STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

Les Cameron can tell tales that bring old Bellevue to life. Such as how horses helped build Main Street in the 1930s, later pulling weights to grade the dirt highway.

“It was quiet here when I was a kid,” said the retired millwright and welder. The population according to the 1950 census was 528 people, and half of the school kids were from farm families. High school and elementary school were in one building with two grades to a room, and my schoolteacher was educated at the old Albion School--she started teaching at 19.”

Cameron is a frequent fixture at the Bellevue Museum, sometimes volunteering to greet visitors during visiting hours on Saturday and Sunday.

Les Cameron remembers when the Bellevue Museum housed City Hall; the Mama Inez building, a post office and Larsen’s Grocery, and the Cutthroat Café, Glenn’s Groceries, a bank and a butcher’s shop.

And this year he donated a couple artifacts to the museum, which will take their places as conversation pieces when Cameron isn’t around.

Cameron recently donated an old safe manufactured in 1877 that was originally a part of the Palace Club, the former watering hole that most recently was the site of a hot dog restaurant. The Palace Club was opened in 1925 by John Wesley Davies.

“It was a bar when I was kid,” said Cameron. “There was a bar on one side and on the other side was a restaurant that served breakfast and hamburgers. There was also a barbershop there.”

During the Depression, the bartenders hid liquor in at the base of columns behind the bar, fetching it on a swivel inside, said Joan Davies, whose late husband John was the grandson of John Wesley Davies. The bar is now in Louie’s Restaurant in Meridian, she added.

Les Cameron opens the double door in the safe.

In those days, everyone had safes because everything was done in cash—there were no credit cards, not even checks, said Cameron.

Les Cameron’s father Orville bought the safe from the Palace Club for his Wood River Welding business. Cameron reached into the safe and pulled out a couple of ledgers that his mother kept, the transactions dating to 1992.

Bringing the 1,500-pound safe to the museum was no small feat—it took a crane. The safe is 65 inches thick and has a couple doors.

“It’s definitely dynamite proof, well…fire proof, at least” said Mary Tyson, who heads up the Regional History Museum at The Community Library.

The safe originally came from the Palace Club.

Cameron’s father rode a freight train from Nebraska to Wendell, Idaho, in 1945.

“He rode with the hobos who, he said, hid their money in the top seams of their pants because railroad workers would take any money they had in their pockets if they caught them,” Cameron said.

Orville Cameron had relatives in Buhl, Kimberly, Jerome and Wendell. He worked on farms and ranches. And he told stories about shoveling out school buses when they became stuck in snow.

“He could plow straight lines with a horse. And he learned welding while working at a machine shop in Blackfoot where they had a forge and made toy rings with a stick,” said Cameron.

Les Cameron donated a meat scale along with the safe.

After marrying, Orville Cameron returned to Nebraska, but Mrs. Cameron quickly discovered Omaha was not for her.

“She couldn’t get over the way women fought over sales in department stores,” Cameron said.

The couple moved to the Wood River Valley in 1945 after a soldier friend of Orville’s told him it was better in the Wood River Valley than in Wendell: “The wind don’t blow so hard and you can hunt and fish.”

Orville bought a blacksmith business, buying all its tools for $100 so he could repair tools for the community. He spent his first year working in a big wooden barn on Bellevue’s Main Street, wetting the floor every night at the end of the work day to prevent smoldering embers from setting the barn on fire.

Walt Stewart, one of his customers who owned what is now the Lookout Farm, finally suggested, ‘Why don’t you buy some land and put up a building and act like you’re going to stay?’

“My father said, ‘Why don’t you put up the money?’ The man wrote a check and said, ‘Now get to work,’ ” Cameron recounted.

“The sheepherder John Brown once spotted a miner in the store and asked how much he owed him,” he added. “He grabbed a grocery bag, wrote out his name and handed it to him, and he was good or it. He took it to the bank and got paid what he was owed.”

John Brown came from Scotland. He got to Minidoka and, when he asked how to get to James Laidlaw’s ranch near Carey, the townspeople pointed north. He walked across the desert 43 miles, Cameron said.

“James Laidlaw would help his sheepherders get land and sheep if they wanted to stay,” Cameron added. “James Brown had 5,000 sheep.”

Les Cameron followed in the footsteps of his father, using what he’d learned from watching his father until he retired in October 2023. One of his biggest projects was dismantling the mill at the Minnie Moore Mine, also known as the Silver Star.

One of Cameron’s mentors was Pete Johnson, a World War II veterans who learned to weld in the Navy.

During the Depression Pete’s family lived in a sheep camp and commissary wagon on the Camas Prairie. The boys slept in the wagon under tarps and blankets. Their parents slept in the camp wagon.

“Pete said his father’s philosophy was: If you spend less than what you make, you’ll always have money.”

One time an IRS agent contacted Pete, whose given name was Lloyd T. Johnson

“How do you know my name is Pete--I’ve never used the name Pete on any document,” Johnson asked the agent.

“You’d be surprised what we know,” the agent told him.

“Well, you know too much,” Pete replied.

Cameron looked around the Bellevue Museum filled with such memorabilia as a turn-of-the-century wedding dress and the keys to the 1881log jail in back. The windowless museum building, built in 1885 to house the city’s hose reel, could be mistaken for a former church given its bell steeple.

If someone spotted a fire, they’d run to the city hall and ring the bell.

“Whoever showed up to the fire was a fireman,” said Cameron.

The jail was once set on fire by an inmate who decided fire was his ticket out of jail.

“They didn’t want to let him out so they put out the fire with him inside,” Cameron said.

Main Street resident Crystal Harper, who lived to be 111, would feed the pigeons that roosted in the bell tower.

“My mother walked in on a Crystal, her sister Hazel Johnon and another women when they were well in their 80s, and they were discussing what they were going to do when they got older,” Cameron said.

During the 78 years Cameron has lived in Bellevue, he has seen innumerable changes.

“Mainly more people, richer people,” he said. “When I was a kid, meat was wild game. You didn’t honor the seasons--you got it when you needed it, and the game warden looked the other way.

“The population went down to 383 in 1960 but resurged during the Silver Star mine revival.  The town hasn’t changed much except for way more traffic. But in 10 minutes you can still get away from the traffic and be out there by yourself.”

WANT TO JOIN LES?

The Bellevue Museum is open from noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays through Aug. 31. Admission is free.

The museum can always use volunteers to receive visitors. To help, call 208-721-1465.