Bonners Ferry a good bet
The first ferry plied the Kootenai River at Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in 1864, which makes Bonners Ferry older than most settlements in the Inland Northwest. But never was the town wilder and woollier than it was in 1905.
The reason: Hundreds of railroad workers descended on Bonners Ferry (pop. 1,500 at the time) every Saturday night, looking for a way to blow their wages.
These workers, mainly immigrants, were building the new Spokane International Railway, from Spokane through Bonners Ferry and on to Eastport, Idaho, where it hooked up with the Canadian Pacific. In the space of one summer, Bonners Ferry went from four saloons to 18.
“Gamblers and women friends are flocking in from points between Montana and the coast and southern Oregon and British Columbia,” reported a Spokesman-Review correspondent, sent to Bonners Ferry to check out the action. “Among the games being played are faro, roulette, blackjack, keno and poker. In most of the saloons, the bar and gambling games are in the front part of the saloon and the boxes and women are allowed the back part of the room.”
“Boxes” were small booths used for, ahem, entertainment purposes.
The customers came from the “grading camps” which had sprung up all along the railroad line. The S-R’s correspondent visited the camps one weekend and found separate camps for the four main immigrant groups: Irish, Scandinavian, Italian and Japanese.
“The different nationalities do not mix in the conversation and in the lounging groups,” the correspondent noted.
One Irish immigrant noted that railroad work was “the only kind of work for a man.”
“We get $2.25 to $2.50 a day and our board costs us $5.25 a week,” he said. “We work 10 hours a day and work hard for it, but we have something to show for it … At prisint we are puttin’ in steady licks accumulatin’ dough t’ spind over the Dimpsy House bar in Spokane this winter.”
Mainly what they did on Sunday, their day off, was laundry. They also took baths and got a shave-and-a-haircut from “Blackie,” the camp barber.
Some slept in, if they could. The correspondent reported that at 1 a.m. Sunday morning, a group of revelers (probably returning from Bonners Ferry) staggered through one camp singing “In the Good Old Summertime.”
This prompted voices from the bunk tents saying, “Cut that out. To the river with you guys. What’s th’ matter with yez?”
In Bonners Ferry that summer, the sudden influx of fun-seeking workers caused some consternation amongst the more respectable citizens. But it also caused the cash registers to ring.
When the sheriff was summoned to town to check out the situation, the S-R reported that the “gambling paraphernalia disappeared as if by magic.”
“Everybody put on his solemn look,” said the article. “A deluge of funerals could not have caused things to appear so sad. … Then the sheriff left town and as his train speeded down the line, citizens stampeded in getting out the paraphernalia of the games. Music was started and everybody breathed nature’s pure air and took a drink to the health of the sheriff.”
The revelry was short-lived. The railroad was completed within a year. All of those hard-drinking, hard-gambling customers went off to other railroad jobs, in other lucky towns.
The Lewis & Clark Report: 200 years ago this week, the Lewis & Clark expedition had finally made it out of the Rocky Mountains and into the lower altitude prairies along the Clearwater River, near present day Weippe.
It should have been an occasion for celebration, but instead, nearly the entire company was laid low by a form of dysentery. After weeks of eating nothing but meat, and precious little of that, the party had feasted on dried salmon and camas root, given to them by the Nez Perce tribe. Nearly everyone promptly became ill, to the point where men were lying on the side of the trail unable to move.
So they spent days resting up in the prairies, making large pine canoes in preparation for their trip down the Snake and Columbia rivers.
100 years ago in Spokane: The excitement was building for the Spokane Interstate Fair, which, The Spokesman-Review promised, would feature the fastest horseracing in years.
Meanwhile, “fast” entertainment of another variety was promised. The midway (carnival) acts included the following, in the words of the Sept. 24, 1905, Spokesman-Review:
“The Pingpong Girls: “Clever dancers who do vaudeville acts.”
“Alice the Wonder: “She is the girl with long hair over her entire face.”
“Ella Ewing: “The Missouri Giantess, 7 feet 4 inches high.”
“The Sunny South: “A show of darkies who will sing southern melodies under southern surroundings and give darky dances.”
That was considered entertainment in 1905.
Meanwhile, in a court-related item, the S-R noted that a certain Ida Elstrup had filed for divorce against her husband of less than one year on the grounds that he “refuses to take a bath.”
She also accused him of “faultfinding” and gossiping about her to the neighbors.