Richard Leigh “Beaver Dick” about 1885. Leigh may be the most famous mountain man to have lived in Idaho. Leigh claims to have run away from home in England when only sixteen years old. He arrived in Idaho sometime in the 1840’s and eventually settled somewhat in the “Forks Country” (Upper Snake River Valley near present day Rexburg) about 1860. It’s believed that Brigham Young first called Leigh “Beaver Dick” not from the fact that Leigh was an expert beaver trapper, but on account of the resemblance of his two abnormally large front teeth to those of a beaver. The Bannock and Shoshone also saw the resemblance and called Leigh the “Beaver.”
Leigh married a 16-year-old Eastern Shoshone girl from Chief Washakie’s band in 1863. The ceremony was performed by a minister, but with no existing records, the bride’s Shoshone name is not known. Dick gave her the English name of Jenny. He built a cabin near the confluence of the South Teton and Henry’s Fork rivers and began raising a family by hunting, trapping, fishing, and guiding often traveling east to Teton Basin. It was Leigh who gave name to the Teton River that had been named Pierre’s River by French trappers. He also named Bitch Creek, called the North Fork of the Teton by polite society. Leigh gave name to many things in the Upper Valley.
Leigh guided the second Hayden Expedition of 1872 to Teton Basin, to the Teton Range, and to Jackson Hole. Hayden and his men were so impressed with the abilities and hospitality of Richard and Jenny that they named the lakes at the base of the Tetons for them: Leigh Lake, Jenny Lake, and Beaver Dick Lake now known as String Lake.
During the winter of 1876, an Indian woman seeking food visited the Leighs. They did not know she had been infected with smallpox. All of the Leigh family as well as another hunter caught the disease. Between Christmas Eve and Dec. 28, 1876, all of Beaver Dick’s family died; he and the hunter barely survived due to their European genes having been exposed to the virus. For two years, Dick suffered and struggled to maintain as normal a life as possible near his cabin on the South Teton. In the summer of 1878, some Bannocks left the reservation in a protest over the government’s failure to send promised food and supplies, in a series of events that came to be known as the Bannock War. Beaver Dick and his friends Bannock John and Tadpole laid low, staying out of sight to “keep their hair,” as he put it…that is, to remain unscalped.
My ancestors, John and Jane Powell, were the first settlers to the area arriving in the Forks Country in 1878. Dick advised them to settle near Eagles Nest Ford on the Henry’s Fork as it was the only ford on this river for miles. Others arrived and founded the town of Egin near Eagles Nest Ford. In the spring of 1879 and at age 48, Leigh married 16-year-old Susan Tadpole, a Bannock girl who’d been promised to Leigh at birth. The couple had three children: Emma, born in 1881; William, born in 1886; and Rose, born in 1891. The Powell family were friends with the Leigh family and we have family stories about Richard and Susan. Perhaps the most interesting is that Susan wanted badly to hold Jane’s baby as she’d never before seen a white baby. Susan pulled her sleeve up to show the Powells that she was very clean and no threat to the baby. Jane, of course, let her hold the baby.
