This day in history: A Frontier Days celebration became a real-life wild west after too much reveling

From 1976: The annual Frontier Days celebration in Springdale, Washington, got so rowdy that the town marshal, Al Goad, stepped in and “closed down the town.”

The marshal said a crowd of “90 to 100 cowboys, Indians and others” whooped it up a little too much on a Saturday night, and the good times threatened to turn ugly. Deputies moved in and kept order.

Then, after the rodeo on Sunday afternoon, things began to get “overly lively” again.

The marshal took action.

“It’s my job to consider the safety of the townspeople, so when it looked like things might get out of hand, I simply closed down the town,” Goad said.

He closed the town’s two taverns and the grocery store. With “nothing left to do,” the revelers departed.

“Everything’s normal today,” he said.

From 1926: An early -morning fire, which began in a “lunch stand,” wiped out six buildings in downtown Sandpoint.

The fire was finally halted just before it reached the Gold Medal grocery store on Main Street.

Meanwhile, wildfires were “sweeping unhindered” through the forests of North Idaho and northeastern Washington.

Nothing except “rain or a decided change in weather conditions” could save the forests from “almost total destruction,” the Spokane Chronicle reported.

The post office at Nordman, Idaho, and a nearby logging camp “were wiped out by the Hanna fire that started a short distance from the camp yesterday.”