Silver Threads
War in the Coeur d’ Alenes
1891-1892
by Pat Cary Peek

The McCarthy family, Joe, Clara and their four children, Colleen, Sam, Polly and Annalee, came west with the railroad in the late 1880’s. They had dreams of a new life, but those dreams hung by a thread. That thread was as strong as steel wire and as fragile as a single silk strand. Joe and Sam got work in the Bunker Hill Silver Mine in Wardner, Idaho, but conditions for the workers were dangerous and unpredictable.

Silver mining, unlike the earlier gold mining, required big companies and expensive equipment. The money for the operations came from stockholders back east and millions of dollars worth of ore was shipped out of the country on the railroads, but the miners whose shoulders and backs carried that oar barely made a living.

The unions were just gaining power across the country and Sam became a union agitator and outspoken supporter of worker’s rights. When the whole country exploded into one of the most violent, destructive union battles in the country, he was in the middle of it. The family was never the same. Read More or Buy It!

Cougar Dave
Mountain Man of Idaho
1855-1936
by Pat Cary Peek

Cougar Dave Lewis, miner, guide and bounty hunter, was as wild and free as the mountain, as independent and solitary, as unfathomable and some would say as stubborn and immovable as the peak that bears his name. Pat Cary Peek unravels the mystery of his early life through personal interviews and painstaking research. Read More or Buy It!

One Winter in the Wilderness
by Pat Cary Peek
Including the essay: Fire at Taylor Ranch
by Jim and Holly Akenson!

Through a blend of personal experience, historical fiction, and natural history of the Big Creek River area, One Winter in the Wilderness describes the humorous, frustrating, and sometimes dangerous daily adventure of a wildlife biologist and his wife in Idaho's remote back country.   Read More or Buy It!