Resurrecting Katie Camp –– Town Historian’s Pilgrimage To Idaho

By Dottie Evans

These are the moments that historians live for.

To pore over old letters, ferret out information, ask questions, and follow clues until suddenly you find what you’re looking for. Sometimes it’s right under your nose. More often, as in the case of Town Historian Dan Cruson’s 2,000-mile journey to Idaho this past August, what you find is so much more than what you imagined.

In a recent gift from Irene King Coad, a descendent of the Johnson family, to the Newtown Historical Society, Mr Cruson had received six letters written by Ms Coad’s great-great-aunt, Katherine “Kate” Foote Camp of Newtown to Jane Eliza Camp Johnson between 1906 and 1907.

The letterhead read, “Mission House: Church of the Good Sheppard: Ross Fork, Idaho,” and Miss Camp was writing home to her sister about her experiences teaching children from the nearby Shoshoni-Bannock Indian reservation.

Mr Cruson found the letters “so evocative,” he could not put them down.

“Almost nothing is known about this obscure woman,” he said, while showing slides of his journey to the Newtown Historical Society on January 12.

He had decided he must find the boarding school where Kate Camp taught and lived, and try to learn more about her if possible.

“That’s a historian’s mission. The resurrection of those who would otherwise have been forgotten,” Mr Cruson said.

This determination was what eventually led him to the very room from which Miss Camp wrote the letters nearly a century before.

“Chills ran up and down my spine,” he said, describing that moment. But his discovery did not come easily.

 

A Victorian Woman Among The Shoshoni

Mr Cruson tried to convey what it was about the letters that fascinated him.

“I was fascinated by her descriptions and by the apparent culture clash between this swamp Yankee and the Shoshoni Indians.

“Clearly, Kate Camp was your basic old maid school teacher, and she was totally unprepared to deal with conditions as she found them,” Mr Cruson said.

She was particularly disturbed by the children’s apparent lack of schooling and ignorance of basic personal hygiene. The following excerpts from her letters, read by Mr Cruson, are printed in italics.

Only one student [out of 13] a boy of seven, can understand any English, and he acts as our interpreter…The first thing done was to bathe them, comb and doctor their heads as in most cases, there was plenty of livestock [head lice?], and clothe them as best we could…

Ms Camp taught them to say the Lord’s Prayer, count, learn words, and do useful work, such as emptying slops and making beds. A victim of her Victorian sensibilities, she found herself unable to eat at the same table with them.

After dinner [the midday meal] I have the children again for an hour in their schoolwork. We think an hour at a time is all they can stand, and it is about all I can stand…Their appetites are immense and I wonder if they will ever be filled up.

 

Winter 1906: Early Signs Of Consumption

Mr Cruson mentioned that an especially poignant aspect was the obvious fact that when Kate Camp wrote the letters, she was already suffering from the effects of consumption and did not know it.

 If it was not such hard work to breathe, I could do a good deal more. But I cannot exercise the least bit without being so out of breath. I hope I’ll get over it after awhile, or I shall wish I was in a lower altitude.

This excerpt suggests she felt her exhaustion might have been due to the fact of living at altitude (6,000 feet) in Idaho. However, Mr Cruson felt her physical weakness was more likely the result of the disease already taking hold.

After doing a little sleuthing, Mr Cruson was able to find out that Kate Camp returned to Newtown in 1907 and was taken to a halfway house in Hartford for treatment. She died there on May 31, 1909.

She is buried in the Camp-Johnson plot in Hawley Cemetery, and her stone stands between that of her sister, Julia Ann Tuttle, and her brother, Dr William Camp. Two arched tombstones for her parents, Beach Camp and Catherine Foote Camp, complete the family row. A little distance away, her sister, Jane Eliza Camp Johnson, is buried alongside Ezra L. Johnson.

“Beyond this, and the letters, we know very little else about her life,” Mr Cruson said. “There wasn’t even an obituary in The Bee, just the mention of her burial.”

 

August 2003: An Elder Leads The Way

“Five days after I made the decision to go, I pulled into Poncatello, Idaho, which is the only major town near the reservation,” Mr Cruson wrote in a summary of the journey that was published in January edition of Newtown Historical Society’s newsletter, The Rooster’s Crow.

Before going, he had contacted tribal elders and was lucky to have as his guide a certain “Arnold,” a fourth generation Shoshoni Indian who was well versed in reservation history.

As he and his guide explored the valley of Ross Fork, Mr Cruson heard many tribal stories and exchanged opinions about where the boarding school might be. A trip to the Ross Fork Valley School was disappointing because as soon as he saw it, Mr Cruson realized it could not possibly have been the building Miss Camp described.

Then his luck turned, as the two visited a library in the nearby town of Fort Hall, eight miles away. After hearing Mr Cruson describe what he was searching for, the librarian dropped a bombshell that changed everything. It seemed that Fort Hall had been called Ross Forks before World War II.

“Suddenly I realized that Kate had not been teaching in the valley at all, but had probably been just a few blocks from where I was standing.”

The librarian pointed him in the direction of Fort Hall’s Church of the Good Sheppard, sitting a quarter of a mile away amid a small compound of buildings. Besides the church, these included the caretaker’s house and a church hall. A woman resident of a nearby apartment who just happened to be standing outside remarked to Mr Cruson that the church hall had once been a school.

“Growing increasingly excited, I pulled out one of Kate’s letters in which she describes the room in the basement of the school in which she was living.”

When I wrote before, did I tell you that I had moved downstairs, and have a pleasant room with a door leading into a hall, which has an outside door, two west windows, and one south one.

 Upon hearing this description, the helpful Fort Hall woman exclaimed, “That must be the kitchen!”

Mr Cruson described the next several hours spent carefully examining the rest of the church hall building, including the rooms where the Shoshoni children had slept when it was a boarding school, rooms that Kate had carefully described in one of the letters.

Best of all, he and the Shoshoni guide, the tribal librarian, and the cooperative Fort Hall resident became partners on a mutual journey of discovery, an experience that he said created a new bond between them.

“I was no longer considered one of those foreign ‘white men.’ Newtown’s local history had touched that of Fort Hall, and the result transcended all personal differences. We were communicating on a fundamental level.

“As I left the old school, the sun was just beginning to set. I glanced eastward to see Mount Putnam, just as Kate had seen it a century ago after the week of the long snowstorm.”

 We have had no sunshine for more than a week, and much of the time it has snowed. For two days and nights the wind blew a perfect hurricane…the children have not been able to go out of doors to play and you can imagine what it is to be cooped up in the house for more than a week with thirteen children.

It looks now as if the weather was going to clear –– for I can see Mount Putnam, which I have not seen for more than a week.

“I photographed [Mount Putnam], preserving the image so I could return to it as often as I was so moved to remember the Idaho expedition,” Mr Cruson said, adding the “glow of discovery” stayed with him for the entire trip home.