IDIdaho State Symbols

Idaho's best known symbol is the nickname on its licence plates, the Gem State, and it is one of the few nicknames with a literal justification. The name Idaho was promoted in the 1860s with the claim that it meant "gem of the mountains", and the ground backed up the marketing: more than seventy kinds of gemstone have been found in the state, including the star garnet that Idaho later made official. The rest of the symbol list leans the same way, toward mining, rivers, timber and the Nez Perce horse country of the north.

Official state symbols

What is on the Idaho state flag

The Idaho flag is a plain blue field with the state seal at the centre and a red band edged in gold beneath it reading "State of Idaho". Adopted in 1907, it began as the flag carried by the First Idaho Infantry, and the legislature simply made the regimental colours official. Blue was chosen as the standard militia field, and the gold fringe and lettering echo the mining wealth that built the territory.

Putting the full seal on the flag has one consequence that sets Idaho apart. Because Emma Edwards Green drew that seal, Idaho flies the only state flag in the country whose central emblem was designed by a woman. The seal on the flag also keeps every element of the state's economy in view at once: a miner, a farmer, a river, timber and the elk head that crowns the design.

The seal Emma Edwards Green designed

In 1891, a year after statehood, the legislature ran a competition for a state seal with a hundred dollar prize. Emma Edwards Green, an art student who had come to Boise from Missouri, submitted the winning design and became the only woman to design a US state seal. She entered as "E. Edwards" so that judges would not know her sex.

Her design puts a woman and a miner on either side of a shield, deliberately equal in size. The woman holds scales and a liberty cap on a staff, standing for justice, liberty and equality, a pointed choice in a state that granted women the vote in 1896. The miner with pick and shovel represents Idaho's chief industry at the time. The shield between them shows a river, forested mountains and a man ploughing. Sheaves of grain, cornucopias and sprays of syringa fill the foreground, and an elk head sits above the shield with the motto Esto perpetua on a scroll. The artwork was redrawn in 1957 by Paul B. Evans, who kept Green's composition intact.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state horse is a breed the Nez Perce built. The Appaloosa, made official in 1975, was developed by the Nimiipuu of the Palouse country in north central Idaho.
• The state fossil is a horse too. The Hagerman horse, adopted in 1988, comes from the Hagerman Fossil Beds along the Snake River, where hundreds of skeletons of the zebra-like animal were excavated.
• The state gemstone is almost unique to Idaho. Star garnets of gem quality are found in commercial quantity in only two places on earth, northern Idaho and India.
• Idaho names both a fruit and a vegetable. The huckleberry became the state fruit in 2000 and the potato followed as state vegetable in 2002.
• The state flower honours Meriwether Lewis. Syringa is Philadelphus lewisii, collected by Lewis on the return leg of the expedition in 1806 and named for him.

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