Coeur d’Alene is a city on the north end of Coeur d’Alene Lake, a hundred miles from the Canadian border. In 1930, prohibition was in force, and the mines to the east and logging camps to the south were filled with men who were paid on Saturday night and where a fellow was served at a bar if he was tall enough to order across it. Grag Bergman, a widower and father of two, was a banker in Coeur d’Alene. Gary Madison brought whiskey across the border from Canada, owned a few clubs, supplied red-light establishments, the police, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and private citizens.
This is a story of that special time of probation, of Depression, a time between world wars in that special part of the north Idaho, where homesteads were still new and civilization as we know it today was only a dream.
