The Saturday Evening Post May 14 1960 Page 34/35

Paul and Marybelle  Filer have carved a homestead and a livelihood out of one of America’s last wilderness areas. Here is their story.

The Pioneers of Lonely Canyon

By HAL G. EVARTS

Photographs by Joern Gerdts

This lonely, beautiful valley is Paul and Marybelle Filer's, "private corner of heaven." Ten years ago they settled here with "a mortgage, a prayer and a hunk of bailing wire." 

Paul and one of his men lead a mare and a filly across the Salmon to the ranch. The tranquil appearance of the water is deceptive. Filer says, "You can't fight this river; she'll beat you every time." 

Pilot Filer in his own two-seater plane. Before he learned to fly, he had to spend days on the treacherous Salmon River every time he went to and from his valley ranch. 

Filer (in red shirt) helps saddle up for an elk-hunting expedition to the hills near his ranch. Much of his income derives from paying guests who come to hunt.

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Paul and his wife, Marybelle, on the bridge which was his first major project when they arrived at the ranch. He had to walk 18 miles on snowshoes to get supplies for the bridge-building operation. 

Filer (sighting in a rifle for one of his guests) which his partner, 78-year-old pete Klinkhammer. Pete, a lifelong bachelor, bought the ranch 50 years ago for" $500 and a lame mare to clinch the deal." 

The Shepp Ranch lies in a mile-deep gorge cut by the Salmon River (foreground). Note the tiny airplane-Filer's-at upper center.

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When Paul O. Filer, the youthful postmaster of Elk City, Idaho, announced his intention back in 1950, to sell his general store and raise cattle for a living, friends and relations gloomily prophesied the worst. In the first place, they argued, he had no experience with cows. Second, a modern cattle operation is big business, requiring ample capital or credit, and Filer had little of either. But the most serious handicap was the spot he had chosen for his venture-a small remote homestead in the mile-deep trench of the Salmon River, in the heart of a vast and rugged wilderness area. 

Explorers Lewis and Clark were turned back by this gorge while trying to find a route to the Pacific in 1805. Known ever since as the River of No Return, the Salmon has exacted a heavy toll of trappers, gold seekers, adventurers and would-be settlers over the years. Even today it is no land for the careless tender- foot. The traveler approaching by air looks down upon a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon, a ribbon of turquoise-green water far below spectacular crags, the habitat of bighorn sheep. Neighbors are few and far between. Most supplies are packed down steep mountain trails or boated downstream through dangerous rapids. 

But Paul Filer was a stubborn man, and his wife, Marybelle, had faith in his ability to pioneer a new way of life. They took the plunge, as she says, "with a mortgage, a prayer and a hunk of bailing wire." Unfortunately the skeptics proved to be right. Caught in the beef-price slump of '51, Paul ended up with twenty-five steers that were hardly worth the expense of driving out to the slaughterhouse a hundred miles away. 

"Man, I made every mistake in the book," he admits cheerfully, recalling that financial fiasco. "I was pea green. Thought all I had to do was turn the bull in loose with the cows and wait for the money to roll in." Within twelve months his career as a stockman came to an inglorious dead end. 

Actually he was not as visionary as this might indicate. Starting on a frayed shoestring, he planned to live largely off the country until he became established. There was game aplenty n the hills- deer, elk, bear -and steel head and rainbow trout in the streams. A flourishing garden yielded every kind of vegetable; berries grew wild among the creek-bottom thickets, and the original settler had planted an assortment of fruit trees ranging from walnut to cherry. The Filers might live lean, but they wouldn't starve. 

As early as the mid-1930's Paul had his eye on the 136-acre  Shepp Ranch. The owner, an elderly prospector named Peter Klinkhammer, invited him down for an occasional week of hunting or fishing. Paul raved so about it that his wife came for a look, and she, too, fell in love with the solitude and natural beauty of the place. Then and there the idea took root, although neither had more than a faint hope of owning such a ranch some far-off day. 

It took the upheaval of World War II to crystallize this hope into something like reality. Filer leased out his store, at that time located in the gold camp of Orogrande, and enlisted in the Navy Seabees. Marybelle, a registered nurse, followed him into the service and to Milne Bay, New Guinea, where his unit was stationed. The wartime gulf between Army first lieutenant and seaman first class is huge and practically unbridgeable; but during the next year, while their respective outfits struggled along the coast toward Hollandia, they got together half a dozen times. Discussing the future they agreed that from the South Pacific jungles their Idaho dream seemed unattainable. But maybe, if they saved their money, waited for a break- 

When Paul got out of uniform in 1945, however, he found that wartime restrictions on gold mining. had turned Orogrande into a ghost town. He literally could not give his store away, let alone sell it; and the bonds he had hoarded wouldn't buy and stock a ranch on even the most modest scale. Instead, he opened a second store, in the lumber town of Elk City. Five years later the Filers had finally saved enough to give their dream a try. 

"We weren't exactly city dudes," Marybelle explains, "although Paul grew up around Spokane, and I took my nurse's training in San Francisco. And we weren't the rugged pioneer type either. Who is, today? But we believed we could learn as we went along. We had to. Those first few years it was sink or swim for us." 

Filer, now forty-six, is a wiry friendly man, bristling with ideas and buzz-saw energy. "Paul," one friend described him, "is a guy who can't sit down and relax. He'll tackle any job, just to keep busy." His wife, by contrast, is a serene, handsome woman, who faces every crisis with composure, and life with Paul has provided a generous share. Their marriage started off on an explosive note. The night of the wedding his miner friends sprang a surprise charivari on the newlyweds, banging on dishpans and serenading their honeymoon cabin, and capped the festivities by touching off a charge of dynamite that shattered every window. By the time she moved to the Salmon years later she was prepared for almost anything. 

Impatient to get settled, they made the move in December of 1950. The sixty-odd miles of hairpin road from Elk City down to Mackay Bar, the nearest access point on the river, ordinarily required a day's travel by truck. It took the Filers three. They loaded a year's supply of groceries into their pickup and set out in a foot of snow. Two nights they slept out in subzero weather. Their zigzag descent down the ice-slick canyon wall is a memory that still haunts Marybelle. At the Salmon they reloaded their supplies on a scow Paul had built with their last $300. The final stage, a ten-mile run through the rapids, was anticlimactic. 

Pete Klinkhammer, who was to stay on as a working partner, welcomed them at the door. Home at last. But it was no dream cottage they entered. Pete, a bachelor all his seventy-eight years, had built the house of whipsawed logs forty years before and made all his own furniture from hand-hewn, timber. Water was hauled by bucket from an ice hole in nearby Crooked Creek, and an ancient" wood-burning stove provided heat. The outbuildings dated from the 1890's. 

To the Filers, however, it seemed a private corner of heaven, especially that first Christmas. A bush-pilot friend zoomed over at tree-top level and dropped a turkey dinner by parachute, complete with smoked oysters, a bottle of brandy and all the trimmings. Marybelle insisted that her menfolk shave and dress for the occasion, then unpacked her accordion and played Yuletide songs. In the fullness of their hearts they had much to celebrate. 

Of the jobs demanding immediate attention Filer gave priority to constructing a bridge across the creek. A flood had torn out the old one. With a gasoline- powered chain saw he began felling trees. Within the week his saw broke down. Work came to a standstill. A Forest Service telephone line links the ranch with the hamlet of Dixie, but for months each year it is down. It was down now. On snowshoes Filer hiked eighteen miles up the trail to Dixie, caught the United States Mail weasel to Elk City, the rode into Lewiston for spare parts. By spring he finished the bridge so that he could cross his ranch without wading hip-deep water. "That's the way it is here," he says. "To get one job done you have to do five others first. Man gets used to going at things backward in this country." 

Between tending cows and repairing fence he found time to complete another project that took considerably more ingenuity -the installation of a home water system. Pete considered this frivolous. Hadn't creek water served for forty years? But Paul persuaded him that the lady of the house, as cook and laundress, was entitled to some convenience. They stripped four 1000-gallon drums from a dismantled pontoon bridge upriver and herded them downstream in a borrowed boat, a wild voyage without precedent on the Salmon. To hoist them up the bank Filer laid a section of ore-car track he had appropriated from an abandoned mine and improvised a runway. Using a winch, they hauled one tank several hundred yards uphill to a spring and buried it in a pit below ground-freezing level, to ensure a year-round  gravity flow. 

By that time it was painfully clear they needed some cash income other than from calves. Briefly Paul toyed with the notion of putting all his land under cultivation. This posed the question of where to market produce. The nearest town, Riggins, lay forty miles downriver, but no one could run a powerboat upriver through the nasty snarl known as Dry Meat Rapids. Then a former customer asked Paul if he could use the ranch as a base for a few days' hunting. He'd be glad to pay for the privilege. Filer took him shooting as a favor, saw to it that he bagged a trophy elk, and then a new idea germinated. Why not guide hunters as a regular business? Well-heeled sportsmen from out of state were beginning to discover the fine game stands in Idaho's primitive areas, and his own back yard, the high country around Oregon Butte and Buffalo Hump, offered one of the best. All of which led back to the problem of transportation. To haul hunters and their gear from the road end he first had to master this stretch of river. 

From Don Smith, a professional river guide, he bought a discarded plywood boat, the first of any kind he'd ever owned - a specially constructed, flat-bottomed, shallow-draft craft seventeen feet long, powered by a twenty-two-horse- power outboard motor. Smith gave him a few tips on the peculiarities of Salmon River navigation and turned him loose. Proudly, and with characteristic confidence, he took Marybelle along on his trial spin one Sunday. At a riffle above the ranch he rammed a submerged boulder and holed the bow, barely getting ashore without sinking. After patching the damage he returned to the river with what can only be described as grim determination, tempered by respect. With Pete as pilot, sitting astraddle the bow and guiding him by hand signals, Filer churned up and down until he was familiar with every channel, sneak, whirlpool and eddy. Since then he has dunked himself several times but never a passenger. 

Word-of-mouth advertising brought a few hunters to the ranch next autumn. Although he had hunted and ridden horses since he was a youngster he had never handled pack strings, so now he had another skill to acquire. Under Pete's tutelage he picked up such rudiments as throwing a diamond hitch and shoeing a balky mule, and thus got through his first season, mostly with borrowed stock and equipment. But most of his hunters returned the following year and brought friends. He was launched in a field that promised steady if not sensational returns, and one he thoroughly enjoyed.

Transportation still remained a problem. Hunters on short vacations begrudged the time it took to get in and out of the canyon. The ranch had one of the few large pieces of level ground along the entire river on which a light plane could land, so an airstrip seemed the answer. Filer bought a small third-hand tractor and bulldozer blade, trucked it to Mackay Bar and boated it down to the ranch. 

Working on his field at intervals' during the next two years, he cleared out the timber and boulders and graded a 900-foot runway, which he since has extended another 500 feet. The first plane that winged low over the Salmon, banked into the wind and touched down beside Crooked Creek gave the Filers an unforgettable thrill. Their isolation was ended. It meant also that sportsmen from points as distant as Dallas or Los Angeles could fly directly to the ranch in one day. And inevitably it gave Paul the itch to fly himself. 

The first flying-school operator he went to told him that the Salmon River Range was no classroom for a tyro, who tended to freeze at the controls. Air pockets over the great canyon were treacherous. The few emergency strips in the region were, for the most part, short, narrow and tricky to approach. To land on Filer-s strip, for instance, a flier had to make two . tight turns between granite cliffs towering 2000 feet on either side. A second's miscalculation could be fatal. Disheartened, Paul gave up the idea. 

A veteran mountain pilot, Ivan Gustin of Lewiston, revived his hope. "I can teach you to fly," Gus told him. "If you prove out I'll sell you this plane in my hangar. But it stays here till I'm satisfied that you can handle it safely under any conditions." 

Paul took up flying with the same furious application with which he'd tackled the river, and under Gus's guidance he gradually conquered his nervousness in rough air. Months later, after logging nearly 200 hours, he shot three perfect landings in succession at the ranch. Braking to a stop, he turned to Gus and said, "Now do I get my plane?" He did. "Paul wasn't any kid, and that terrain is murder," Gus said later. "But, knowing him, I knew he could learn. I never saw a man who wanted to fly so badly." Since then Paul has flown his two-seater all over the West promoting more business, but mostly he uses it to spot game from the air or to bring in supplies. In a sense, having his own plane has brought the world to his doorstep, for he flies into town on errands, over a breath-taking jumble of peaks, as casually as any suburbanite driving to the supermarket. He no longer has to advertise. Most of his hunters are repeaters; the youngest so far a fourteen-year-old boy, the oldest a retired octogenarian. Both got their meat. He can afford to be choosy now and takes only people that he knows and likes or those recommended by friends. Except during hunting season, when he hires an extra wrangler or two, it remains a simple family-size enterprise. 

During the summer months any number might turn up unannounced-smoke jumpers off a fire line, a Forest Service trail crew, neighbors dropping in for a visit. Salmon residents are sociable, friends often staying a week or more, and to relieve some of the congestion Paul decided to build a guest Cabin. Through the winter he cut the biggest yellow pines he could find, trimmed and peeled and hauled them to the site, a bluff overlooking the river. That spring the runoff reached record heights. Day after day the muddy waters crept up the marker. Then a violent rainstorm raised the river level several feet overnight. The Salmon surged over the top, flooded the lower field and swept every log downstream beyond recovery, washing out months of labor. At that moment Filer came as close to quitting the ranch as he ever has. But Marybelle talked him out of it, and within six months he had cut more logs and finished the cabin, a sturdy two-unit structure. 

As a side line he began to guide more fishermen and branched out into tours for the growing number of white-water enthusiasts. Don Smith had been experimenting for years with boats of safer design, and from him Paul learned most of his rapids-shooting technique. In time he ran the upper river, including such terrors as Salmon Falls, The Growler, Bailey, Gun Barrel and The Whiplash, and lower rapids like Chittum and Carey Falls. He bought a larger boat, then built a still larger one himself, a sleek fiberglass beauty of seventy horsepower that carries up to a ton of cargo and can skim over the water at thirty miles an hour. Ironically, it was in this boat that he had his closest squeak. 

The paint was barely dry when he offered to haul a load of engines upriver during low-water stage. There are two schools of thought on this subject. Old-timers contend that high water is more dangerous, but Filer has found it otherwise. The channels are narrower at low water, he says, a condition that demands split-second timing and maneuvering, and the shallows are a greater hazard. On this occasion he tried to follow Smith up the middle of Big Mallard, somehow broached in the current and smashed against a boulder. The impact hurled him overboard into the rapids. Swimming for his life, battered from rock to rock, he kept afloat until Smith could race back and pull him out. The boat was badly holed and almost capsized before they could beach her.

"I thought I was a goner," he said. "But one thing I learned: you can't fight this river. She'll beat you every time."

He did score one victory though. Downriver, Dry Meat Rapids remained an impassable one-way barrier. On every trip he had to portage, laboriously transferring passengers and cargo from one boat to another. Finally he and neighbor Glen Rice agreed they had put up with this nuisance long enough. They rigged a boom out over the boiling current. Paul lowered himself into the water with a rope around his waist and tamped dynamite under the offending boulders. Three blasts ripped open a channel. For the first time since white men had looked upon the Salmon it was no longer a River of No Return. It was now possible to power a boat upstream from its mouth to the point where Capt. William Clark turned back 155 years before. 

Historically the Filers are Johnnies-come-lately. The first inhabitants were Tukuarika Indians, who left their burial mounds and artifacts scattered along the creek banks. Gold was discovered in nearby Florence in 1862, placer miners dispossessed the redskins in the Sheep-eaters' War some years later and squatted along every river bar. By the time Pete arrived all the pay dirt had been cleaned out, but he bought the mineral rights- for $500, and a lame mare to clinch the deal-for what then seemed a valid reason. He'd heard a rumor that the Union Pacific Railroad planned to build a transcontinental line through the canyon. The railroad never materialized, but Pete has stayed on, through good times and bad, for nearly half a century. The depression, not gold, brought Filer into the country. In 1933 he left the University of Idaho in his sophomore year and wandered into Orogrande, hunting a job. The only one available was cook's flunky at eight dollars a week. He cut stove wood, washed dishes and swept out; then proved he was smarter than many a college graduate by marrying the cook's daughter, who had come to visit her  mother during a holiday. With the first $300 saved out of his wages he bought a few supplies and opened a store in a ramshackle but rent-free cabin. As an inducement to trade he nailed an apple box to the wall for a letter receptacle, thereby launching himself as the community's only merchant and unofficial postmaster. 

As the business grew, Marybelle gave up nursing and went to work behind the counter, but since there was no doctor for fifty miles everyone in trouble called on her anyway. Delivering midnight babies and treating injured miners became a commonplace. Paul boned up on first aid so that when she was out of town he could answer emergency calls in her stead. During these years they built up their most important asset-friends. Because there were no musicians to play for dances, Marybelle took up the accordion and taught herself by correspondence. How many down-and-out prospectors he grubstaked, only Paul knows. Gradually the old settlers, a clannish breed suspicious of newcomers, began to thaw. 

Then the owner of the biggest mine opened a rival store and ordered his employees not to patronize Filer's at pain of being fired. Ignoring this ukase, the miners rallied to Paul's support and sneaked into his premises after dark. Within a few weeks the mine owner hollered uncle and closed his doors. 

"We were lucky we made a lot of good friends," he says now, looking back at those early struggles. "Without friends we wouldn't have lasted a year on the river. Everybody helps out, whether it's flying a sick kid to the hospital or digging an irrigation ditch. Once these people get to know you the sky's the limit." 

One friend explained it this way: "The secret of Filer's success is that he loves to have people around. That store of his got to be a home-away-from-home for every mossback in the country. He had a beer-parlor license, too, and these fellows would drift in after batching on the river for maybe six months. They had a thirst, sure, but what they wanted most was talk and companionship and then some of Marybelle’s cooking. There wasn't any hotel, so Paul made them welcome; and they'd bed down on the floor or anywhere handy, day or night. A crazy way to run a business, but it paid."

From late February, when the spring steelhead run starts, through the end of hunting season in November, the ranch overflows with visitors. Then the last sportsman departs, Dixie Ranger Station closes down and the nearest neighbors- ten miles in either direction-go "outside" for the winter. Quiet settles over the canyon. But for Paul the winter months are anything but slack. One year he modernized the house; another he built a hangar for his plane. His next scheme is a hydroelectric plant. He has the water power and some war-surplus equipment ready to fly in by sections. All he needs is time.

Life for Marybelle is easier now. She still home-preserves 400 pounds of elk meat every fall and a "ton or so of fruit and vegetables in season, but a mail plane flies in twice a month throughout the year, weather and forest fires permitting, and when the phone line is up she can chat with other wives along the river. In her spare time she writes a weekly column for the county newspaper. 

But life here can be lonely for a woman, too, as she will testify. When business takes both men away from home she must stay behind to feed the stock, with only two dogs for company. "Whenever I get to feeling blue and sorry for myself," she says, "and envying women in the city with all their comforts, I think about Polly Bemis and what she had to put up with. Then I realize how lucky I am." 

"China Polly" Bemis, probably Idaho’s most famous woman pioneer, lived in a meadow just across the river, and her cabin can be seen through the trees. Born Lalou Natoy in Canton, she was smuggled into this country in the 1860's as the concubine of a wealthy Chinese in the gold camp of Warren. According to one romantic legend a white gambler named Charles Bemis won her in a poker game, and she is still remembered as the "poker bride." The true story is that she saved Bemis's life when he was wounded by a revolver shot by fishing the bullet out of his eye socket with a crochet needle. Later he married her and moved down to his placer claim on the river. She left it only twice in the next thirty-seven years, until she died at the age of eighty-four.

The Filers often speak of luck; referring to their own, for they feel they have been extremely blessed. Recently a cloudburst cut the airstrip in two, a windstorm demolished the hangar, a flash flood washed away twenty cords of firewood and Paul lost a new $750 outboard in a pool below Ludwig Rapids, all within the span of a few months. Once anyone of these would have seemed a disaster, but now the Filers accept such accidents philosophically. It could have ebee worse, they will tell you. 

Not even the projected Crevice Dam worries them unduly. Crevice, a potential Federal damsite some distance downriver, would create a lake more than fifty miles long. If the population growth of the Pacific Northwest continues at its present explosive rate, officials say, construction of the dam will become a certainty-perhaps within a dozen years, unless some cheap form of nuclear power is developed in the meantime. The dam for which preliminary surveys have been made, would tame the lower Salmon once and for all, incidentally covering Shepp Ranch with something like 200 feet of water. 

The Filers are too preoccupied with day-to-day realities to brood about anything so indefinite. They have few regrets and no illusions about the future. They didn't expect to strike it rich when they settled on the river ten years ago and they don't now, although their property has increased tremendously in value during that time. Patented land has become scarce in the national-forest area, much in demand by city dwellers eager to get away from it all. Paul has turned down several tempting offers. If the day does come when they have to sell out to the Government, would they move back to town? Paul and Marybelle say no. America’s last frontiers are shrinking rapidly, but there's still virgin country farther up river. They pioneered once; they could do it again. .....