For thousands of years the Shoshoni Indians who became known as “Sheepeaters” roamed the Middle Fork country of Idaho, wintering along "the river of no return" and following the game to higher elevations in the summer, digging camas in the headwaters meadows, fishing for salmon in late summer. Their pictographs, house pits, hunting blinds, and obsidian flakes remain. The Sheepeater Indian war, a minor and final chapter in the Indian wars…of the Northwest, occurred in 1879. Cavalry penetrated the Middle Fork and Big Creek country, with great difficulty and left with a better sense of the geography of the Middle Fork country. At least one of their scouts, Dave Lewis, remained for the rest of his life, living on Big Creek until the 1930s. In the late 1800s, during the latter part of the homestead era, a number of people established homesteads, primarily between Pistol Creek and the Flying B. In this section of river, several tributaries formed alluvial fans that were large enough and flat enough to establish small ranches, if the tributary could be diverted to irrigate the flat. The remoteness of the area meant that ranching was always a subsistence operation, and by the end of the Depression raising livestock along the Middle Fork was mostly over. If only this homestead could talk I thought, what stories it would tell. I stopped the car to take this picture......Available as 8 x 11 or 11 x 17 b & w photo or water color print on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching Fine Art Inkjet Paper and each photograph is personally approved and hand-signed by me, the artist, dr. ralph goldman