Beware old history books

Beware old history books — sometimes they are about as accurate as a Facebook meme. One such book that comes up from time to time is “History of the State of Idaho” by C. J. Brosnan, published in 1918. As Judith Nielsen of the University of Idaho wrote, the volume was, “designed as a textbook for high school freshmen.” Other editions were published in 1926, 1935 and 1948, but we will get to that soon enough.

Let’s begin on page 74 of the 1918 edition where we find the following: “The open, grassy plain near the mouth of the Portneuf River was a favorite meeting-place for Bonneville’s men and he selected this site for his second winter camp. It was located about ten miles northwest of the site of the town of Bancroft in the present Bannock County. Clear springs of water abounded here and grass grew in abundance in the open plain. It was near the future Oregon Trail, and only a few miles away was the site of Fort Hall, the converging point of numerous trails. In this favored region the Bonneville party passed their second winter in Idaho....”

That may have sounded about right to Brosnan who had only lived in Boise for six years by the time the book came out. To those of us who actually grew up in East Idaho, it is abundantly clear that Brosnan’s geographic knowledge was far from accurate.

However, that does not mean Brosnan was without qualifications. After all, he was the head of the history department at Boise High School at the time, a position that was loosely equivalent to a community college professorship today. Brosnan almost certainly used maps published with Washington Irving’s telling of Bonneville’s story and tried to compare them with early 1900s maps of East Idaho. Still, let’s take a look at how many errors he had in that short passage given his limited knowledge and minimal resources.

First, the mouth of the Portneuf is nowhere near Bancroft. For those not used to the terminology, a river’s “mouth” is where it enters into another body of water. In this case, the Snake River. In relation to Bancroft, the mouth of the Portneuf was, before the advent of the American Falls Reservoir, about 46 miles west-northwest from Bancroft. Brosnan is off by 36 miles and in the wrong direction.

It is sort of true that the area “about ten miles northwest of Bancroft” is an “open plain.” Well, not really. The upper Portneuf valley is indeed a valley, but the area indicated by Brosnan would place the camp on the western rolling hills. He might have meant north-by-northwest, which would be at about Chesterfield, which also lies on rolling hills. So, that is also a clear miss.

There are indeed some springs near Chesterfield, but only the most imprecise and flowery prose would say, “clear springs of water abounded here.” It is an even bigger problem when we read what Bonneville actually conveyed through Irving about the springs, “(which) gush out of the earth in sufficient quantity to turn a mill and furnish beautiful streams, clear as crystal and full of trout of large size.” The upper Portneuf is a nice trout fishery, but nothing like what Bonneville described is in that valley.

It is true though that the Oregon Trail passed Chesterfield, but Chesterfield is emphatically not “only a few miles (from) the site of Fort Hall.” Following the standard route, it is nearly 50 miles to Old Fort Hall. Not even the intrepid Bonneville would call that “only a few miles,” particularly when you look at the terrain between the two points. It is possible on this point that Brosnan may have been confusing Wyeth’s Old Fort Hall with the later military Fort Hall on Lincoln Creek, but that is still 25 miles away over the mountains.

Another issue is with the timeline. Brosnan says the winter camp was near the mouth of the Portneuf and, “only a few miles away was the site of Fort Hall.” The problem is Wyeth’s men did not build Fort Hall until July 1834, about eight months after Bonneville camped at the mouth of the Portneuf during the winter of 1833-1834. Brosnan’s inelegant wording makes the two locations sound contemporaneous.

This all may sound like nitpicking and worrying over nothing. However, history is built on details and it is important to get them as right as we can. Also, we are being no harder on Brosnan than he was on himself. After all, we all make mistakes and that is one reason why new versions of books are published. In Brosnan’s 1935 edition it is clear he knew he had some work to do. He wrote the following on page 77:

“The open, grassy plain near the mouth of the Portneuf River was a favorite meeting place for Bonneville’s men and he selected this site for his second winter camp. It was located in the vicinity of the town of Bancroft in the present Bannock County. Clear springs of water abounded here and grass grew in abundance in the open plain. It was near the future Fort Hall, the converging point of numerous trails.”

He hedged a bit with the phrase, “vicinity of the town of Bancroft…,” but I suppose 46 miles as the crow flies could be considered “in the vicinity” back then. Notice though how every other criticism leveled above has been corrected. It is probable that in the intervening years someone pointed out to Brosnan his errors and he had the personal integrity to go back and fix them in future editions.

Perhaps just as important is what happened in Brosnan’s career between 1918 and 1935. Here we can take another look at Nielsen’s brief biography of Brosnan:

“From 1920 — 1921 he was an Austin Scholar at Harvard University, and after receiving his M.A. from that institution in 1921 he returned to Idaho as a member of the history faculty at the University of Idaho. In order to complete his doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley, Prof. Brosnan took a leave of absence during the 1928/29 school year. In 1930 he became head of the Department of American History.... In addition to teaching he did extensive historical writing on the northwest; he was the author of a book on the Oregon pioneer missionary Jason Lee, a book which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1932... and he wrote the Idaho sections for several encyclopedias. He was a Fellow of the American Geographical Society, a member of the American Historical Association, the Northwest Scientific Association and the Oregon Historical Society.”

So, not only was Brosnan a man of academic integrity, he also grew significantly as a scholar in the intervening years between 1918 and 1935. Furthermore, he had far greater resources at his disposal at Berekley and Moscow than he had in Boise. Why anyone would want the first edition of his high school textbook rather than the 1948 edition is beyond me. Yes, the 1918 edition is free online, but as they say, you get what you pay for. In this case you can get a free textbook written by a good high school teacher who was still new to the state or pay a few dollars and get a textbook written by a leading mid-20th century luminary in Idaho history.

So where did Bonneville make his second winter camp? Brosnan admirably, and accurately, answers that question in his 1948 edition, “The open grassy plain near the Portneuf River south of Fort Hall was a favorite meeting place for Bonneville’s men and he selected this site for his second winter camp. The party killed buffalo near the town of Bancroft in the present Bannock County. Clear springs of water abounded near his camp on the Fort Hall Bottoms and grass grew in abundance in the open plain. His winter camp was near the future Oregon Trail, and a few miles south of Fort Hall, the converging point of numerous trails. In this favored region the Bonneville party passed their second winter in Idaho....”

Unfortunately, bad information tends to stick around once it is in print. As much as he probably wished to, there was no way for Brosnan to gain control of all the copies of his flawed 1918 edition. Today it is out of copyright and so it is extensively published online and liberally quoted (with and without attribution) while the 1948 edition cannot be freely published due to copyright. From those free online sources the flawed information gets picked up and spread on social media. People take it as a proven fact because they can do a search on Google, find Brosnan’s 1918 edition and read it in black and white. After all, it is in a book and it was used in schools so it must be accurate, right? Some may even check Brosnan’s credentials and see the deservedly glowing biography of him on the University of Idaho website, but they do not take the time to see if they are quoting the most recent version of his book. Why bother, it could not possibly be that different, right?

As a wise man once said, the problem isn’t so much what people don’t know, it’s what people know that just ain’t so. Just because it is in a book and we learned it in school does not mean we received the right facts. Just because it was written long ago by a historian who later ascended to the heights of academia does not mean his first edition is worth the paper it is printed on. Brosnan showed his integrity by being willing to examine new evidence, admit when he was wrong and correct his mistakes. The rest is up to us.