Notable People

Edward Crockett Pulaski was not a young man when he joined the fledgling U.S. Forest Service in 1908. Born in 1866, he had spent years in the West as a miner, a railroad worker, and a ranch foreman before pinning on a ranger's badge in the Coeur d'Alene National Forest, based at Wallace. "Big Ed," as the men called him, knew the ridges and canyons of the Silver Valley as few others did. In August 1910, that knowledge saved dozens of lives — including, barely, his own.

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.