Frank Koube was a well-educated immigrant from either Austria or Germany, according to a Facebook post by Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests. He became a fur trapper on the Powell Ranger District in the early 1890s. Many stories circulated about him during his lifetime and about or if he may have died on the forest.

No one is sure how or why he immigrated to the US; some people who knew him claimed he was a European outlaw fleeing incarceration, while others maintained that he was a draft dodge seeking to avoid the German or Austrian Empire's draft. He built several cabins on the forest that rotated through, but his most used one was on Kooskooskia Meadows. He was respected for his skill as a trapper, the excellent methods he used to preserve fur, and for the fact that he was known to gather specimens of the American animals that he shipped to European natural history museums.

Local legends claim that in 1912 or 1913 Koube told the trappers who gathered at Lolo Hot Springs to supply themselves for the winter that he found 'Isaac's Mine', a fabled vein of gold that many me in the Powell backcountry searched for in vain during the late 1800s and early 1900s and that he planned to trap one more winter, the post continues. His eccentric behavior during this trappers' rendezvous led some of his friends, including the Forest Supervisor, to worry that he may have been suffering from dementia.

Koube didn't show up at Lolo Hot Springs in the spring as he had planned and a search party went to the cabin a Kooskooskia Meadows to find him. When they arrived, they found a clean, orderly home with a moose head carefully cleaned and mounted for shipment to a German museum and a note saying that he had left for Lolo Hot Springs, but they had had seen no trace of Koube on their trip to his cabin. They theorized that he must have taken a less-direct route that crossed small streams rather than the Lochsa River because he could not swim and followed his most likely route.

At the mouth of Colt Creek, they found a tree that had been recently cut to use as a footbridge by Koube (who was known for his unique way of felling trees). As they continued, they found two more stream crossings with telltale trees that Koube must have cut, but at an island in Crooked Creek their trail went dead. In that same creek, a belt buckle that Koube owned was found, leading his friends to presume that Koube had drowned.

The post says a less credible story of Koube's disappearance also circulated. Supposedly, years after Koube was last seen, a naked and heavily bearded man showed up at a trail crew's camp when only the cook was present and quickly disappeared. The camp cook believed this man must be Frank Koube who had chosen to forsake the company of other humans and was living on what he had fished and foraged in the woods.

Though much of his life is shrouded in mystery, rumor, and tall tales, he is remembered in the forest. To this day, the site of one of his hunting cabins is named Koube Meadows to honor the life he lived on the forests, the post concludes.

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