Rest day in Council, ID

(August 1). Council is a town of about 850 people in west central Idaho. It sits below a ring of 9,000+ foot mountains known as the 7 Devils Range. It was named by Merriwether Lewis because when he and Clark arrived here they saw hundreds of indian encampments. Lewis mistakenly thought the tribes were gathered at a council, when actually they were just living in the valley at the time.

Council has fallen on hard times economically ever since a nearby sawmill shut down a few years ago. There are quite a few empty storefronts and 3 thrift shops/junk stores. However we found the people to be uniformly nice and, like many small towns we have visited, happy to be living here despite the hardships.

We enjoyed visiting the thrift shops and picked up some great bargains, including a book for me (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for 50 cents); a new church key bottle opener for beer and other bottles (10 cents, an incredible deal for an absolute essential tool); and a small, heavy duty styrofoam cooler that we will use to haul perishable food for camping (99 cents).*

We also visited the local museum (Adams County history museum) which, although small, was very interesting. At one time there was a huge fruit orchard just south of here (at Mesa) that was one of the largest in the country. They built an elaborate irrigation system from the Weiser River to the orchard, using wooden water pipes. There was also a colorful female dentist who practiced here until she was in her 90s (when the state first took away her license, then confiscated her equipment. She refused to use Novacain for fillings and when pulling teeth used to tell her patients to dig onto the chair handles as hard as they wanted to ("they're solid oak, you can't hurt them"). The museum also had a section on the Native Americans who once inhabited the area (the Shoshonies and Nez Pierce tribes) but it said absolutely nothing about what happened to them or how the white settlers came to occupy the land.** It is very true that history is written by the winning side.

*We suspect that the cooler may have been intended for fish bait, but it looks clean and doesn't smell so we purchased it.

**Reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown's classic work on the settling of the country from the indian
perspective, has sensitized me to this subject.
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