Re: MtMan-List: Battle of Pierre's Hole

["Carpenter's" <kcarpenter@bigbear.net>]

Matt Despain wrote:

> Dear Gene:
>
> Yes the general area of the battle was near the area where Teton Pass
> enters into the old Pierre's Hole. The exact sight is not known.  You can't
> trust Washington Irving's account fully since we don't know what he added
> or left out of Bonneville's original manuscript.  But there are indications
> that it occured near a marshy zone, which if you look on todays USGS maps
> is up the canyon a ways and which corresponds to the historic path that
> existed north of the modern highway there (you can see this natural defile
> on the USGSmap too).  I have heared rumor of an archeological dig to be
> done up there, perhaps much the same as was done at the Little Bighorn
> Battlefield in the 1980s.  Until then we just don'd know for certain.
>
> Matt Despain
> University of Oklahoma

Dear List:
In 1989 or 90, while on a trip visiting all the original sites, following
Gowan's book, I went to a museum, or a historical society in, I believe,
Tetonia, ID.  The ladies there sent me over to an elderly Mormon gentleman, who
was then in his nineties.  We didn't know him and he didn't know us.  But, when
we knocked on the screen door, we heard a voice inside say, come on in, without
any introduction or reason for being there. Try that in L.A.  I wrote his name
down in the notes I was taking.  He told me that the fortification breastwork,
from the battle, still existed when he was a kid, growing up in that area.
I'll have my wife try and find these notes, if any one is interested.  She may
know where they are.