Canyon Creek Laboratory

As settlers in the Bitterroot Valley pursued timber and farmland in the late nineteenth century, a mysterious illness appeared each spring bearing dramatic symptoms and a high mortality rate. Theories on Rocky Mountain spotted fever’s origins ranged from melting snow and decaying tree foliage to sawmill waste and household garbage. By 1908, pathologist Howard Taylor Ricketts proved that tick bites transmitted the bacterium that caused spotted fever. Ricketts’s untimely death and a state budget shortage in 1910 shifted efforts towards tick eradication rather than disease research. However, when spotted fever killed eleven Bitterroot residents including a state senator and his wife in 1921, a third wave of research began here at the recently vacated Canyon Creek schoolhouse. With electric lights, heating, and ample space, the then substantial two-story brick building was a major improvement over previous makeshift field stations. Lab employees faced hazardous conditions. Several contracted spotted fever at work and three died. A large sign posted outside the laboratory warned visitors that they entered at their own risk. In 1924, entomologist Ralph R. Parker and physician Roscoe R. Spencer developed a vaccine that, although time-consuming and expensive to produce, could prevent severe illness and death from spotted fever. Half a million people received the Spencer-Parker vaccine until the discovery of broad-spectrum antibiotics in the 1940s made it obsolete. In 1928, the team relocated to the new Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Hamilton. Despite later radical remodels, the “schoolhouse lab” remains a symbol of a critical turning point in the fight against spotted fever.

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