It was not merely the legal act, but the spirit of Eleanor Steele Reese that created the Steele-Reese Foundation.

She was born in 1893 and grew up in New York City where her father, Charles Steele, was a partner of J.P. Morgan. It was an affluent world, but it was also a rigid world and when she finished her schooling, she left to pursue a serious musical career as an opera singer in Europe and the United States for two decades. At the beginning of World War II, she settled briefly in Connecticut, and when her marriage came to an end (she had no children) she went west to start a new life at an age when many people are comfortably settling in to middle age. She never returned to the East, to the wealthy world of her childhood, or to the glamorous world of professional music.

She met and married Emmet P. Reese in 1941. During the early 1930s, he had left southern Kentucky for central Idaho, the most remote and unspoiled area he could find in the continental United States. He lived an independent life as a frontiersman for several years: trapping beaver, maintaining a small herd of steers in a mountain pasture, panning for gold, occasionally working on ranches, or packing materials into the wilderness are for the US Forest Service. At the time of their marriage, he and Eleanor bought and operated a small working ranch in a narrow mountain valley near Shoup, Idaho, called Pine Creek Ranch, adjacent to the wilderness area. In the mid-1950s, they moved to a large spread in nearby Salmon, which they operated until a few years before her death in 1977. Emmet died in 1982.

Emmet and Eleanor’s life for fifteen years at the Shoup ranch was simple and strenuous. She helped with the manual labor of building the log structures, cooked for the ranch hands year after year, canned most of the fruit and vegetables grown and used on the ranch, and kept the breeding and business records on their herd of Hereford bulls.

The bull herd quickly became one of the finest in the state, and the Reeses gained their living from the proceeds of their labor. Eleanor’s inheritance remained intact. It was her duty, she felt, to put it to a permanent good use so, after years of pondering the problem, she set up the Steele-Reese Foundation in 1955 in honor of her own and Emmet’s families. By the time they died, they had given almost everything they owned to the foundation.

Because the Reeses took more satisfaction in helping others than in indulging themselves, they avoided credit for their philanthropy. The attitude behind their giving was as firm and unsentimental as every aspect of their lives on the ranch: they wanted to help people and organizations to help themselves, and they knew that simply giving handouts often weakened rather than helped the recipients.

In developing the foundation’s grant policies, the trustees have tried to reflect the personal philosophies of the Reeses.