Days in Orofino and the old log burling contest. I think that things like that are a very important part of the historic record that we need to maintain.

Reichert
One of the last log drives was filmed by amateur photographer Omer Drury. It’s just one bit of Idaho history Drury captured on film. Most of his other movies center on his other love - running rivers. It’s a love that started in 1961 when Drury made his first float trip on the Snake River and found some of the wildest whitewater in the West.

Omer Drury, Outfitter:
They wiped out five of the best rapids when they put in the dam. There was a Kinney Creek, Squaw Creek, Buck Creek, Sawpit Creek, and Deep Creek Rapids - all destroyed by the dam. The Squaw Creek was bigger than any that are currently left on the Hells Canyon trip. On the first time I took my family down through the Squaw Creek Rapid, there was a rock island at the stage that we were doing and my kids were so excited they were waving their arms and having a big time. Both fell out. One went on one side of the rock and one went on the other side.

Reichert
Despite the "swim", Drury and the family were hooked. The kids loved their days on the river. And Drury found a sense of adventure and enjoyed the challenge of pitting his skills against new rivers. After the Snake, Drury moved onto the Salmon and began a lifelong love affair with that river and some of the folks who still called the Salmon River canyon home. He fondly remembers old timers like Frank Lantz.

Drury:
He was an old man by the time I got acquainted. And as I first visited with him, he said, "I built all the trails in this part of the canyon." I thought, "Well, you're getting old Frank and maybe you're exaggerating a little." But he had built most of the trails. I also met Hank the Hermit. He took us out and showed us his cellar and his cellar was in a pit that turned out to be a shaft he was digging down to find gold. He had an idea that there'd be an underground stream and if he got to that underground stream it would be full of gold. He had books of addresses. He was going to visit everybody when he found that gold. Next down the river in our time was probably Frances. If you came in unexpected on Frances and she didn't like the way you reacted when she saw you, she told you to get off the place. If she liked you, which she did us, she was offended if you didn't stop and come up. And she always told us you bring your friends on up. She loved to be dressed up and sometimes would bake a cake and come down to the river and eat lunch with the group.

Downstream then would have been Buckskin. Buckskin enjoyed your stopping. We used to speculate on which one of the good looking young ladies of the group Buckskin would choose to dress up in a costume. Joan of Arc, I remember was one of his characters. If there were kids along, he liked to ask them if they liked kittens and bring out a jar of cougar kittens he had preserved. Besides the things he'd made, his guns and his knives and it was real craftsmen work. Very proud of that big, over an inch bore, I don't know whether you'd call it a gun or a rifle, almost a cannon, but it was to be held and shot. He never demonstrated it for us, but he explained and showed us the ball that you had to have a piece of cloth through it to keep it from spinning like a baseball. It would curve, so you had to keep it straight. I got the impression that most of them were uncomfortable with too close of neighbors. That they liked to have some choice of their neighbors and who they visited with and were very personal about their time so that you didn't want to infringe. If you infringed too much, you wouldn't be welcome. They always treated me real nice.

Reichert
In 1969, Drury turned his passion for running rivers into a profession. He started outfitting on a handful of Idaho rivers like the Middle Fork. Drury filmed the trips as he shared his love of the outdoors with others. One of his fondest memories is of taking a group of blind down the river.

Drury:
They were one of the most fun groups because they wanted you talking all the time, describing the canyon as you went. And if they didn't get a splash, they could hear rapids but they couldn't see them. And if they didn't get splashed, they didn't think it was a good rapid even though it might have been a big one that just happened it didn't splash them.

Reichert
And, Drury has had his share of adventures - like the time he took his daughter’s class through the "Slide" when the Salmon River was running at 60-thousand cubic feet per second.

Drury:
When it gets up to 60,000, it's going over the part of the curve on the right hand side, making a drop that looks like 20 or 30 feet, right down into a hole that would be almost suicide if you got sucked over into it. It's big enough if you can stay to the left of the thing, but if you get too far left, then you go to being slammed against the wall at the bottom. I had an extra motor mounted and ready to drop in at a moments notice. In big water, that compares with like Crystal and Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon, but in lower water, the Slide disappears. There isn't even a rapid there.

Reichert
Drury was the town of Troy's only physician. As a doctor, Drury has stitched up his share of injuries on the river. And sometimes the stitches weren't for a passenger, they were for a boat. In the early days, it was tough to find good patches, so Drury often had to improvise.

Drury:
There was no stores that sold the supplies, particularly glue and patching. Maps and things of that kind were non-existent. You had to adapt materials that you could find. We used delousing bags the military issued. And they had a little place to put the vial in after you got it shut, you could crush the vial and release a chemical to fumigate and get the varmints out of your clothes. And that's what I used for duffel bags.

Reichert
Looking back, Drury says his biggest pleasure was working with his family. Most summers, his guides and helpers were his children or his grandchildren.

Drury:
They have been licensed guides and they've worked behind the scenes and ran rafts and my grandchildren have ran rafts. I've never made much from it, but I've been able to pay them well enough that it sure helped them with their college and school expenses. It helped them financially and helped them to learn work ethics.

Reichert
After some 30 years in the outfitting business, Drury is calling it quits. But that doesn't mean he's leaving the river. In fact, he's looking forward to many more river trips in the summers ahead.

Drury:
Once you start running rivers, it's like the golfers, you try a different course. Over the years, I've tried over 20 different sections of river in different parts of the West. I can foresee that I can have more variety now that I'm not limited to just one section of river to go over and over. I can now go with my friends. I don't know whether it's lies or stories that they want, but they invite me to go along with them. I'm not going to totally fold up. My grandchildren, now, all of the original nine are capable of hauling me if I get to where I can't run the oars, why, they can all take me.

Reichert
And you can be certain, if Drury isn’t running the oars, he’ll be running his camera, and more of Idaho will end up in the movies.

You can’t help but get nostalgic watching some of these old movies. They show an Idaho that many fondly remember and some wish had never left. But thanks to these old films, those early days live on - in the movies.

Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.