IDAHO AND THE
GREEN SNAKE
THE STORY OF MEN WHO USED
THE CAREY ACT TO CHARM
THEIR SERPENTINE RIVER
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FRED Hastings drifted into Idaho from his Michigan home in 1883. He was a youngster barely out of his teens, short, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with the constitution of a bear and the fighting ability of an Apache. He came in advance of the railroad, in the days when Glenn, the squaw-man, was still ferrying the Oregon emigrants across the green Snake. Glenn made half a million out of his ferry before the locomotive trail was broken from Ogden to Portland. Yet he took no toll from Hastings, for the boy liked Idaho. He stayed, headed for the lower Camas Prairie, a long well-watered valley in the mountains. There he prospected, taught school and fell in love.
Camas Prairie was thirty-five miles from the nearest railroad. In winter the roads were impassable.
"Do you want to go back to civilization, or do you want to make our home here?" asked the lover. The true pioneer spirit was in the girl. They married, took up a homestead, built a cabin, acquired some stock, put up hay and awaited the winter.
Six feet of snow fell. Twenty-foot drifts covered the rough mountain roads. The Camas settlers were cut off, isolated for four months. Their provisions gave out. They were down to bacon rinds when twelve men broke a trail to the nearest store, fifteen miles distant, only to find its shelves bare. They packed flour into Camas on their backs, twenty pounds at a time through the snow, packed it twenty-five miles to feed the hungry.
Fred Hastings lived on his homestead for nigh a quarter of a century, raised a family, prospered and, when a branch railroad at last reached Camas, sold out. There is nothing spectacular or dramatic in his career. He won a competence through his industry, foresight and thrift like thousands of other Western pioneers. And, like all other pioneers, he and his wife suffered the privations and hardships of him who sets out to subdue the wilderness.
When Senator Hastings—he is a member of the Idaho legislature now—sold his mountain ranch, big things were afoot on the gray sage-brush plain to the south. The great irrigation boom was on. Armies of men were building dams, digging canals big as rivers to carry the Snake's green water upon the arid land. Every month new projects were hatched, new towns sprang up, new settlers came, new land openings were held. Hastings caught the fever. He knew the country. Twenty years his cattle had wintered in the sagebrush. The results of irrigation were familiar to him. So he went out and bought the relinquishment of a desert
