Living History:  Jasper Portrays Buckskin Bill
 Note:  Jasper, a 120 lb labradoodle enjoys dressing up to help tell living history stories at the Historical Museum at St. Gertrude. His parents are Jerry & Rosalie (Wassmuth) Jessup of Grangeville. 
My name is Sylvan Hart and I was born in 1906 in the Oklahoma Territory.  My family home was a dug-out hole in the ground with a sod roof supported by timbers.  I worked my way through college, earning a bachelor’s degree in English Literature and later studied petroleum engineering.  
At age 26, I left Oklahoma and began living on the Salmon River.  I left briefly to work on airplanes in Kansas to help the WWII effort, and also worked part time for the Forest Service building trails and as a fire lookout.  
But for 48 years, I lived in the Idaho Wilderness. I made my own clothes of deerskin which earned me the name “Buckskin Bill”, constructed a compound of adobe-covered buildings with hand-hewn timbers and constructed catwalks along the sheer cliffs to get to the outside world during high water.  I made utensils from mined copper, which I smelted and refined myself.  I made my own flintlock rifles, boring them on a handmade machine I designed and built to save myself from the bother of having to buy ammunition.  Before I began any project, I first hand-crafted the tools necessary. When the federal government designated my chosen wilderness as a Primitive Area not open to habitation, it appeared I might have to move.  However, the Forest Service ultimately agreed that one individual living as an authentic frontiersman deserved to continue live there as a kind of museum piece. 
I was 74 years old when I died suddenly of a heart attack in 1980.