Historical hand-atlas, illustrated, general & local, 1881, H.H. Hardesty & Co., Chicago.

This morning in Salmon, Idaho, the low was 52°, but the high today is 89°. When we get to Salmon next Saturday the forecasted low is 43° and the high 63°. In Houston today the low was 78° and the high 96°. I’ll dress for the arctic.

This will be our third trip to Idaho. The first was in 1992, to Stanley, a tiny crossroads jump off for Frank Church Wilderness raft trips. We weren’t there for rafting, and I’ve never really understood how we picked it. I swear it was Kris’s idea, but she denies it. We fished the Big Wood River near Ketchum, and I caught fish in the Salmon. We didn’t fish Silver Creek, or raft so this is a bit of a makeup trip.

Three years later we visited Yellowstone and fished the Box Canyon of the Henry’s Fork. We were in Idaho for about eight hours. We watched an osprey catch a fish, and caught a fish that had been punctured by an osprey’s claw. We didn’t fish the more difficult Harriman State Park. We won’t fish it this time either, and that’s ok because it’s famous for its insect hatches, and I don’t believe in hatches.

We’ll fish for rainbows and cutthroat, though there are other things to fish for in Idaho, including salmon and steelhead. Idaho seems to be one of those rare places where both cutthroat and rainbows are native. So are steelhead and salmon coming across Washington and Oregon from the Pacific. There are 39 species of fish native to Idaho, plus another 60 or so introduced species. There are six different subspecies of cutthroat trout.

That we’ve been to Idaho twice before is both a bit extraordinary and not remarkable at all: Idaho has four industries: Agriculture, mining, timber, and tourism. Out of 53.5 million total acres in Idaho, 35 million acres are public land. That means 65% of the land in Idaho belongs to me! And we’re tourists! It’s out of the way, but in Idaho we’re a major industry!

It’s public land in part because most of Idaho land isn’t really good for much except for timber, mining, looking magnificent, and the trout fishing kinds of whatnot, and in the early 1900s the agricultural interests in the southern part of the state realized that to protect water for irrigation, the lumber industry had to be regulated. Enter Gifford Pinchot and the US Forestry Service. Potatoes wouldn’t exist without large-scale irrigation, large-scale irrigation wouldn’t exist without the US Forest Service.

Potatoes are in the eastern part of the state, and Idaho divides east/west. Idaho is where Lewis and Clark left the Missouri River drainage and entered the Columbia River drainage. In Idaho the Lewis and Clark expedition nearly starved crossing the Rockies.

Geographically Southeast Idaho is the northern reach of the Basin and Range Province that extends into Nevada, western Utah, and eastern California. That’s where the potatoes grow. The Rockies extend through 2/3rds of the Panhandle south along the Wyoming border and into British Columbia and Alberta. The Columbia Plateau, sagebrushed and arrid in the south and forested and well-watered in the north, extends west into Washington and Oregon. Salmon follow the Columbia Plateau into the Snake River basin, or at least they would except for the Northwestern dams. Fish don’t pay much attention to state lines, but they do notice dams.

Believe it or not, Idaho’s principal indigenous tribes didn’t stick to state boundaries either, but culturally they divided north/south. In the well-watered north the Kootenai, Kalispel, Coeur d’Alene, and Nez Perce–those are dubbed English names–spread into what is now Washington, Montana, Oregon, and British Columbia. They traded into the Columbia basin for salmon. In the arid south, independent bands of Northern Paiute spread into Southern Oregon and Nevada–when we fished Pyramid Lake in Nevada it was on a Northern Paiute reservation–while independent bands of Shoshone were kindred to and allies with the Plains Comanche.

At Euro American contact, there were an estimated 20,000 native inhabitants of Idaho. By the mid 1800s the population had fallen to 4,000. It was the usual stuff: displacement, disease, warfare. Out of a total estimated Idaho population in 2018 of 1,754,208, approximately 1.7% or 29, 821 were Native American. I guess that’s a kind of recovery.

Idaho didn’t become a state until 1890. It sits there, way north. It’s land that’s hard to monetize and that really couldn’t be commercialized until the railroads and irrigation came, which was late. It’s pretty, but so are its neighbors, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, Utah, and British Columbia are all pretty, and Nevada has all those casinos.

Last week I listened to a podcast of a debate among Boise’s mayoral candidates: the president of the city council was running against the current mayor–I’d surely like to know what bit of ambition and local discord set that off. There was also a nice young Hispanic veteran, and a member of a neighborhood association board who had never heard of urban sprawl. Listening to the debate, you’d have thought that the biggest concerns in Boise were (1) global warming, (2) sprawl, (3) global warming, (4) public transportation, (5) global warming, and (6) air pollution.

It was a decidedly progressive and urban list of concerns, except crime or police violence or pensions or fire department salaries or poor-performing schools were never mentioned. They never mentioned flooding or potholes either. They did mention electric rental scooters. At one point someone said that the Boise Valley was approaching one million in population. It’s not, or at least it’s approaching at a slow and mannerly amble.

For such a progressive and urban list of concerns, Idaho is a decidedly Republican state, and while Idaho is growing–in 2017 it was the fastest growing state by percentage of population, 2%–the greater Boise area has fewer than 800,000 residents. In 2018 Boise itself had an estimated population of 228,790, and for all its progressive urban mayoral concerns, President Trump carried Boise’s Ada County by nearly 10%. That sounds more like Amarillo than New York City.

Of course President Trump pretty much ran away with all of Idaho, receiving 59.25% of the vote. More than 90% of Idaho’s population is white, 26% is Morman, 21% Evangelical, and those things probably aren’t unconnected. It ranks 41st in wealth per household. One supposes that back in the 80s white separatists chose Idaho as a refuge because it already was both pretty separate and pretty white. Success! Only Blaine County, the richest county that includes Ketchum and Sun Valley, and Latah County, home of the insanely liberal University of Idaho, voted for Hillary Clinton. Idaho is decidedly conservative, thought I expect the gap between the most conservative Idahoans and most progressive Idahoans is greater than most of us see in our circle of acquaintance.

Whatever its politics, Idaho is gorgeous, but there’s something unhappy about the West. I came across a list of state suicide rates, and the top ten? In order, Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma, Colorado. Maybe it’s the relative geographic isolation, maybe it’s the cultural streak of independence or the relative lack of social support, or maybe white malaise. The highest rates are among white males 65 and older, with 32.3 deaths per 100,000, and Native American males, with 32.8 deaths per 100,000.

And it’s probably no accident that the principal city of Latah County is Moscow.