IDIdaho Famous People

The most reproduced woman in American public art was born in Idaho. Sacagawea was born among the Lemhi Shoshone near the Salmon River around 1788, taken captive as a girl, and came back west with Lewis and Clark in 1805. When the expedition needed horses to cross the mountains that August, the Shoshone chief they had to bargain with, Cameahwait, turned out to be her brother. Her face has been on the US dollar coin since 2000, and the ground she was born on is now Lemhi County, Idaho.

No presidents, and two senators who ran Washington anyway

No president has been born in Idaho or raised there, and no vice president either. The closest the state has come is Ezra Taft Benson of Whitney, born in 1899, who served eight years as Eisenhower's Secretary of Agriculture and later led the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1985 until 1994.

Idaho's national weight has come instead from its Senate seats. William Borah moved to Boise in 1890 from Illinois, won a Senate seat in 1907 and held it until he died in office in 1940. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee he led the bloc that kept the United States out of the League of Nations, and the state's highest point, Borah Peak at 12,662 feet, carries his name.

Frank Church was born in Boise in 1924 and elected to the Senate at 32. He steered the Wilderness Act of 1964 through the chamber, and in 1975 chaired the committee whose hearings exposed decades of CIA, FBI and NSA operations against Americans, producing the reforms that still govern intelligence oversight. He ran for president in 1976 and won several late primaries. The 2.3 million acre Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, the largest unbroken wilderness in the lower 48 states, was renamed for him in 1984, months before he died.

The farm boy who worked out television

Philo Farnsworth was born in Utah in 1906 but his family moved to a farm outside Rigby, Idaho when he was twelve. At fourteen, driving a horse drawn harrow up and down a field in even rows, he realised an image could be captured and rebuilt the same way, line by line, with a beam of electrons. He sketched the design for his chemistry teacher Justin Tolman at Rigby High School, and Tolman's recollection of that blackboard drawing became evidence years later when RCA challenged his patents. On September 7, 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory, he transmitted the first all electronic television image.

Writers, actors and the man who chose Ketchum

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey on October 30, 1885, in a silver mining town where his father ran the federal land office. Marilynne Robinson was born in Sandpoint in 1943 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead in 2005. Vardis Fisher of Annis wrote the novel behind the film Jeremiah Johnson. Lana Turner was born in the mining town of Wallace in 1921 and became one of the biggest stars at MGM. Aaron Paul grew up in Emmett.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois but is buried in Idaho. He came to the brand new Sun Valley resort in 1939 as a promotional guest, worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls in a room at the lodge, hunted around Silver Creek for two decades, bought a house above the Big Wood River in Ketchum in 1959 and shot himself there on July 2, 1961. His grave is in the Ketchum cemetery.

Athletes out of towns of a few hundred people

Harmon Killebrew was signed out of Payette in 1954 after Idaho senator Herman Welker tipped off the owner of the Washington Senators about a local kid who hit the ball absurd distances. He finished with 573 home runs, won the American League MVP award in 1969 and entered the Hall of Fame in 1984. Picabo Street was born in Triumph in 1971, in a settlement so small her parents named her after another Idaho town, and won downhill silver at Lillehammer in 1994 and super G gold at Nagano in 1998. Kristin Armstrong, based in Boise for most of her career, won the Olympic road time trial in 2008, 2012 and 2016, the last of them on the day before her 43rd birthday.

People whose Idaho origins catch everyone out

Gutzon Borglum, who carved Mount Rushmore between 1927 and his death in 1941, was born near Bear Lake in Idaho Territory in 1867. Sarah Palin was born in Sandpoint in 1964 and her family moved to Alaska before her first birthday. J.R. Simplot was born in Dubuque, Iowa, raised in Declo, left school at fifteen and built a potato empire that became McDonald's frozen french fry supplier from 1967. Joe Albertson opened his first grocery store in Boise in 1939 with an ice cream counter he thought would draw a crowd. And Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader, was born across the line in Oregon's Wallowa Valley, but the 1877 flight that made his name began in Idaho at White Bird Canyon and ran through the Nez Perce homeland that is now the state's north central corner.

Questions people ask about famous Idahoans

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