How We Got Here

Caroline Filby

After graduating from San Jose State University, my wife Caroline and I both went on for graduate degrees from New Mexico State University. I attained a Ph.D., she a Masters degree – both in chemistry. Then, for about thirty years, we had “day jobs,” I as a research scientist and project manager, while Caroline was a laboratory supervisor.

But, for various reasons, we chose to retire early and indulge our urge to travel. Much of that took us to historical places, mostly in the state of Idaho. As we visited sites and browsed museum book racks, it struck me that none offered anything about the cowboy (specifically, “buckaroo”) heritage of the state. I did eventually find three, all of which focused on just the “Owyhee Country” (the county in Idaho and across the state line into Oregon).

To make a long story short, I decided to write the book I could not find. By the time I had most of the book written, I had also collected a huge amount of research material. I therefore created a web page – the original South Fork Revue – and, in September 2009, the South Fork Companion blog. On those venues, I posted a lot of information that I had gleaned with all that research.

That soon put me in touch with fellow history buff Skip Myers. Back then, Skip and his wife owned a grocery store and café in Idaho City, plus a small grocery outlet in Placerville. The sesquicentennial of the first settlements (gold mining camps) in the Boise Basin was coming up in 2012. But Skip discovered that he had nothing to sell that described the history of the gold camps and what came after.

To compress another long story: While I continued to peddle my buckaroo book to publishers, I – with Skip’s input – wrote and assembled Boise Basin Gold Country. Because of the tight timeline, I went straight into self-publishing through the CreateSpace print-on-demand service. At our first big book event, in Skip’s café, we signed over seventy copies.

Later, we did a book signing in New Centerville, about five miles from Idaho City and a couple miles southwest of the original Centerville. Centerville/New Centerville was once a thriving area with around 4,000 people. Now hardly anyone lives there and New Centerville is basically an old weathered railway station. The book has continued to sell steadily ever since.

Skip and I at the New Centerville Book signing.

The process went so well for Gold Country, I then chose to also publish Before the Spud through CreateSpace. But I still had all this material, and 2013 was the sesquicentennial of the creation of Idaho Territory. So, for that event, I created and self-published Idaho: Year One.

With three books out under my personal imprint, I started this second blog, then titled Sourdough Publishing. As noted earlier, I posted items from Year One on this blog, along with information about the books.

Through all this, I kept adding material to the South Fork Companion. One such item was: America’s Sherlock Holmes – Innovative Forensic Detective Luke May, posted on his birth date, December 2.

During my research for that article, I discovered the significant role May had played in the development of scientific methods of crime investigation. Scans of newspaper from back then also highlighted just how much of a celebrity he was in his day. So… Why was there no biography of this fellow?

An exchange of e-mails and phone calls with his granddaughter, Mindi Reid, revealed that a writer (in Seattle, as I recall) was working on such a project. That fell through, but another writer took up the task. All this time, I was working on my three books.

But finally, with Idaho: Year One out, I called Mindi and asked, “How’s that biography going?” Answer: “It isn’t.” The second writer had also abandoned the project. I won’t speculate on a reason. However, the fact that it took me about three years of research and writing to have a “product” may have something to do with that.

When Rowman & Littlefield agreed to publish the book, I began to gear up ways to reach readers. One thread was to revamp my original South Fork Revue, which I had “put on the back burner.” That’s when I discovered that my ISP had taken it down, as part of a policy of removing a free personal web page from the membership package.

Exploring that event further seems rather pointless, so I won’t go there. But that’s when I decided to re-purpose this blog rather than try to pick a new web host and start a site from scratch. On the main page (which I have made “sticky”), I'm trying to keep you updated on the status of the new book, and other projects I start.

Beyond that, I have (literally) dozens of Luke May cases that I could not fit into the book. Anyone interested in scientific crime investigation or just “true crime” stories, should find plenty to like among those accounts.