Our Daily Sykes #41 – Horace Takes Aim

"Ira S. Dole" is stamped on the slide. Horace is the subject - taking aim at what? The terrain looks like Hell's Canyon on the Snake River, but the water, I think, is not wide enough. Somewhere in Sykes hundreds of slides might be the one he snapped at this moment. We will keep an eye out.

5 thoughts on “Our Daily Sykes #41 – Horace Takes Aim”

  1. This is almost certainly Hells Canyon–the narrow area close to where the Hells Canyon Dam was eventually built. Ira Dole visited at least twice in the early 1940s. I am currently working with footage that he and his fellow adventurer, Dr. N. M. Purviance, shot at this time. I’d appreciate any other info you have on Ira Dole’s work.

  2. Thanks Patricia for the likely identification. I’m wondering how did an elderly cameraperson smake it down there? I think I’ll go google earth the dam(s) and see if I can find a likely route. Alas I know anything more about Ira Dole – unless you know better. I am getting increasingly forgetful. I don’t remember seeing any other Dole slides in the collection.. There are other pictures of Horace in the area and some of them having posing with other men. Perhaps Dole is among them. There may be two examples in the “daily sykes” series. If you find them and Dole is among them, please make a comment on the same. They may have belonged to a camera club together. Also Horace was active in the Masonic Lodge – a lodge historian. Perhaps Dole was too.
    Paul

    1. Hello, I have a photo of Mill Creek by the grist mill in Aumsville, Oregon taken by Horace Sykes. I would like to know more about his life and work. Did you happen to know him?

  3. I just happened on your site again and saw your response.
    So here is some more of what I know: In July 1942, Dole and Purviance rode the mailboat–the Idaho–upriver from Lewiston, Idaho, to the head of navigation at Johnson Bar–about 93 miles, making stops along the way to drop off mail and supplies at the ranches along the way. Other tourists were on board and Kyle McGrady was the pilot. They had a 16mm technicolor movie camera with them and planned to use the footage for travelogue presentations to civic organizations, etc. All of this information is from the Lewiston paper, which seems to have recorded every trip the mailboat made, including what (and sometimes who) it carried up and what it brought back.

    From looking at the 45 minutes of footage they shot–of course, there’s no sound–the best I can surmise is that they got off at Johnson Bar and spent the next week (the mailboat would have returned a week later) visiting ranches on the Idaho side of Snake River, even going up to at least one cow camp in the Seven Devils. They had at least one of the young ranchers–Allen “Cougar” Wilson from Granite Creek–as a guide.

    I’m making the final edit on an hour-long documentary that uses their footage along with interviews with 4 or 5 of the old timers who lived up there at that time.

    One of the ranchers from the Oregon side–now in his 80s–was helping me identify places that appear in the footage and then identified himself as a 16 year old walking down from one of the old log ranch houses! He didn’t even remember the occasion.

    I really can’t figure out your website. Can you explain to me what it’s all about???

    Thanks.

  4. Patricia
    I’d surely like to see your documentary when it is ready. Please let me know if there is a way. You ask about this blog. Quite a lot of it has to do with regional history – but not all. Jean and I do a weekly feature in the local pulp – The Seattle Times – on what some call “repeat photography.” It is more popularly called “then and now.” The blog is not built around that, but often our reprinting with many extras of those small black-white Sunday features is the larger contribution that will appear in dorpatsherrardlomont. Those are the joined three names of the principal contributors. There are others, like Ron Edge and his “edge clippings” built upon his large collection of old periodicals. Individually we all have wide interests and are collectors too. Much of what I do involves regional history. For Berangere Lomont, in Paris, it IS Paris – of course. So the blog gives us a chance to “express” these interests – the little time we have to give to them and it. The Horace Sykes photography is a daily (almost) insertion and really the only one. Before the “Daily Sykes” there were spans when the blog was static. Jean points out that it is conventionally more of a web page than a blog, but we keep it a blog because we like responses like yours. So please let us (or me) know about when-where your Snake River film-video may be watched. Imagine isolated cow camps in the Seven Devils!
    Paul

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