Synopses & Reviews
Swiftwater People is a collection of tape-recorded and edited interviews with more than 40 homesteaders, log drivers, railroad men, flunkeys, mule skinners, gamblers and Wobblies. In their own words they tell what it was like to be one of six girl flunkeys in a hundred man logging camp; to be a single woman homesteader and lost; to be a storekeeper's wife and expected to be the midwife for the neighborhood; to escape from your flooded home in a rowboat across a half mile of streaming river that had been pasture, to the safety of high land with your husband, two kids and only a box of chocolates; to be a log driver clinging to a high limb while two men drown and another makes a magnificent ride on the crest of the Marble Creek flood; to be driven from home and sweetheart by the Depression and almost freeze in a boxcar while looking for work; to be caught in a tug by a wild storm on Lake Coeur d'Alene; to ride a runaway sleigh load of logs. These are the lives of homesteaders, woman flunkeys, lumberjacks and firefighters in the swiftwater country of the St. Joe and St. Maries rivers.