STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

“Hurry!” Kevin Lupton encouraged two youngsters taking turns pulling a crosscut saw through a log that was nearly a foot in diameter.

“Winter’s coming!” the retired high school shop teacher added, explaining that settlers often had less than a month to build a home after having spent the summer coming West on the Oregon Trail.

As Lupton swayed side to side directing the sawing, two fourth-graders from Hailey Elementary School pulled faster on the crosscut as three classmates sat on the log to hold it down. They cheered as a sawed slice of wood fell to the ground.

Children traded cafeteria benches for hay bales while eating lunch during Wild West Days.

Some of the children taking part in the exercise have fathers who build homes in the Wood River Valley. But they learned that homebuilding in the 1800s took on an added sense of urgency last week at the Wild West Days.

Some 270 fourth-graders from Blaine County District schools, Syringa Mountain School, Pioneer Montessori, Trinity School and Sun Valley Community School spent a day on the lawn outside Hailey Elementary School learning how to brand cattle and how to record their observations about nature, as Lewis and Clark had done, at 12 stations set up around a skyscraper of a tipi that loomed 25-plus feet into the sky.

The Blaine County Historical Museum led by board member Mary Gervase organized the three-day event after learning that Wagon Ho! a traveling hands-on Idaho history program would no longer be coming to Blaine County to offer students a taste of pioneer life.

It was a mad rush to figure out what to teach and to purchase props on Amazon. But the community stepped up to Gervase’s delight. The Trailing of the Sheep Festival brought in its  sheep wagon, and Tim Green loaned three of his 70 sheep. Scott Miley Roofing donated tiles for cattle branding, and Gimlet resident Donna Higueras donated a tipi that had never been unpacked after other organizations couldn’t find the right size poles for their tipis.

A young girl experiments with a binocular during a session exploring the observations that Lewis and Clark made on their fact-finding expedition.

Putting up the tipi on a blustery Sunday dotted by snow flurries gave several adults a lesson in the ways of the Old West as they thumbed through several YouTube videos trying to figure out how to do it.

Come showtime, 80 volunteers stepped forward to help, including Hailey police who brought an old-fashioned ice cream churn and handed ice cream out to the kids at lunchtime.

D.L. Evans Bank Manager Kelli Young helped the kids pack little jars of sourdough starter to take home, and Blaine County Sheriff Morgan Ballis traded his sheriff’s blues for a pair of brown Carhart jeans and a cowboy hat as he helped youngsters practice lassoing three wooden cows covered with cow hide.

The teachers wore sheriff’s badges and the volunteers, yellow bandanas. And the youngsters seemed only too happy to come wearing cowboy hats and Davy Crockett coonskin hats atop their heads.

Bobette Wildcat Haskell tells students how the muskrat helped create Earth according to her tribe’s creation story.

Bellevue resident Lorna Kolash preached the importance of sourdough for the pioneers who came west and for the miners that worked in Bellevue’s Minnie Moore Mine.

Yeast was hard to find, she said, so miners made their own sourdough starter out of flour and water, sleeping with it against their bodies in freezing weather to keep the yeast alive—that’s how they got the nickname “sourdoughs.”

They packed it into snowballs to take with them to the mine. And they’d make flapjacks with it for breakfast. Or, they’d pinch off pieces of the fermented dough and bake dinner biscuits in a cast iron skillet over an open fire.

The students also learned that they couldn’t call 911 for a fire engine had their house caught on fire in the late 1800s. Instead, they learned about bucket brigades by breaking into two groups and racing with buckets of water to put an imaginary fire out.

A young cowpoke tries to rope a steer.

“In those days, if you had to fight fire alone, you were in trouble,” Lupton said as he showed them an early picture of downtown Hailey after a fire burned a city block.

Bobette Wildcat Haskett, a Shoshone-Bannock bead worker, came from the Fort Hall area near Pocatello, bringing clothing made of tanned hides and animal pelts. Rock chucks take shelter under rocks in the Craters of the Moon Preserve when it’s hot, she told them.

She showed them the digging tools she uses to dig camas bulbs. She showed them a breastplate made of bones that protected warriors from arrows and musket balls. And she showed them a spearhead her son had made that looked like a museum artifact.

“It’s important to pass on Native American heritage when we talk about the Wild West,” she said. “The children think about cowboys first, and the Indians are often portrayed as villains.

“It’s important for children to know that we lived in these lands before white settlers came. It’s important for them to know that we started coming through the Wood River Valley in April, that we went through the canyons looking for camas bulbs, the bitterroot, to harvest.  It’s important for them to know that we’re still here and that we still come and harvest the plants, the salmon.”

Haskett said her people decided just in the last 20 to 30 years that they have to keep their culture alive and share their history with those who are not Native American. In that vein, she has made muskrat shoes for a Native American exhibition in the Wood River Museum of History + Culture. And she and her husband have held workshops showcasing their beading and tanning.

She noted that many of the children who live in Salmon did not know Indians had existed there, even though the Sacajawea Interpretive Center opened there in the early 2000s.

“They know only about the things that white man puts in the history books. So, I go in and I teach them about a people and way of life they do not know about,” she said. “We live in trying times now, and people have to know how Indians got put on reservations. People don’t want to know that but it’s important to know those things.”

Kids had nothing but good to say about Wild West Days.

“It’s cool stuff,” said Werner McNamara. “I learned about Indians and I learned about weasels and bison and badgers. And I learned how to put out a fire—you just use buckets of water.”