Wagon Days 1

                                                   ‘Hitch your wagon to a star.’
                                                          Ralph Waldo Emerson



Carbon. Labor day morning in Ketchum began scorched earth ghost town macabre. The Wagon Days banner was more visible, but the celebration it advertised seemed to be missing.
Robyn and I meandered up Main Street, along the closed storefront façades. We looked at the listings in a real estate agent’s window.
Two charming cottages built in 1950 situated on 0.27 of an acre. Close proximity to the river and Downtown core. $725,000.
“They’re just shacks.” Robyn said.
“Not here.” I said. “This is another pastoralized estate heartland of the very rich. Here, like in Jackson, you pay more for the seamless Rockwellian illusion.” Across the street from the Pioneer Saloon, an older couple was setting out a row of director’s chairs along the curb. We went over to inquire about the festivities.
“You’re just a bit early,” She said. Anne was a well-dressed elegant lady in her early sixties, with a Sun Valley sunbeam smile, short silver hair and a long silver and turquoise and fringed leather Western pedigree. The black pearl necklace was an incidental ornament to her kindness.
“Where are you from?” Asked her husband. Fred was a remote Eastern transplant, but his roots were deep enough that he likely knew everyone who normally lived in Ketchum, if it was possible to live normally in Ketchum. Anne was the local Sotheby’s Real Estate rep, the company that sold Napoleon’s library. On 22 May 2002, Sotheby’s sold Norman Rockwell's painting of Rosie the Riveter for $4.96 million, and Anne’s sale profile wasn’t likely far behind. They invited us to a luncheon Anne was hosting at her office, and their linear sidewalk inner circle for the Big Hitch Parade that would follow.
Robyn and I headed up Fourth Street to the Town Square, where the traditional eight-dollar all-you-can-eat Papoose Club Pancake Breakfast was already in full swing. All proceeds benefit local youth.
Also in full swing was the fiddle band in the background, the jowls of the first crossbow bouncing on his violin under his cowboy hat, through the smoke of the hundred of sausages behind the big wagon wheel doors of the big black barbeques. Toes in the boots of the Stetson pensioners at the front tables tapped in rhythm. Clone cowboy campfire cooks with white cowboy hats, blue and white striped shirts, Levi’s, and red aprons manned the griddles, flipping flapjacks and feeding the frenzy. Firefighters ate free, and got extra big helpings, having achieved redemption for living the authentic life in Nature, and facing death with dignity and courage.
My paper plate was heavy with pancakes and sausages and bacon and eggs, and the orange juice in my other hand was searching for a place to land. All the picnic tables in the square were full, except for the one directly ahead of me. Only one man sat eating breakfast there in the dappled light, but I could see why he had it all to himself.
So old, he was Old West. Under his oversized grey felt Stetson, was a bushy white beard, and a penetrating set of clear blue blue eyes. He wore a leather vest with a marshall’s badge, a blue bandana, and the same striped shirt, blue jeans and boots as the cowboy clones. I approached cautiously.
“Is anyone sitting here?” I asked.
“You see anyone?” He said. You can always tell a cowboy but you can’t tell him much. He motioned me to take a seat.
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Older than the mountains with twice as much dust.” He said. “I’ve seen eighty go by.” I told him I thought that was pretty old.
“It’s not about how fast you run, or how high you climb.” He said. “It’s about how you bounce. Out here, you live a long time. Even horse thieves have to hang five minutes longer than anywhere else.” I introduced myself.
“Ivan Swaner.” He said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.” But his gnarled handshake told me he was less pleased than I was, until Robyn arrived with Anne, and Ivan lit up.
“Ivan, you’ve got your breakfast on your moustache.” Anne said. “Ivan is our local raconteur, historian and man-about-town. Too old to set a bad example, but old enough to give good advice. He went to school in a one-room schoolhouse, and remembers when ‘going south for the winter’ meant Twin Falls, and when skis were ‘snowshoes,’ used by the ladies to get around town. He was the deputy sheriff of Ketchum for fourteen years. They used to call him Ivan the Terrible.”
Ivan wiped his beard.
“Sit down.” He said to Anne, and then he started, his moustache dancing with the food and the telling of it.
“The Alpine had a red light on top of it, and when there was trouble, they would turn it on and we would go break up drunken fights or whatever it was.” He said. “You can’t drink coffee on a running horse. The one I’ve been riding through this life could buck a man’s whiskers plum off. There are only two seasons in the valley, July and winter. I remember how much wood I had to cut, to get through January of 1951. It were minus fifty-four degrees, and the words froze clean out of my mouth.” Ivan had hit his history button.
“In 1880, the town founded here was called Leadville. The Post Office renamed the place after a local trapper, David Ketchum. But it wasn’t about fur trapping, it was about lead and silver. Isaac Lewis, the father of Ketchum, gave his son, Horace, ten thousand dollars to start any business he wanted. In 1884 Horace formed the Ketchum and Challis Toll Road Company, constructed a road over the steep Trail Creek Summit, and built a chain of massive wagons to run them. Each one could carry ten tons of ore on a mountain track no wider than itself, careening around hairpin turns, teetering along sheer ledges on giant six-foot wheels, making fourteen miles a day.”
“There’s more horse asses than horses.” Horace had said. “I prefer mules to men.” His Lewis wagons were daisy chained together and pulled by a team of draft mules, selected for strength and stamina and temper. Their muleskinner used a hundred-foot jerk-line to control and rein in the twenty animals it took to pull the convoy. He drove a majesty of metal and wood and beast.
At the height of mining activity the Ketchum Fast Freight Line employed 700 mules and 30 wagons to haul 700,000 pounds of raw ore to the Philadelphia Smelter on Warm Springs Road, annually. Between 1880 and 1885 approximately $12 million worth of lead and silver left the valley. In 1902, rail service to Mackay and Challis arrived, and the Lewis wagon trains became obsolete. Horace died two years later. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all.
The Chinese had come with the building of the railroad. A Chinatown grew up on River Street in Hailey, with a population of hundreds.
“They had to live underground, or they’d be killed.” Ivan said. On September 8, 1883, Sheriff Gray and his deputies raided the subterranean opium dens, making the first ever drug bust. He arrested 8 Chinese and a white man, and confiscated $350 in opium, pipes and smokers paraphernalia. At the trial, two days later, two Chinese were fined $20 and another $5. Nine months later, Kuck Wah Choi, known locally as Ah Sam, was found guilty of murder in the first degree and sentenced to be hanged by the Sheriff until dead. On September 18, 1885, in accordance with the Judgment, Ah Sam was hanged in Hangman's Gulch. Hailey's Chinatown was wiped out by a fire in 1920, when a still, owned by a bootlegger named Monkey Frank, exploded. The fire uncovered many underground tunnels, containing opium bottles, hats, wire, and the remains of banks that the Chinese used.
In the 1890s, after the mining boom turned bust, sheepmen drove their herds north through Ketchum in the summer, to graze in upper elevations of the Pioneer, Boulder, and Sawtooth mountains. By 1890 there were a reported 614,000 sheep in Idaho, and by 1918, 2.65 million, almost six times the state's human population. Every fall, sheep flowed south into the town’s livestock corrals at the Union Pacific Railroad's railhead, connecting to its main line at Shoshone.  They brought money and giardia and the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, which still graces the Ketchum calendar each October.
The 1930s brought the Great Depression. Public work relief projects proliferated during the Civilian Conservation Corps CCC days of FDR’s New Deal. Bugsy Siegal’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill, Queen of the Mobsters’ Molls, hung out in Ketchum, paying for goods and services with hundred dollar bills, sent to her in shoeboxes, before Bugsy ended up perforated with bullet holes on her couch. In 1936, the Union Pacific opening of their ski resort brought Hollywood culture to Sun Valley.
“Who were some of the celebrities that skied up there, Ivan?” Anne asked.
“Well, there was Marlene Dietrich and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez, Bette Davis and Rita Hayward, and Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway.” My head came up.
“Did you ever meet Hemingway, Ivan?” I asked.
“I used to drink with him.” He said.
“How was that.” I asked.
“He was better.” He said.
“Did he talk about much?” I asked
“Liquor talks mighty loud when it gets loose from the jug.” He said. “But you can’t drown your sorrows; they know how to swim.”
“How come you survived and he didn’t?” I asked.
“I stayed on the wagon, and Hem fell off.” He said. I asked Ivan what he thought of the man.
“Some people thought he was a son of a…” He said. I thought he was a regular guy.”
“You know he won a Nobel Prize in literature?” I asked
“That may have happened.” Said Ivan. “But I ain’t got no recollection of it.”
Anne asked if we had visited Hemingway’s house. I told her we were planning on seeing it the following day.
“It’s easy to find.” She said. “You just follow Warm Springs Road to East Canyon Run. Number 400.” Getting to Hemingway’s house would be easy. Getting inside would be impossible. I knew this from my correspondence with the Director of Communications of the Idaho Conservancy, who took two months to communicate her refusal. Thank you again for your interest in the Hemingway House. Unfortunately, we will not be able to accommodate your request. Due to the high number of requests we receive, our staff can only schedule a few during the year that best meet our conservation goals for the property. I asked her if it was possible to provide the criteria that would accommodate a visit. No, we cannot provide the criteria as it is part of an internal document.
“No use diggin’ for water under an outhouse.” Said Ivan. “Anything you might had found inside Hem’s place is likely long gone.” Anne asked if we were planning on travelling up the valley to Stanley. We told her it was also on our list for the next day.
“Make sure you stop at the North Fork Store.” She said. “That’s where Marilyn Monroe was filmed in the movie Bustop.” Ivan’s blue eyes brightened conspicuously.
“Ever been married, Ivan.” Robyn asked.
“Nope. Single, footloose and fancy-free.” He said. “Getting shot and getting married are bad habits.”
“You must have had some bad habits.” I said.
“Every dog has a few fleas.” He said. “But if a man knows anything, he ought to die with it in him.” I asked Ivan for his thoughts about Lewis and Clark
“The Salmon River stopped them cold in their tracks.” He said.
I asked him about Custer.
“General George Armstrong Custer was a pompous, egotistical, self-centered…” He said. “He was a goldilocks presidential wannabe murderer, meaner than a skilletful of rattlesnakes.” I asked him where all the Indians went.
“Well, there were Indians, and I remember the days of their Trail Creek powwows, but they seem to have all disappeared.” I asked him how Ketchum had changed.
“Our minds used to be cleaner than our fingernails, but we’ve been invaded by all those California developers, with their wide open wallets and wide open mouths. And Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis and Clint Eastwood. Horseshit stays on the outside of boots, not Birkenstocks.” Anne told us that Ivan was in the Big Hitch Parade.
“Its the largest non-motorized parade in the USA.” He said. “You can catch me hanging off the second wagon.” I asked why they cancelled the Blackjack shootout this year.
“One year a guy lost his arm when his gun misfired.” He said.
Ivan was finished his breakfast, and his history lesson. He wiped his beard on his sleeve, and got up to leave.
“Where are you going now, Ivan?” Robyn asked.
“I’m going to see a man about a mule.” He said.