Free Press Frances

Sun., Aug. 7, 1994

Frances Coyle lived in the Salmon River country from the early 1940s until 1985, when she died of cancer.

Through most of those years, she was well-known to Camas Prairie folks as “Free Press Frances,” a columnist for the Idaho County Free Press. She chronicled river life, lobbied for improvements to her primitive corner of Idaho and mused on a wide range of topics.

She outlived two husbands at Campbells Ferry, where she kept house in a two-story log home with well-tended gardens and an orchard around it. The Forest Service recently dedicated the bridge near Campbells Ferry in her memory.

She hauled her water into the house from a ditch for decades, long after her husband offered to pipe in running water, because she wanted to hear the gurgling of the little ditchbehind her house.

“People who have lived in Idaho most of their lives have no idea how truly beautiful this country is,” she once wrote. “Now I am in a place I was born to be. All the good things I knew as a child are here and more!”

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