"I'd Do It Again in a Minute!": the Civilian Conservation Corps on the Salmon National Forest

by Michael Crosby

Contents: Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps comes to Lemhi County -- 1933-34, down the Salmon River -- 1935-36, the peak years of the CCC -- 1937-42, a long good-bye -- Bibliography --Chronology -- Map -- Pages from the scrapbook --Index.

82 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm of the opinion that Franklin Roosevelt's policies and programs, almost without exception, disastrously extended the Great Depression longer than it would have otherwise lasted. One of the only exceptions was the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC. That program took tens of thousands of young unemployed men from around the country--but primarily from cities where they were wasting away or potentially falling into crime--and sent them to under-developed parts of the country to work at infrastructure projects like building roads, digging irrigration canals for agriculture, cleaning up forests for protection against wildfires, etc. With amazingly prescient timing, the works of the CCC accomplished two important things: it put the country in a condition to mobilize more fully when war came less than 10 years later, and it strengthened and hardened the generation of young men who would fight and win that war.

This marvelous work of research goes into glorious detail about the history of the CCC as a whole, but particularly the amazing things they accomplished in the area of Lemhi County, Idaho, that was about as remote and forbidding a wilderness in the 1930s as anywhere in the lower 48, or even Alaska. It enumerates the various "camps" that rotated through the Salmon National Forest and where the men came from, and is full of anecdotes about their activities and their interactions with the handful of residents of nearby Idaho towns. It's packed with wonderfully illustrative photos and the text is a fun, easy read. This is local history at its best.

My only real complaint is that the only map in the book--the only one it needs, really--is a black-and-white line drawing that is missing most of the detail that would make it more useful. But for 1997, before good map drawing software was generally available, it's sufficient.