Remote US Museum Survives in Hells Canyon

October 26, 2012

Grace Jordan’s kitchen has been spiffed up a bit from the Depression days when it was heavily used by her family and its ranch hands. (Carol M. Highsmith)

The rushing Snake River cut America’s deepest gorge through Idaho in the Rocky Mountains of the American Northwest.

Today, it’s known as Hells Canyon.

Every few kilometers along the way, the river widened and scoured out sandbars. There, protected from biting winds and howling snowstorms high above, Nez Percé Indians fashioned winter villages and buried their dead. Later, around 1880, ranchers took their place.

And in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, ranch foreman Len Jordan and his wife, Grace, bought a ranch there that included a white-frame house, a blacksmith shop, and a rustic cabin.

And because Grace kept a journal that grew into the book Home Below Hell’s Canyon, and Len would become Idaho’s governor, the story of their rough-hewn existence on the remote sandbar would spread throughout the Great Northwest.

This old blacksmith shop is part of the rustic museum complex in hard-to-reach Hells Canyon, Idaho. (Carol M. Highsmith)

The only electricity came from a clever water wheel in Kirkwood Creek that Len had jerry-rigged out of cowbells, bolted to a wheel from an old Model-T Ford.