Many of the photos in this book were taken by Ernie Day, an Idaho-born photographer who took hundreds of shots of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area and Cecil Andrews White Cloud Wilderness. The collection of photos of popular places like Redfish and Sawtooth Lake from the 60’s and 70’s in this book, accompanied by the stories surrounding them, are interesting compared to what we see now. 

Following a loose timeline, Sawtooth Tales starts out with rumors and stories of early settlers in the Stanley Basin, Custer, Bonanza, Smiley Creek, Ketchum, and Hailey, along with the stories of the men they were named after. In those gold rush days, Custer was a bigger deal than the little trading outpost of Stanley, which can be hard to believe with the current bustling tourist economy of Stanley and Bonanza’s current lack of people, besides those scrounging around for a rare nugget of gold. 

You can still visit the ghost town of Custer, run by a couple that keep the rustic cabins alive in memory with a cute museum in the old schoolhouse. All of Bonanza that still stands are old gravesites, but it’s an interesting stop on the way to a stocked fishing pond along the Yankee Fork. Nestled in a pond a few miles before the ghost towns is the Yankee Fork Gold Dredge, a massive beast of a machine that used to employ hundreds of workers in Custer and Bonanza. You can tour the Dredge and fish in the pond it rests in. Stories of old forgotten mines up the Yankee Fork and the gold found (or not) litter Sawtooth Tales, the urge to pack up a metal detector and go sweep the dredge piles scratches at the back of your mind.

One of my favorite stories in Sawtooth Tales is of Sawtooth Jack, a grizzly bear weighing 900 pounds by some accounts. A man called Dutch Schwartz trapped Jack and supposedly knocked the bear out with chloroform, before parading him around the United States as a fearsome attraction. Grizzlies have been extirpated from the region, and the idea of having that big of a bear roaming around the range and the efforts to catch him is a fun tale. 

I want to add a note that this book was written nearly 50 years ago and does contain words that might offend today’s readers. At the same time, there are some more socially conscious takes on the impact white settlements had on indigenous people and the horrific practices carried out by the United States. I think it’s an interesting mix of attempting to be true to history next to how people in this region thought 50 to 100 years ago, and is definitely worth the read.