Those folk familiar with Wagon Days know the name Horace C. Lewis. He's the son of Isaac Lewis, who meandered west from Chicago, bought land in what is now Sun Valley, opened a bank and raised a family. Horace owned the Fast Freight Line, which carried ore (and other items) in a train of wagons across Trail Creek pass on a circuitous 180-mile route that took a full two weeks to complete. Now 119 years old, the ore wagons were given to Ketchum in perpetuity by the Lewis family to be shown once a year. The rest of the year, they are preserved in the Ore Wagon Museum.
The first Wagon Days was held in 1958, on the 85th birthday of Ketchum's Grand Dame Katherine Lewis, Horace's widow.
On Saturday, during the 50th Annual Wagon Days parade there will be a gaggle of former parade grand marshals including Hildegarde Lewis Pierce, 78.
The daughter of Palmer Lewis, she and her brother Cutler were grand marshals in the 2000 parade.
Contrary to some reports Palmer G. Lewis was Kate and Horace's nephew, not their son. Kate and Horace never had any children. He was in fact the grandson of Clancy Lewis, Horace's brother who had moved all the way west to Seattle.
"My great-aunt Katherine and Uncle Horace lived in what is now the Elephants Perch. It was a wonderful house," Hildegarde said from her home in Seattle. "The first time I was in Ketchum was 1937 with my dad. Horace and Aunt Kate had a bathhouse at Warm Springs we used to go to. The first time she said to me, 'You must go out and have a bath at Warm Springs, it's good for your health.' It seemed a long way out there. It was a wooden tub, covered by green slime. I got in so I was wet but I got right out. I was a city girl."
Hildegarde laughed about her squeamishness as though it was yesterday. She said she never really knew Horace but fondly remembers "Aunt Kate's hospitality."
"She was very generous with the food," she said. "Kate was a wonderful woman. They had no children. We tried to come to Ketchum every few years. She gave my brother and me, when we were little, a photo I still have of herself with Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Averell Harriman, Bing Crosby, Carole Landis, Mrs. Gary Cooper and some rancher friend. It was our most treasured possession."
She recalled watching her father Palmer Lewis, when he was the Wagon Day's grand marshal.
"The wagons were all hitched up. Various clubs and restaurants would have wagons with something on it. I met Jim and Wendy Jaquet there. I've been four or five times."
Hildegarde calls herself the "family historian," and said she has things to bring to Ketchum for the Sun Valley Ketchum Historical Society.
She may not part with one item however.
"We do have a peer-glass from Horace and Kate's house. It's a very long looking glass. It was then in my mom and dad's house. And now it's in mine. We had stories from relatives in Illinois about letters they sent back home. How clear the sky was, how blue, how fresh the water was in the Big Wood and Trail Creek. I never heard why they left. I think it was an adventure. Clancy taught math in Canton, China. That's where my dad was born. They didn't like it where they were or they would have stayed. We've come full circle. My daughter is back in Chicago now. We just keep going round and around."
Tonight, Aug. 29, at 5:30 p.m., all the grand marshals including Hildegarde Lewis Pierce will attend a party in their honor at Carol's Dollar Mountain Lodge. Everyone is invited to attend.
Descendants of Ketchum’s founding family, the Lewises, are from left to right: Elliott Pierce, Sandy Pierce, Hildegarde Lewis Pierce, Hans Van Delft and Louis P. Van Delft Hildegarde will ride in the Wagon Days Parade on Saturday. Photo by
