STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Rita Hurst is no stranger to Bellevue’s Labor Day Parade.

The woman who will be this year’s Grand Marshal rode her horse Trigger in the parade for 19 years. The horse was so named because it was born on a night when Arthur had been told to sleep with his finger on the trigger while fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.

In addition, she served as Grand Marshal of the parade 19 years ago. And it was just nine years ago that she rode in a carriage as part of the Blaine County Museum’s Heritage Court.

Shucks. That was easy compared to the ways she used to get around the valley.

Hurst, now 88, drove a 10-wheel logging truck up and over the narrow dirt-covered hairpin turns of the old Galena Highway in the 1940s and ‘50s. It was all in a day’s work as she hauled timber to Hailey from the 630-acre parcel of land her parents Walter and May Wade family had homesteaded along Beaver Creek.

The truck was so primitive that Hurst often had to bank it on the side of the hill to slow it down.

“It took an hour to drive it up and over the summit on one side—sometimes I’d have to stop and back up to make the turns,” recalled Hurst, who also worked alongside men cutting trees with the chainsaw she was given as a 12-year-old.

One time, Hurst recalled, she drove an overloaded truck to the Triumph Mine, As she started up the hill, the front end of the truck rose into the air. The miners had to stand on the front of it to force it down so she could finish the drive, she said.

To look tough in the days before women were even beginning to crack the glass ceiling, Rita carried a can of snuff, which she never chewed.

When pulling up to the Silver Dollar Saloon in Bellevue, she would jump out and kick the tires to show she was one of the guys.

One day a stranger heard her cussing and told her a young lady shouldn’t be swearing.

“Since I’m doing a man’s work, I’m entitled to swear like a man!” Rita retorted.

When her father built the Beaver Creek Store, which still stands north of Smiley Creek Lodge, Rita began cooking for the miners at the nearby Silver King and Eureka mines, along with sheepherders and government trappers.

She cooked on a wood stove with no running water or electricity.

“I cooked meat and potatoes, biscuits and gravy. But, once in awhile, a government trapper brought some bear meat that he’d killed and I cooked it up in a frying pan, browning it up good like a steak. It had a taste of its own,” she recounted. “You had to make sure the fat was off, but the cooks loved to get the fat for baking pastries.”

When her family began spending winters at Beaver Creek, Hurst would cross-country ski seven miles over the pass to the Galena store where Pearl Barber would have the mail waiting for her. She’d make the mail run three times a week.

To stave off cabin fever, she’d occasionally thumb a ride from the Galena store to Ketchum where she would attend a dance and movie before returning home.

In those days Bellevue used to get 8 feet of snow on the flat and Beaver Creek would get up to 12 feet, she said. Her stepfather kept Bellevue city sidewalks plowed with B-plow made with two big planks. And he kept a team of horses ready to go 24 hours a day should they need to take firefighters to a fire.

One winter Hurst rescued three horses who had been left at the Beaver Creek store, taking them eight miles down the Salmon River where they could feed on exposed grass. Once a week she would ski to the horses, pulling a toboggan filled with bales of hay.

Each fall, she would drive the family’s own horses back to the Wood River Valley, leaving Beaver Creek at 5 in the morning and trotting into Hailey by 9 p.m.

Isolated as her family was, her playmates were not other children but the local foxes, porcupines and coyotes. She named a pair of baby badgers Maggie and Jiggs and put them on a leash and led them around like a dog

And, when a government trapper killed a sow, she and her stepfather took in its two cubs, raising them for five years until the bears’ growing size prompted them to take the bears to the Pocatello zoo.

In 1953 Rita married Arthur Hurst, a Bellevue boy who had received a Silver Star for laying phone lines during the Battle of the Bulge.

The couple bought the timber operation from Rita’s folks and continued to log until 1968. They also tended sheep, living out of sheep wagons at times.

After marrying, Rita ran the old Bellevue Cafe where Milano’s is now and worked off and on for 20 years at the Silver Dollar Saloon, luring customers with her homemade cinnamon rolls, coffee cakes, doughnuts and dinner rolls.

And she opened a second-hand antique store next to her trailer home in Bellevue.

When her husband became ill with cancer, Rita got him a miniature horse, which kept him company indoors, even eating off his plate.

Hurst kept busy in her later years, collecting donations for the Tuesday night soup kitchen supper the now-gone Rosebud Deli used to offer, busying herself at the Bellevue Community Church and frequenting yard sales looking for more treasures for her home and yard of her home near the bike path that runs through Bellevue.

“I didn’t need to do the things I did,” she said as she looked back on her outdoorsy life full of hard work. “But I loved it. I liked the smell of the pines and being my own boss.”