Sent by his wealthy merchant father, Curtis Edwin Bolton sailed to Europe in 1832 to study French and German, leaving his fiancée behind in New York. At twenty-years-old Curtis Edwin Bolton was 5’9” with blue eyes and black hair. He returned stateside in the fall of 1834. As a new convert, he pilgrimaged with the diaspora of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1848. His first winter, he taught French in the evenings in their bedbug-infested fort. In 1849, Curtis accepted a mission call to serve in France, embarking with a small group of missionaries. While Curtis labored to translate the Book of Mormon into French in his Paris apartment in 1851, a tangible stillness fell upon the noisy bustling city as Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s troops flooded through the streets nearby. On signal, the soldiers leveled their weapons at the innocent bystanders watching out their windows. With an infernal roar of artillery, they bombarded thousands of men, women, and children. After hiding in his apartment for two days, Curtis stepped out, stunned by the destruction of the coup d’état. He resided in France until 1853.  Life pulled him to the frontier desert areas of southern Utah Territory. He led a Fourth of July celebration in Santaquin, rode the rapids in the Muddy Mission, and taught school in Long Valley and Monroe. Popular in local elections, he served as Piute County Clerk and Justice of the Peace, in addition to merchant, miner, and sawmill owner.  Proud of his robust nature, he boasted he could walk fifty miles in one day. His strength and endurance fueled many of his accomplishments. In his sixties, he homesteaded in Piute County near the Sevier River, where he built his final home, a two-room log house with a shingle roof and board floor. He also dug miles of irrigation ditches and cultivated twenty acres (SLC Land Office, Curtis Bolton homestead file). He founded a town called Boltonheim, meaning “Bolton home” in German, located five miles south of Marysvale, where he served as the postmaster from 1878 until 1880. In those days, a letter only cost three cents for postage. A stroke in 1883 prompted Curtis to transfer ownership of his homestead to Sarah Howes, in exchange for her pledge of lifelong care. After battling stiffness in his right hand for two years, he stepped down from his role as county clerk at the age of seventy-three. Curtis’s life reflects the adventurous drive that brought many pioneering individuals westward.

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William Allan Stonebraker and his family were among the first non-Native American migrants to homestead in Idaho’s Chamberlain Basin along the Salmon River. Their 409-acre homestead and ranch, established in 1898, generated lucrative ventures for the Stonebraker family. In its early days, the homestead survived by raising beef cattle for neighboring gold rush communities like Thunder Mountain. In 1900, William, already a practiced freighter, struck gold when he won a trail construction contract connecting Grangeville to Thunder Mountain— later known as the Three Blaze Trail. Eventually, he worked as a pack train operator along this route, started his own pack train business in Stites, and lead hunting excursions from his homestead. In the 1920s, following these endeavors, he adapted his homestead into a dude-ranch. All the while, William brought along his camera.

The experiences of the Stonebraker men and their expeditions in mining, ranching, and big game hunting are well documented in the Stonebraker Photograph Collection, donated to the University of Idaho library in 2003. However, little is shown of the Stonebraker women who remained on the family homestead during their husband’s and brother’s entrepreneurial outings. Out of 540 photographs, less than 50 images of William’s first wife, Lillian Carter, second wife, Golda, and various sisters, friends, and daughters survive in the collection taken by William between 1900 and 1934. The photographs that exist offer a glimpse into these women’s lives as homesteaders.

In the late nineteenth century, white women in working-class families traditionally performed homemaking tasks like child rearing, cooking, cleaning, baking, sewing, and laundry. For women homesteaders, household labor also included planting, feeding, plowing, herding, cultivating, harvesting, culling, gathering, processing, storing, preparing, and selling or serving the food products gleaned from their homesteads. Photographs in the collection depict the Stonebraker women in trousers and work boots, indicating that they worked outside and handled livestock, particularly in the homestead’s later years as a dude-ranch. Farm work and interactions with livestock signify that the Stonebraker women occasionally transcended the rigid gender notions of nineteenth century homemaking.

Homesteading often demanded from the Stonebraker women increased responsibilities in outside work that surpassed the antebellum domesticity ideals of the time. Their work in the Chamberlain Basin would end abruptly following William’s death in 1932. Golda sold the Stonebraker homestead shortly thereafter and, eventually in 1975, the homestead was acquired by the Forest Service. The cabin on the Stonebraker property still stands today, however it is reachable only by “horseback, foot, or air”, serving to remind of the homestead’s remoteness and enduring testament to the forgotten women who worked to keep it operating.

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