Idaho's Place

A New History of the Gem State

Adam M. Sowards, Adam M. Sowards

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805078
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Idaho's Place is an anthology of the most current and original writing on Gem State history. From the state's indigenous roots and early environmental battles to recent political and social events, these essays provide much-needed context for understanding Idaho's important role in the development of the American West. Through a creative approach that combines explorations of concepts such as politics, gender, and race with the oral histories of Idaho residents - the very people who lived and made state history - this unique collection sheds new light on the state's surprisingly contentious past. Readers, whether they are longtime residents or newcomers, tourists or seasonal dwellers, policy makers or historians, will be treated to a rich narrative in which the many threads of Idaho's history entwine to produce a complete tapestry of this beautiful and complex Western state.

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Idaho's Place

Reckoning with History

ADAM M. SOWARDS

SNOW AND RAIN FALL FROM THE IDAHO SKIES. AS WATER, IT rolls or seeps down hillsides and into creeks. It collects into larger streams and then into rivers. Then rivers converge into larger rivers. It is an impressively complex system in which several parts exist individually, but as they move through space and time, those independent pieces gather together and collect into something larger and then larger still. At the headwaters, the water system seems simple. By the time we see the river downstream, it is the accumulation of countless tributaries and all that flows into each of them.

History is like that, too.¹ It begins with small things—an individual, a family, a village, a year. They interact and accumulate and converge, adding and changing into something altogether new—a town, a region, an economy, an era. Later, “downstream,” as it were, those constituent parts are so intermingled, so entangled, that it is impossible to discern one strand from another, and we find each piece wrapped up with all the others. So it is with Idaho and its rich past. The waterways of history are abundant. This book helps us chart them. It shows us how the streams and rivers have created—and continue to create—this vibrant place, Idaho.

What is Idaho's place? It is a deceptively simple question. The answer, of course, is, it depends. It depends partially on how we frame the question. If we consider it geographically, Idaho is a meeting ground of the Great Basin, Rocky Mountains, and Columbia Plateau and is characterized by stunning sagebrush, majestic mountains, and roiling rivers. If we examine it politically, Idaho is as conservatively Republican as any state today, but beginning in 1971, two Democratic governors served six consecutive terms, and the state has long been represented by fiercely independent Republicans and Democrats unafraid of bucking their party establishments and serving the state more than a party's ideology. If we conceive of it ethnically, Idaho is one of the most homogeneous states in the nation, yet once nearly one-third of its population was Chinese, a long and proud Basque tradition strongly influences cultural events and identities, and its many tribal members represent a continuing vital presence.

This list of paradoxes could go on. The contradictions could be described by the common quip that Idaho is the only state with three capitals—Salt Lake City, Boise, and Spokane—which shows the cultural, political, and economic scattering of the state. They could highlight how the state possesses some of the largest and longest-protected wilderness areas amid a population that exhibits some of the nation's most hostile attitudes toward environmental protection. They could feature the simultaneous opportunities and obstacles, discrimination and tolerance faced by diverse Idahoans while they were trying to make a successful life in the state. In other words, the state is a diverse and in-between place where there is far more than first meets the eye or than is revealed by the popular stereotypes of famous potatoes, Aryan Nations, and open spaces. To place Idaho, to define this state, we must reckon first and last with its history. This book takes on this task.

A leading historian of the region once remarked that the Pacific Northwest was far away from and behind the times of mainstream America. And it is easy to conclude from existing regional writing that Idaho is the most distant and most delayed of the states with which it is usually linked.² But such a characterization conceals more than it reveals and depends largely on comparisons with New York or North Carolina, Massachusetts or Missouri. Yet even historians of the American West marginalize Idaho, paying more attention to its neighbors, perhaps because its complex history defies easy incorporation into larger narratives.³ The casual reader, resident, or visitor to the state could be forgiven for thinking that not much happened there or that events in Idaho's history reveal little of importance more broadly. This simply is not true.

Even the more flattering portraits do not adequately represent Idaho. Consider Leonard J. Arrington's description from his thorough, two-volume History of Idaho: “[T]he peoples of Idaho have adjusted to these divers tugs and pulls, and a resolute citizen loyalty to the state has emerged. Idahoans enjoy their historical uniqueness…. Indeed, Idahoans take pride in their singularity—their unique blend of conservatism and progressivism, their free-wheeling democracy, and their deep commitment to traditional values.”⁴ As astute an observer as any, Arrington sketches the state as singular when in fact most western states, perhaps all states, would be equally well characterized by the generalities he employs.

I noticed this tendency to displace or misplace Idaho, despite good reasons not to, when I moved from teaching Northwest history at an urban college in Seattle to doing so at a rural university in Moscow, Idaho. It was easy to find history—excellent history, in fact—about Idaho. Sensitive portrayals of Idaho tribal culture, surprising insights about the social and environmental history of irrigation, and a best-selling account of industrial violence and political retribution had all been published in the few years before my move.⁵ Despite this work and much more that continues to appear year after year, Idaho's history has remained disconnected and disjointed, much the same as the state's sprawling landscape.⁶

Understanding Idaho's place and putting it in context requires a guidebook. This book attempts to remedy the current scattershot understanding of the state's past. To date, those interested in religious history might know of Idaho's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Christian Identity sects; immigration historians might know of its working-class miners or agricultural workers; cultural historians might know of its writers or artists. But those topics have tended to remain diffused. What the fine authors in this volume have done is collect and synthesize the best of Idaho history. Consider, then, this book a report on the state of the state's history. Readers who pick up this volume—whether they are longtime residents or newcomers, onetime tourists or seasonal dwellers, policy makers or historians—will be treated to a rich past, one in which the many streams of Idaho's history intermingle to produce this beautiful, interesting, and sometimes confounding state.

What does this work reveal about Idaho? It would be redundant to summarize each chapter here, but it may be useful to point out to readers some ways various elements of Idaho history intersect, both thematically and chronologically, as reflected by these gathered texts. As already suggested, paradox is a prime characteristic of this state; puzzles about Idaho's past are plain in almost all the essays that follow. More self-consciously than any other available source, this book traces how Idaho's political or cultural paradoxes evolved so that the state becomes comprehensible, not just a collection of inexplicable oddities. Political patterns, environmental divisions, racial challenges, and cultural trends all emerge from these pages in ways that make clear what at first might seem confusing or contradictory. The reason for the clarity, for the unraveling of these paradoxes, is that the authors root their analyses in historical developments. What might seem enigmatic in the twenty-first century looking backward makes sense when seen on the past's own terms. Or, to return to the river metaphor, we can find our way best through Idaho's watersheds by tracing them from the headwaters of the past through their confluences with the present.

Another leitmotif in the following chapters is how Idahoans built their communities, sometimes in the face of strong counterpressures. Whether emphasizing the roles of women and churches, economic and political roots, or ethnic and cultural traditions, the authors show commonalities that bound Idahoans to one another as they made their way in the world. In the face of sometimes harsh physical and social environments, Idahoans banded together to create places in their towns, their state, and their social institutions where they felt at home and that promoted a sense of well-being, community, and identity. Such havens—powwows, churches, political parties, women's clubs, labor unions, and more—offered mutual aid in trying times, a sense of identity and belonging, and connections to other communities within and beyond Idaho's borders.

Integral to this community building and togetherness, though, were the hostility and discrimination many communities faced while making their way. Latter-day Saints and Chinese miners, women and American Indians, Latino migrants and Japanese farmers, and more faced unequal conditions. Such inequality took many forms, from officially sanctioned legal discrimination to interpersonal violence. Idaho individuals and communities persisted, survived, and flourished despite pressures to assimilate, disappear, or remain in the shadows. This thriving—so apparent in the following pages and as one travels the state—illuminates Idahoans’ power of persistence, individuality, and community.

Diversity is another prevalent theme. Whether it is the diversity of environments, cultural practices, political sensibilities, economic structures, or community beliefs and traditions, Idahoans have made and encountered differences and have necessarily defined themselves as part of such mosaics. Idaho resists easy characterization. Consequently, these writers have provided a signal service in their careful and sensitive reconstruction of the state's peoples and the broader forces with which they interacted to create history.

Within this multiplicity of themes, the authors help us identify some trends; they help us, in other words, in distinguishing some of those streams of history from others. One important duty for historians is to periodize the past, recognizing that major turning points for one group or region may be almost irrelevant to another;⁷ that is, by examining broad scales of time, historians can identify periods when important shifts and emerging trends marked a new age. Across these essays, some common shifts coalesce at important, if imprecise, transition points.

Following the emergence of Native peoples in the region, the first transition came when Euro-Americans arrived with their animals, plants, and diseases, after which all Idahoans would reckon with the consequences of contact until the 1880s. Beginning around the turn of the eighteenth century, trade networks brought the biological armada (e.g., horses, pathogens) that irrevocably altered Idaho's ecological and cultural relationships. In effect, this meant incorporating new economic patterns and fashioning new cultural interdependencies for all. Gold and silver traded hands alongside salmon and mountain goats, Christianity added to indigenous spirituality, and the Coeur d’Alene became successful farmers while Italian and Welsh immigrants forged unions of hard-rock miners. Puzzling out those initial changes initiated by colonialism remained the primary task of all Idahoans, Native and newcomer alike. Until the next transition.

By the time Idaho gained statehood in 1890, Euro-Americans asserted power through political, economic, and religious institutions, entities that sometimes quite harmfully entwined with or overpowered indigenous institutions and landscapes. Political leaders established Idaho's boundaries and governing bodies, and capitalists constructed an industrial system that transformed economic and ecological structures. The extension and consequences of those developments occupied much of the succeeding century. New technologies and migrations moved Idaho toward and into the twentieth century with much the same impact as in other western places. Ethnic groups arrived and worked in the fields, forests, and mines; modern industrial techniques accelerated economic growth and increased the pace at which Idahoans transformed nature into commodities to be traded in national and global markets. Policies—federal and state, formal and informal—facilitated these changes, generally pursuing what most Americans thought to be the common good while expressing little concern for negative consequences for Native peoples, the working classes, or ecosystems. Conservation policies funded dams for irrigation and hydropower, while foresters managed land for timber and game production; immigration policies encouraged and then discouraged and finally selected who could immigrate to Idaho (and the United States generally) to labor in the state's economy and build its communities. Meanwhile, women, workers, Latter-day Saints, and others not in the male, WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) elite achieved greater recognition, rights, and power, although discrimination and power imbalances endured.

By the 1930s and 1940s, Idahoans felt federal involvement in their lives and livelihoods to a greater degree as the government attempted to check capitalism's excesses and abuses. Moreover, changes in governance on Indian reservations (e.g., the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934) and in labor and immigration practices (e.g., the bracero program) similarly modified social patterns. Close examination in the following pages will reveal that cultural practices, political desires, and economic dynamics had shifted noticeably by then, but in many respects it was only the emphases that changed—a shift in degree, not kind; that is, rather than a full-scale departure from an earlier period, the Depression, World War II, and postwar years found Idahoans adjusting to modern life and the institutions that had grown up with the state, consolidating and expanding power in familiar state structures.

By the 1980s, however, Idahoans were forging a new historical era. The nature of this transition was complex and not uniform, and its implications are still unfolding in ways that historians are puzzling through. Nevertheless, in the past three decades, Idahoans have asserted themselves in unprecedented ways. Idaho's indigenous nations have pursued, along with some changes in federal policy, self-determination and sovereignty with great success; Latinos, Basques, and other ethnic communities have publicly celebrated their traditions, and the Aryan Nations and Christian Identity movements found transitory refuges in which to express their own violent versions of racial pride and hate. Meanwhile, politicians and the public have become more combative, with the state's conservative base strengthening, and new issues—from religious expression to women's rights to endangered species—animating the state's public debates and leading to well-publicized and hotly contested campaigns. This assertiveness, then, includes mixed signs—vigorous public participation and rising cultural pride, ubiquitous political conflict, and tiresome xenophobia. These elements have roots stretching back throughout Idaho's history, although as the writers that follow make clear, sometimes subtly and sometimes explicitly, something shifted around 1980 to heighten and make more strident these divisions. When Idahoans produce the next transition is impossible to predict, for historians can only forecast the past, not the future.

It is time to place Idaho securely within its historical context, and Idaho's Place does that. By recognizing that historical developments in this state are neither as distant nor as inconsequential as some may think, this volume suggests that Idaho's place is properly understood to be a product of its spaces, cultures, and times. Part and parcel of the North American West, Idaho reveals a rich past of struggle and achievement, of diversity and common interests, of continuities and changes, of creativity and imitation. As a dynamic place and meeting ground, the state has struggled at times with finding a common identity. But Oregon and Washington routinely experience chafing between their eastern and western halves; sprawling Texas includes both high-tech Houston and empty western plains; and distant upstate New York does battle with its downstate metropolis. In other words, lack of coherence is not uniquely Idaho's burden, and reckoning with that seeming incoherence is best done through history. The here and now of the state, after all, is the product of its past. Writing Idaho history is an ongoing and necessarily incomplete process. Nevertheless, in this volume, students and teachers, residents and visitors have a historical guidebook that can help them begin piecing together the story of this place. Within these pages, readers will find enough details to challenge their stereotypes, deepen their understanding, and answer the question, What is Idaho's place?

As much of Idaho's water leaves the state via the Snake River at Lewiston, Idaho's lowest point, it carries with it sediments of the state's past, the fragments of its history, the thorough commingling of people and place and time. If it could speak, it could tell of Shoshones hunting deer and gathering pine nuts; of explorers, traders, missionaries, and emigrants exchanging ideas and goods with indigenous groups; of prospectors and town builders, boosters, and ministers, Natives and newcomers making homes and communities amid constantly shifting circumstances. The waters would have witnessed confrontation and cooperation in forests and fields, in courtrooms and the legislature, among farmers and ranchers, unionists and executives. They would carry with them runoff from irrigation and pollution from mining, be slowed by dams and turbines, and swirl around invasive carp and declining salmon. Such water would have provided good health for families, relief du...