Eight wagon teams, fifteen saddle horses, and a high-school history class riding an old Indian trade route from British Columbia to the Eureka fairgrounds.
Dale Duff taught history at Lincoln County High School in the early seventies, and he believed students should experience history, not just read it. For the class of Mark Purdy's junior year, 1971–72, he decided the history trip would travel by wagon train — period clothing, campfire cooking, home-canned food.
Working with Canadian and U.S. border officials — and with Mark as Wagon Train Master — Duff plotted a thirty-mile, week-long route from Grasmere, British Columbia, down an old Indian trade route trail to the fairgrounds in Eureka. Duff, Mark, and the border officials spent a month on motorbikes just locating the trail.
An experience and sight never to be forgotten.— the Purdy family album
The train was eight wagon teams and fifteen riding horses, trucked into Canada by local farmer and logger Mike Stoken. The last night they camped on the northwest edge of Sophie Lake — where some of the senior class, as the family history delicately puts it, “played havoc with the horses.” Nobody was hurt, the horses were rounded up, and the next day the whole outfit rode into the fairgrounds.
“An experience and sight never to be forgotten,” the family album says. Fifty years on, it still is.