Setting and history

The setting is the thing most likely to be gotten wrong in a hurry, so this page does two jobs. It explains why the game is set where it is, and it keeps an honest ledger of what is known versus what was recalled. The setting is real North Idaho history, written from general knowledge. Anything stated without a source page in hand is marked as unverified, and that mark covers the whole history and setting section until someone checks it.

Why Harrison

The game is set in Harrison, Idaho, on the Coeur d’Alene River, where you settle a town and start with a 160-acre claim. It is meant to run from the early 1900s through time, with later eras reaching toward the present. The setting does a lot of design work. It supplies a real river, a real lake shore, a real set of tree species and a plausible reason for each mechanic: logs go downriver to mills, steamboats and later rail change which land is well placed, mines need timber. It also supplies the pillar of local roots, because people who know the country will notice what is right and wrong about it. Building in a real place people know is one of the main hooks.

What the game borrows, and what is checked

Unverified, from memory. The Homestead Act’s 160-acre claims, with proving up by living on and improving the land for roughly five years before receiving the patent. This is the basis for the claim size and the term “proving up”. The quarter section as 160 acres in the Public Land Survey System is the same kind of fact, and is also the reason the working-title list includes “Quarter Section”. The prototype’s plat-map look (parcels of two and a half acres in an eight by eight grid) imitates that survey style but the sub-division into 2.5-acre parcels is the game’s own choice.

Unverified, from memory. The 1872 Mining Law allowing lode claims up to 1,500 by 600 feet, about 20.66 acres. It is the basis for Silver Valley claims in the plan.

Unverified, from memory. The Silver Valley as a mining district with the towns Wallace, Kellogg, Burke and Mullan, whose mines used timber for shoring. This is why the first expansion region is the Silver Valley and why mines would become a future outside buyer of Harrison timber.

Unverified, from memory. Steamboats on the Coeur d’Alene River and lake, and rail to the mines. The exact steamboat and rail routes are still to be confirmed during history research. Nobody has done that research yet.

Unverified, from memory. Forest reserves and national forests in North Idaho from the early 1900s, with sales of standing timber (stumpage). This is the real-world model for the studio-owned Forest Reserve in Scarcity and the Forest Reserve.

Unverified, from memory. The species list and their historic uses: white pine for matches and boards, redcedar for shakes and poles, larch for ties and mine timbers, Douglas-fir for framing. White pine blister rust arriving in the early 1900s and devastating white pine is a candidate era event, and it is unchecked. If the game ever models it, it will remove value from the most valuable species in the table, so being wrong about it would be expensive. The species values, the growth multipliers and the mixes by zone (bottom land, bench, ridge) are design numbers and not historical data; they are in timber and growth.

Unverified, and mostly invented. The prototype’s mills and distances. Harrison, Medimont and Springston are place names used for the three mills, with distances of three, six and ten miles and directions of down or up the river. Nothing here checks whether mills stood at those places, how far apart they were or which way the river ran between them. Building the map from public USGS elevation and LiDAR data would settle the geography. Until then these are stand-ins, and the specialisations (for example Medimont favouring cedar and larch) are the game’s own.

The eras

The plan proposes a sequence, still to be confirmed against Harrison’s actual history: homesteading, a timber boom, steamboats and rail, decline and change, recreation and lake homes, and modern development. Treat it as a skeleton. Each era is meant to change what land is good for, so that an old-growth stand which mattered in the timber era can turn into a prized view lot a century later. History is also meant to be the event engine: mill booms, fires and the opening or closing of routes give players reasons to adapt and act as natural sinks, which ties it to Economy, sinks and one-way money. Which real events belong, and when, is unresearched.

Using this page

Before any of these claims reaches player-facing copy, someone needs to check it against a local source, such as the county historical society, a library or the relevant government pages. The guardrail “realism wins ties” only works if “real” has been confirmed. Until then the safe course is to use the setting as flavour and to keep specific dates, names and events out of anything a player might take as fact.