The summer of 1910 was the driest in memory across the northern Rockies. By August, some 1,700 separate fires were burning in the national forests of northern Idaho and western Montana, fed by a record drought, logging slash, and sparks from locomotives. Forest Service crews — many of them hastily hired immigrants and students — fought the scattered fires for weeks with hand tools. Then, on Saturday, August 20, a violent cold front drove hurricane-force winds across the region, and in about 36 hours the separate fires merged into a single firestorm that burned roughly three million acres.

On February 8, 1921, a baby girl was born at Providence Hospital in Wallace who would become one of the most famous movie stars in the world. Her name was Julia Jean Turner, the only child of John Virgil Turner, a miner from Montgomery, Alabama, and Mildred Frances Cowan of Lamar, Arkansas, who was herself just four days shy of her seventeenth birthday. The family was living in the nearby mining camp of Burke when she was born, in the heart of an Idaho silver district then producing some of the richest ore on earth.

In the spring of 1884, Colonel William R. Wallace built a cabin on a flat where several canyons meet the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River, and he gave the spot a hopeful name: Placer Center. Wallace, a Civil War veteran with a hand in mining ventures across the region, claimed 80 acres at what he judged to be the natural crossroads of a brand-new mining district.