Lower Grand Valley before the dam

 

Panorama of lower Grand Valley

 

Native Americans on the South Fork of the Snake River

Today is Indigenous Peoples Day! One of the best ways to celebrate is to learn about the history of Native Americans in our area. These pages are scans from the book, Our Turn In Paradise: On the South Fork of the Snake River by Lynn Wiese.  Copies are available for sale. Contact us via email (svoldtimers@gmail.com) to get your very own copy.  It's a great book.

In this section, Lynn provides a lot of background information about the sentiments of the time regarding native Americans.  I've highlighted some keywords pertaining to Grand Valley for the Atlas of Drowned Towns because I'm still working on that project, telling a complete story of the people of Grand Valley before and after the land was claimed by government, both to gift to white settlers through the Homestead and Desert Lands Acts and later displacing them all for the Palisades Dam Project that flooded the farms, businesses, town-sites, schools, and unrecognized indigenous sites in 1958.

Although it wasn’t the Palisades Dam project that drove the Native Americans from Grand Valley, it was the Federal Government policies that privatized the lands and gave white settlers the ability to stake claim to the lands they historically hunted, fished and gathered from. Lynn Wiese tells a very fair story of the plight of Native Americans. I think there's an interesting parallel between the natives being driven from the lands they were the stewards of and the settlers being driven from the same lands by the same government.

 

The old road and the new road......,...

 Well, a decision was made; the road was rerouted and the schools consolidated.  They were going to flood the grand valley, build a dam for all Idahoans' prosperity. Hardworked homesteads left for simple pennies per acre.  What did they have invested in them?  Blood. Sweat. Tears.

In the lower picture you can see both roads. Photo credit is hazy: Larry Fleming? Dam Kids? Let me know and I'll fix it.......

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reservoir Displaces Longtime Farm Families

 

This article is from the Post Register.  This image is from a binder of memorabilia about the Dam Kids collected by Larry Fleming over the years.  All of the contents of the binder have been scanned and sent to The Atlas of Drowned Towns for them to add to their database. We will regularly be posting images and articles from the binder to this blog and we will share those posts on our social media.  The best way to stay up to date on the progress of our research into Grand Valley is to follow our Facebook page, Swan Valley Old Timers. 

 

 

Handdrawn Map of Grand Valley by JoAnn Cromwell and Josie Byrd

 Here's another hand-drawn map of Grand Valley before the Palisades Reservoir flooded the valley.  Let us know about any errors or discrepancies, as we are using this information to make sure we tell an accurate story of the families because of the Palisades Dam Project.