Idaho Experience

Annie Pike Greenwood was a writer, teacher, mother and farmer's wife who lived in south-central Idaho between 1913 and 1928, when the area had just opened to farming. She would turn her notes about her hardscrabble experience into a book, We Sagebrush Folks. Using newfound material, this documentary helps illuminate Greenwood’s life and work and examines how her legacy lives on.

When the first commercial airmail pilot took to the air in Idaho in 1926, it didn’t take long before many realized airplanes could open the state to a world of possibilities. But before Idaho could reap the benefits of flight, the state needed airports, runways, and pilots who could navigate miles of desert and wilderness. Find out how early pilots took on Idaho’s rugged landscape.

Lt. Mark Calnon Sr., a pilot from Meridian, was shot down over Germany and spent two years in a Nazi POW camp, not knowing if each day would be his last. His story is a tale of courage and survival against the odds.

After a revelation from God, Frank B. Robinson founded Psychiana in Moscow in 1929. Psychiana had no churches, no ministers, no services, but through advertising and mail order it became one of the largest employers in northern Idaho and one of the largest mail-order operations in the U.S.

Benedicte Wrensted and Jane Gay never knew each other. But both took images of Native Americans in Idaho at the turn of the 20th century. In this program, we bring their stories and their photographs out of the shadows. Descendants of those in the photos also discuss what the images mean to them today, and we introduce viewers to two female indigenous photographers practicing their craft.