What rival football match would be complete without the traditional bonfire and rally? Martin Larson’s novel, Plaster Saint (1953), describes the excitement and drama of the big pep bonfire on the eve of the big University of Idaho game with the nearby state university:

On this Friday night the great annual bonfire would take place on the slope just east of the Engineering Building. Half the men in the university were engaged in preparing this enterprise. They searched every nook and corner of Belle Ridge for lumber, boards, sticks, tarpaper, corrugated boxes, stumps, logs, coal, oil, gasoline, kerosene - anything, everything, that would make a tremendous blaze. Wagons, carts, automobiles, trucks - every type of conveyance - had been used to transport the fuel. But the pyre would not be constructed until almost the last minute, because no greater victory was conceivable - except winning the great game itself - than that of setting fire prematurely to an opponent’s pyre.

Every imaginable sort of stratagem was used to accomplish this purpose. Last year the university had attempted to fire State’s pile from an airplane, which dropped flaming torches just before the celebration was to begin. Two years before, a very energetic young man who had been working all day with the students in Belle Ridge, gathering logs, suddenly turned out to be an enemy, who lunged at the pile as it was nearing completion and threw gasoline upon it. As he almost succeeded in firing it, he was pounced upon and severely beaten. This had been a close call.

Postcard of bonfire from the Northwest Historical Postcards Collection