Knock on wood, so far it seems the county might get off fairly easy for fire season, which hasn't been the case most years. Today's story called Peat Fires and Sod is from the History of Boundary County p.46 and was written by Ray Sims.

"The 1938 peat fire at Parker Creek started on a Sunday afternoon when there were no guards around it. The wind came up and the peat fire spread and it got in the timber and burned for weeks between Parker Creek and Canyon Creek. Thousands of acres of good timber were burned. The fire got down into cropland and started the peat on fire. They had a peat fire go over 200 acres of river bottom land and the crops weren't ripe so we hauled water and hired men and worked trenching the fire. It was a job to haul the water but we made it go a long ways. Peat is decayed vegetation that hasn't completely turned to soil. "The peat fire spread like cancer. The center of the fire burned deeper in the ground than the outside edge, so we just took shovels and worked around the perimeter of the fire and threw it over the ashes. The fires would burn down to water level but, they wouldn't smother themselves out. They'd just keep on burning and spread. They'd carry through the next year underground.

"We did a lot of shoveling but we did have some water and spread around the outer edge of the burn. Water is available in the ditches.

"The farming operations settled the soil down. Mostly in the early years of farming when the ground was like sod, it would burn. After it became cultivated, it became too dense. The sod-like ground would get air easier but when we ground it up fine like powder, there'd be no air in it.

"You'll find the peat all the way from district #3 clear down to District #10. You'll find peat land all along the valley next to the foothills.

"For twenty years after we came here you could look from the highway #95 over to the mountains to the west and see a road over there or what looked like a road but it was a lakeshore up from the early lake here when the glaciers were in. I'd walked up the mountains on hunting trips and found those regular wave action along up there and it was a straight line from Bonners Ferry to Porthill, same elevation. The timber has grown up now-it's pretty hard to see it from a distance.

"The Kootenai River-when the glacier was in Canada-flowed to Sandpoint. When the glacier melted out the river changed its channel and flowed down through the Kootenay Lake and the outlet of the Kootenay Lake joins the Columbia at Castlegar, British Columbia.

"They determined the area of the districts by the mountain streams coming into the river. Now you take over here in District #1, they had to dike Deep Creek out. The district #7 is right across Deep Creek and they had to put a dike there. The size was determined by the mountain streams that flowed through the land to the river. Down there in district #10 Canyon Creek is on the lower end and Parker Creek is on the upper end.

"When it flooded in 1938, they built a dike on the Reilly Bend to separate the Reilly Bend from District # 10. It broke and the water came into the Reilly Bend and we got chunks of peat that floated in district #10 along the foothills when the river raised in there 18-20 feet. That ground came right up and before it could get wet and sink, it flooded clear down to our place and settled out there on our field. I was a whole month with the grader, grading around out there. It was before big bulldozers. That peat was in chunks as big as this room here and they had a growing crop on it and it would be probably three feet thick and it would just be dry peat. There was no wind to push it back out-it just stayed there.

"We finally got our own school down there-the Lindbergh School. We had about 20 pupils. Mary Hawkins was County Superintendent and she helped us get it. Otherwise all those kids would have to row across the river. There was only one family on the other side of the river.

"We had New Year's Eve dinner with her one time. She served us her beaten biscuits. She was very popular but very down-to-earth.

"Our neighbors were Bryan Duffy and Tuffy Kent and both liked to hunt and so we got a hunting party. I said to them, "I'll drive you. Where do you want to go?" They said "Well, go to Boulder Creek-way up to the other end of Boulder Creek." They were talking among themselves all the time about long ago and here, and here, and here, and we wound up way out here north of town at Meadow Creek. They never got out of the rig all afternoon. They didn't want to go hunting, they just wanted to talk among themselves about the early days. In a couple of years, both of them were gone.

"There were several places in the valley where the water would go underground for a quarter of a mile and form a pocket in a low place. It was real nice water, and clean.

"The water gets softer in the river in the spring than it is in the wintertime on account of the snow water off the mountains and the snow water is soft."

The History of Boundary County contains a wealth of information about the county, industries and the people, but certainly not all the stories. Each week the Boundary County Digest publishes Museum Musings as a service to our community and as a reminder of our rich history. Visit the Boundary County Museum at 7229 Main St. Tuesday-Saturday 10-4 to learn more.