IDIdaho History

In September 1805 the Lewis and Clark expedition came down out of the Bitterroot Mountains on the Lolo Trail having eaten three of its own horses and a quantity of candle tallow. On the Weippe Prairie the starving party met the Nimiipuu, the Nez Perce, who fed them camas root and dried salmon and helped them burn out canoes for the run to the Pacific. That was the first documented entry of United States citizens into what is now Idaho.

Salmon country: the Nimiipuu, the Newe and the Schitsu'umsh

The Nimiipuu held the drainages of the Clearwater, the Salmon and the lower Snake. North of them, in the forested panhandle, were the Schitsu'umsh, whom the French called Coeur d'Alene, along with the Ktunaxa and the Kalispel. Across the lava plain of the Snake River lived the Newe, or Shoshone, and the Bannock, with Northern Paiute bands in the southwest corner. What tied this very different country together was fish. Chinook salmon ran up the Columbia and the Snake as far as central Idaho, more than 800 river miles from the sea and over a mile in elevation, the longest and highest salmon migration in the world. Horses reached the Nez Perce by about 1730, and they became the most careful breeders on the plateau, selecting the stock behind the Appaloosa.

Fur posts, a mission press, and the line at 49 degrees

David Thompson of the North West Company built Kullyspell House on Lake Pend Oreille in 1809, the first trading post in the region and a British one. The Convention of 1818 left the Oregon Country under joint British and American occupation, and for nearly thirty years the Hudson's Bay Company was the effective government, running Fort Boise and, after 1837, Fort Hall, which Nathaniel Wyeth had built in 1834 and sold when his venture failed. Henry and Eliza Spalding established a Presbyterian mission among the Nez Perce at Lapwai in 1836, and a press shipped from Honolulu reached them in 1839, the first in the Pacific Northwest.

The Oregon Treaty of June 1846 fixed the boundary at the 49th parallel and made the country American without a war and without a purchase. In 1860 Latter-day Saint families from Utah founded Franklin, the first permanent town in Idaho, in the sincere belief that they were still in Utah Territory. Three years later, on 29 January 1863, Colonel Patrick Connor's California Volunteers attacked a Shoshone winter camp on the Bear River near present day Preston and killed between 250 and 400 people, many of them women and children, the largest single killing of Native people by the United States Army.

Gold on Orofino Creek and a territory drawn in 1863

Elias Pierce found gold on Orofino Creek in 1860, on land guaranteed to the Nez Perce by the treaty of 1855. Florence, Pierce and Idaho City boomed so fast that by the mid 1860s Idaho City was reckoned the largest town in the Pacific Northwest, larger than Portland. In 1863 federal negotiators pushed through a treaty cutting the Nez Perce reservation by roughly nine tenths so the gold country could be kept, and the bands that had not signed, including the one led by Joseph, called it the thieving treaty.

Lincoln signed the act creating Idaho Territory on 4 March 1863, an enormous jurisdiction taking in all of present Montana and nearly all of Wyoming. Montana was cut away in 1864 and Wyoming in 1868, leaving the long panhandle and the mountain barrier that still separates the north of the state from Boise. Lewiston was the first capital, and when the legislature voted in 1864 to move the seat to Boise, territorial officers removed the seal and the archives under armed guard. The Nez Perce War opened at White Bird Canyon on 17 June 1877, where about seventy warriors routed a cavalry command, and ended 1,170 miles later in the Bear Paw Mountains of Montana.

Statehood in 1890 and the Coeur d'Alene mine wars

Idaho became the 43rd state on 3 July 1890, one day ahead of Wyoming. The constitution drafted in 1889 carried a test oath denying the vote, office and jury service to anyone who practised or advocated plural marriage, aimed at the Latter-day Saints who made up a large share of the southeastern population. The statute was repealed in 1893, but the constitutional clause stayed in the text until voters struck it out in 1982.

The Bunker Hill and Sullivan lode, found near Kellogg in 1885, made the Coeur d'Alene basin one of the richest silver districts on earth and one of the most violent. Strikes in 1892 and 1899 ended in dynamite: union miners seized a train, ran it to Wardner and blew up the Bunker Hill concentrator on 29 April 1899, after which Governor Frank Steunenberg called in federal troops who penned hundreds of men in stockades for months without charge. On 30 December 1905 a bomb wired to the gate of Steunenberg's house in Caldwell killed him. Harry Orchard confessed and named leaders of the Western Federation of Miners, and Clarence Darrow won an acquittal for Big Bill Haywood at the 1907 Boise trial against prosecutor William Borah.

Reactors on the desert, and fries for the world

The Atomic Energy Commission chose the empty plain west of Idaho Falls for its National Reactor Testing Station in 1949. On 20 December 1951 Experimental Breeder Reactor I produced the first usable electricity from nuclear fission, and on 17 July 1955 Arco became the first town in the world lit by nuclear power. On 3 January 1961 the SL-1 reactor went prompt critical and killed its three operators, still the only fatal reactor accident in American history.

Union Pacific chairman Averell Harriman opened Sun Valley in December 1936 to give his trains a destination, and his engineers adapted a banana boat conveyor into the world's first chairlift. J.R. Simplot dehydrated potatoes for army rations during the war, commercialised the frozen french fry in 1953 and began supplying McDonald's in 1967. The Teton Dam failed while filling for the first time on 5 June 1976, killing eleven people and wrecking Wilford, Sugar City and much of Rexburg. Micron Technology started in a Boise basement in 1978 and became the largest private employer in the state.

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