Idaho Commission for Libraries

Buffalo Coat (1944) is Carol Ririe Brink's novelized account of events in Moscow, Idaho around the turn of the century. Brink's work details the yearning lives of women and men who feel not quite in tune with their town's spirit, as it traces the rivalries of several town doctors and their visions of life.

Carol Ririe Brink (1895-1981) was born in Moscow, the child of one of the families whose history is adapted in Buffalo Coat. An author of many children's books (including the Newbery Medal-winning Caddie Woodlawn), she also wrote an Idaho trilogy for adults, Buffalo Coat, Strangers in the Forest, and Snow in the River.

Honey in the Horn (1935), a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by H. L. Davis, tells of the lives of Oregon pioneers. With realistic and colorful detail and rough humor, the work describes the quirky individuality and essential isolation of various frontier types of men and women, as it describes the search for a suspected murderer and the yearning relationship between a young man and a gypsy-like horse seller's daughter.

Stump Ranch Pioneer (1942), an autobiographical account by Nelle Portrey Davis, chronicles how Davis and her family acquired land in the Idaho panhandle in 1936 after their ranch in eastern Colorado failed in the dustbowl. The book is full of optimism about the value of hard work and simple, homey life, and about Americans' ability to be self-sufficient and neighborly in the face of Depression hardship.

Mountain Man (1965) is the story of Sam Minard, a trapper in the Rocky Mountains, based on an actual mountain man, John Johnson.  When his Indian wife is murdered, Sam Minard vows to avenge her death. The novel served as inspriration for the 1972 movie Jeremiah Johnston.

Vardis Fisher was a prolific and versatile author, born and raised in Idaho. He spent his childhood on a homestead in Swan Valley, was educated at the University of Utah and the University of Chicago, and after some years, returned to Idaho to write and teach.  He died in 1968.  

A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1972) presents the reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, the cultivated Eastern wife of an engineer, who came to the Boise River Canyon in the 1880s. Foote, an illustrator and writer of short stories and sketches, chronicles her ambivalence to Idaho and to the West—she loves the harsh beauty of the land, but dislikes the isolation and the debilitating roughness of the life for women.