Died 29 April 1980 | ||
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Sylvan Ambrose "Buckskin Bill" Hart (May 10, 1906 – April 29, 1980) was among the last of the mountain men in the western United States. He was the oldest of six children born in Camargo in the Indian Territory, one year before it became Oklahoma. He worked in Texas oilfields during the Great Depression. From 1932 until his death he lived on the Five Mile Bar of the Salmon River in the Frank Church River Of No Return Wilderness, Idaho.
Sylvan Hart attended McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas in 1926, then studied petroleum engineering at the University of Oklahoma in 1927-28. He did not graduate. He purchased 50 acres of land at Five Mile Bar for $1, where he built a compound that included a two-story house, blacksmith shop, a stone turret, and a bomb shelter. The defensive structures reflected his sense of continual threat from the federal government, which peaked in 1956 when Howard Zahniser's Wilderness Act threatened to designate the Five Mile section of the Salmon River as a non-habitable Primitive Area, and he was in danger of being evicted. He volunteered to serve in World War II and was assigned to a Boeing plant in Kansas where he worked on the Norden bombsight. Following the war, he returned to his compound and was employed by the National Forest Service. He farmed, hunted and fished for survival, and made his own guns, weapons, clothing and tools.
Buckskin Bill died in 1980 and was buried at Five Mile Bar. His compound has been preserved as The Buckskin Bill Museum.