It was eight miles to Dietrich, nearly an hour's kidney-busting ride by wagon, from the farmstead where Gladys Shaw grew up. But once in town, Shoshone - 15 miles distant - was only 20 minutes away by train.
"The railroad was always part of our life, but we didn't go anywhere very often," recalls Shaw, 90."I was out of high school before I ever saw Twin Falls. We were, I guess you'd call it, self-sufficient. We worked hard, made do with what we had and didn't worry about what we didn't have."
That will serve well enough as a motto for Lincoln County's first 100 years. High, windy and squarely in the path of every rain shadow to parch the interior West since the glaciers receded, Lincoln County was where civilization took root first in the Magic Valley and refused to yield.
Shoshone was the center of a lot of action while Twin Falls was still 10,000 acres of sagebrush with a view.
"Without Milner Dam, Shoshone might have become the largest city in the Magic Valley and the economic center of the whole area," said Leonard Arrington, Utah historian who wrote the official "History of Idaho" two years ago.
"But there just wasn't enough irrigable farmland there."
"You started out every spring wondering if there was gonna be enough water to get you through the season," said Paul Bancroft, 86, a retired Shoshone farmer and cattleman.
"Some years, it didn't get you through June, so you put it in pasture and bought enough hay to keep your livestock alive.
"Course it was always a little hard on the pocketbook."
"I'll tell you how it was," Shaw said. "During the Depression, when crop prices and sheep prices and cattle prices were bad, not very many of our neighbors or the people we knew went broke. They already produced everything they needed."
By the time Shaw's father came to Lincoln County from Washington state in 1911, the county may have been most socially and ethnically diverse place in Idaho outside of Pocatello. Chinese and Irish section gangs had built the Oregon Short Line track, Basques had arrived to tend the sheep, Japanese to farm and run the stores, Italians and Greeks to keep the railroad running and Midwesterners to try their luck under the Carey Act, the federal law that made the Minidoka and Big Wood projects possible.
"While I was growing up, there were even some blacks who farmed around Dietrich," Shaw recalls. "My mother invited one man, Mr. Bell, to lunch one day, and he came in and said, `I know how some folks feel about Negroes, so I'll just take my plate and eat on the back porch.'
"But that diversity also helped create a spirit of generosity, Shaw said. People took care of each other.
"If you got sick and couldn't get your crop in, your neighbors were there to help." The county was created by the Legislature in 1895 and began life as a vast livestock empire.
Even after Magic Reservoir opened up farming around Shoshone, Richfield and Dietrich, many farmers raised alfalfa.
"In the old days, the sheep companies were huge," Bancroft said. "The Goodings, the Newmans, the Bacons and the sheep industry were all tied into the railhead at Shoshone."
It was also inextricably tied to Blaine County, which before World War I was the mecca of sheep production in the Western Hemisphere. For a time, Ketchum and Shoshone were the world's leading shipping points for sheep and wool.
"But the sheep kind of went out after (World War II), and them that stayed in business got into cattle," Bancroft said.
"That's about the time the railroad started to go out, too."
Along with Pocatello, Minidoka, Glenns Ferry and Nampa, Shoshone was one of the major centers for the Union Pacific in southern Idaho.
"The trains would stop and the crews would go into the cafe and eat," recalls Robert Haddock, 78, whose family has lived in the county since 1906. "There were several trains going east and west each day, and the train service was so good that you could mail a letter here in the morning and have it arrive in Pocatello in the afternoon.
"Sometimes, you might even get an answer the same day."
At its peak, the railroad employed hundreds of Lincoln County residents, mostly on track crews and at its roundhouse in Shoshone.
"The county commissioners at the time wanted this to be a quiet, grazing county," Bancroft said. "So they raised the taxes on the railroad until they moved the roundhouse to Pocatello."
UP freights still roar through Shoshone several times a day, but they don't stop anymore. Amtrak is the town's only train, and it arrives three times at week and in the middle of the night.
"It used to be, you could live in Richfield and go to the doctor in Fairfield," said Alice Crane Behr, 78, who co-authored a history of Richfield last year. "I knew a woman who did just that."
The decline of the UP dovetailed with construction of U.S. 93 from Twin Falls in the early 1950s, and that transformed the county.
"It used to be we had almost every kind of store or service we needed here. When they opened the highway, people started going to Twin. Now we don't even have a full-time barber," Bancroft said.
Although some businesses continued to do well, the shrinkage of the retail economies of Shoshone, Dietrich and Richfield combined with drought and the farm recession of the early 1980s dealt Lincoln County a body blow.
The county lost 4 percent of its population between 1980 and 1990 and 4 percent of its jobs between 1982 and 1992.
Prosperity of a sort has returned in the form of hundreds of newcomers who work elsewhere and live in Lincoln County. But the economy is still dominated by the forebearance of the land and the generosity of January storms on distant peaks.
"One year, my father had 12 days of (irrigation) water," Behr recalled. "But we always got by. He didn't . . . believe in debt. We always had Christmas, but we raised the turkey ourselves."
"One year, I got 50 cents and I spent it on a (book of sewing needles) from the Montgomery Ward catalog," Shaw said. "Three hundred needles. "And you know, I'll bet I still have 297 of them."