Chapter Seventeen
The first mining operation in the Boulder–White Cloud Mountains reportedly began when a miner named Robinson filed a placer claim on a tributary of the Salmon River in the seventh decade of the nineteenth century. The claim became known as Robinson’s Bar (the name was later changed to Robinson Bar). With hand tools and shovels wielded mostly by Chinese immigrants, Mr. Robinson installed an extensive network of ditches and sluice boxes to divert water from the creek for the purpose of extracting gold. Remnants of those ditches still exist at that ranch.
A placer is a natural concentration of heavy minerals (such as gold) deposited by gravity and water. Placer mining involves the use of water to separate the heavier minerals from lighter materials such as sediment or sand. Panning, sluicing, and dredging are all methods of placer mining.
“Placer” was one of many words I learned in my adopted state, where folks speak the same language as the rest of America—and yet not. Some words have different meanings in the Wild West than, say, on the South Side of Chicago, where “draw” could be a tie game between the Cubs and the Phillies, or it could be something an artist does. In Idaho a draw is the place between two hills down which water flows.
In common usage, reference to a draw is made in the late fall when a man holding a rifle says, “Y’see that big bull elk up that draw?”
“What drawer?” I asked the first time I heard a hunter use the word. I was imagining the place in my bureau where I kept my socks.
“See’m up there?” he said, using the barrel of his rifle to indicate a standing dead tree toward the top of the hill. “He’s right behind that snag.”
After puzzling for a moment over how a pulled thread on a sweater could obscure a bull elk, I queried, “Snag? Where?”
The hunter pointed again to the standing dead tree, behind which were some branches. Suddenly some of the branches moved. They were the rack of the aforementioned bull elk, which had no sooner moved than the hunter raised his rifle, aimed, and Kaboom!! Suddenly the elk was no longer behind the snag up the draw. It was good luck for the elk (though not for the hunter) that the hunter had missed. When last seen (at least by me) the elk was bounding up the hill with his rack and the rest of him intact.
In New York I had always understood a bar to be a place where you ordered whiskey, and a bench to be where you sat while you drank it. In Idaho, a bar is a flat piece of land along a creek or a river, and a bench is a larger flat piece of land higher up, not necessarily near water. In the context of mountains, “flat” can mean anything between horizontal and steeper than the face of a cow.
Not to put too fine a point on it, in Idaho a bar can also be a place where you order whiskey and a bench something you sit on while you drink it. The town in which I vote has several of both kinds of bars and benches within the space of a quarter mile.
To keep things fair and balanced, a future lesson could cover subway etiquette and priority positioning for hailing a taxi on Broadway in inclement weather. Hint: the optimum position is in front of a person who is already trying to hail a taxi, unless he or she is wielding a large umbrella, in which case you’d be better off looking for a bench in a bar.
Then there’s the meaning of bar as in lawyer, and bench as in judge.