“You made your own job” - A Small Family Business in a North Idaho Timber Town
At a Glance
Section titled “At a Glance”| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2023-03-01 |
| Journal | Montana |
| Authors | James W. Martin |
Abstract
Section titled “Abstract”39 Living on the margins of North Idaho’s timber-extraction economy, the Evans family drew on ecological resources, including fish, game, and berries, to make a life and a living for several generations. Martha Miller’s (née Evans) husband, Harold, stands in front of their car with his daughters, armed with canvas picker baskets and metal pails for harvesting huckleberries. Author’s collection ‘‘You made your own job’’ A Small Family Business in a North Idaho Timber Town by James W. Martin M O N T A N A T H E M A G A Z I N E O F W E S T E R N H I S T O R Y 40 Sandpoint, Idaho, lived its boom years as atimber town in the early twentieth century. The Humbird Lumber Company, the Diamond Match Company, and a few smaller operations dominated the town’s North Idaho hinterlands. Together with the Northern Pacific Railway, the Great Northern Railway, and the Spokane International Railway, these companies rapidly transformed the area into an important resource frontier serving markets hundreds of miles away. On the shore of Lake Pend Oreille, Humbird’s sprawling mill gave Sandpoint the flavor of a company town, sporting Humbird-owned housing for workers, a store, and a school. The Humbird mill processed millions of board-feet of timber per year,harvested from the old-growth forests surrounding the town by numerous logging companies.Today, the massive ancient stumps left by this flurry of activity still rot away among second- and third-growth forests, and the remnants of infrastructure—flume pilings in creek beds, slumping trestle abutments, odd bits of concrete—render mute testimony to these long-departed enterprises. The razed ground and bald stumplands in old photographs speak to the power this bonanza exerted over the landscape,as do the wood dynamite boxes still knocking around many garages and the crosscut saws that decorate local restaurants and breweries.1 This timber-town backdrop, echoing through kitsch and local historical accounts, obscures the complexity of the region’s extractive economies. Many private memories but few visible traces remain of the families who made their living on the margins of this boom. Frank and Nora Evans—who arrived in North Idaho from the Midwest in 1909—formed one such family.Lacking inherited wealth,the abundance of the region’s agricultural and extractive industries drew them west. When they found a future in those sectors limited or unattractive, they developed adaptive strategies to survive.They and their children built a series of seasonal enterprises outside of the timber economy and sometimes outside the law: commercial fishing and fish processing, huckleberry picking, moonshining, gardening, and pilfering timber. Seasonal rhythms structured the family’s business and sustenance. Although they readily adopted new technologies to more efficiently exploit the resources around them, the textures of daily life and work remained rooted in an intimate relationship with the natural world. Their unusually well-documented work lives offer a window into an informal economy that afforded many North Idaho residents the opportunity to piece together a living well into the 1970s. Near the end of her life, Frank and Nora’s daughter, Martha Miller—a lifetime laborer in this informal economy—reflected on her family’s experience. She declared that to get by, “you made your own job,” an utterance that speaks to the precarious nature of working-class life and the spirit of autonomy she and others cultivated as a survival mechanism.2 The Evanses came to Idaho in 1909, a departure from both Frank and Nora’s family backgrounds in small-scale midwestern agriculture. Frank, the restless eldest son of a genteel North Dakota farming family, left home in his early twenties. He traveled to San Francisco after the devastating 1906 fire to work in cleanup and construction. He soon returned to The Humbird Lumber Company’s Sandpoint mill on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho’s largest lake. As a timber town, Sandpoint experienced its boom years in the early twentieth century, but numerous families subsisted on the edges of this extractive economy. 757/ 11.064, Bonner County Historical Society, Sandpoint J A M E S…