Huckleberries: A bygone day when celebration & hope turned to carnage in Coeur d’Alene

Huckleberries Monday:

July 31 comes and goes each year in Coeur d’Alene, without much remembrance of the terrible accident that killed 17 and badly injured more than 100.

On July 31, 1909, two trains collided head-on at or near Gibbs station (the approximate entrance to today’s Riverstone development, Northwest Boulevard and Lakewood Drive).

The trains were running on a tight schedule, transporting visitors and speculators to and from Coeur d’Alene. The trains of the time also carried a flood of potential homesteaders hungering for cheap land ($1.25 to $7 per acre) opened on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation by the Allotment Act of 1909. All this according to Jon Mueller’s swell new history of Coeur d’Alene’s City Park: “Private Park, Public Park.”

Well, on that fateful July day, mistakes were made in an effort to keep the packed trains running on time. “As it turned out,” writes Mueller, “there was a mix-up in the switching procedures of certain parallel tracks at certain locations and a non-standard departure of one train from Coeur d’Alene.”

The Electric Line never recovered from the crash and subsequent investigations.

Then came the automobile. More here.