Away for 80 Years : Prospector, 83, Finally Gets Back to Wyoming Birthplace

Tears welled in the gray-bearded prospector’s sharp blue eyes as he walked among the ruins of a log cabin and barn he hadn’t seen in 80 years.

Across the lush meadow against the side of a hill stood the cream-colored rock walls of a root cellar where his mother once preserved home-grown strawberries. A brisk walk up the narrow canyon by Roaring Paint Creek brought him to “the old cave where my brothers and I played.” A flood of memories came back:

“Old Zip, our dog, would come up here with us. Zip lost a leg in a bear trap. I fell in Paint Creek and got all wet one time and my mother spanked me. . . . “

“Salmon River Steve” Huntington, 83, a lifelong gold prospector from Forks of Salmon, a remote Northern California hamlet in the mountains of Siskiyou County, had come home to his birthplace in the equally remote Absaroka Mountains near Dead Indian Pass 25 miles north of Cody.

Interviewed at his diggings on the Salmon River by The Times last March, Huntington told of being born on a ranch near Cody, and of leaving by horse-drawn wagon when he was 4 or 5.

“If I found the kind of gold I’ve been searching for all these years, I would travel the world,” he mused at the time. “And the first place I’d go would be Cody. . . . I’d like to see Cody again.”

Someone in Southern California sent a copy of the story to a relative in Cody. The story was passed around. “Folks in town got to talking about that old fella and decided to pitch in and bring him back here, let him see Cody again before he dies,” explained Bruce McCormack, 34, editor of the twice-weekly Cody Enterprise.

Townspeople in Cody, population 8,000, led by Cindy Baldwin, 32, and her husband, Mark, 34, owner-operators of the Caroline Lockhart Bed & Breakfast, set about to fly the old prospector back home for a five-day sentimental journey.

“Salmon River Steve” lives alone in an old trailer on blocks on the banks of the Salmon River, 35 miles by one-lane, twisting mountain road to “civilization”--Etna, a small Northern California town. He drinks the river water, bathes in it, washes his clothes in it and finds specks of gold in it. His light is a lantern. He cooks and heats his trailer with a wood stove. He is miles from a phone and the nearest neighbor.

Last Friday, he climbed into his weather-beaten, rusty, 1961 pickup--there are 186,000 miles on it--and headed out for Cody. A cigar dangling from his lips, a gap-toothed grin on his face, he headed out on the 117-mile drive to Medford, Ore., the nearest airport.

There, he boarded a jet and flew to Denver. The final leg of the journey was on a vintage-1950 propeller plane. In Cody he emerged from the airplane chomping on his cigar, wearing a sweat-stained floppy hat, a lumber jacket, a new pair of pants he bought for the occasion, and carrying a small suitcase with a big rip and a change of clothes.

“Welcome back to Cody, the place you were born,” said Peg Shreve, Cody’s representative in the Statehouse, as a crowd of townspeople cheered. The old prospector replied: “This is the highlight of my life. I’ll never forget this as long as I live.”

Driving through town, Huntington was greeted with signs on business marquees: “WELCOME HOME SALMON RIVER STEVE.”

Cody boasts that it is the only place in the world with a rodeo every night of the week all summer and “Salmon River Steve” was the honored guest on opening night Saturday. He stood out in the arena and tipped his hat to the grandstand crowd as he was introduced. They loved it. He loved it.

Asked how he kept in such great shape, he explained: “Well, I do a lot of walking and a lot of pick and shovel work on my claims.” He was asked if he is a religious man. “My religion is a simple formula. If I know something’s wrong, I don’t do it,” he replied.

The prospector visited the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (named for Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who founded the town), stopped by the grave of famed mountain man “Liver Eating” John Johnston, portrayed by Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson in the movie, saw Eric Sorg’s one-man show on the life of Buffalo Bill at the theater in the Irma Hotel, which Buffalo Bill built in 1902 and named after his daughter. Huntington was given a new outfit of clothes, including a $100 Stetson hat, by Wayne Lundvall, who runs the sporting goods store.

He went horseback riding at the Rimrock Dude Ranch and danced to tunes like “This is Where the Cowboys Ride the Range” at Cassie’s, a cowboy bar.

At the dude ranch, Huntington described his old home to foreman Ryon St. Clair, 49, so closely that St. Clair knew exactly where the old Huntington place is.

“It all adds up. There’s an old irrigation ditch up there called Huntington Ditch. It must have been built by and named after your daddy,” St. Clair told the prospector. St. Clair drove Huntington to the old homestead.

“I guess everybody ought to go back to where he was born sometime in his life,” Salmon River Steve told St. Clair as they bounced over the rough country in a pickup. Later, walking through the weed-choked remains of his family’s turn-of-the-century log cabin, the misty-eyed miner remarked:

“Time changes everything. I thought of this place often all through my life. I never knew whether I’d ever see it again. I never knew if I did get to see it if anything would be the same as I remembered it.”

He reached over and plucked three wild roses off a bush near the crumpled wall of the log cabin, one for his sister, Iris Martin, in her 90s in Bryn Mawr, Calif., one for his brother, Corey, 100, in San Diego, and one for himself.