Idaho Playlist

Did you know that if you took any song written about Mexico, and changed it to Idaho, the meter still worked? That’s why Canadians sing “South of the border/Down Idaho way.

What We Took

We took gear for trout. We took a 3-weight rod, a 4-weight rod, and two 5-weights, and we never took the 4-weight out of the luggage. I liked the flimsy 3-weight just fine until it got windy, but it got windy a lot so I finally gave it up for the 5-weight. Both rods I took were Winstons, a new Pure 5-weight that Trout Unlimited sent me because I won their annual spelling bee, and a Boron IIIX that I picked up at a Gordy & Son’s remainder sale because Winston came out with the Pure. Kris took her Helios 3D 5 weight. I fished it for just a bit. I’m used to big booming saltwater rods. I’m not used to big booming trout rods. That rod is a big booming trout rod.

We took floating lines and some 5x and 6x leaders I’d tied. We didn’t use the 6x, and I think the guides laughed at me for owning 6x tippet. We took some reels, a couple of Abels, a Ross, a Hardy, but I caught exactly one fish on the reel, and then I was reeling in my line for a pause in fishing when for some unfathomable reason a fish hit the skating fly.

We took waders and boots for Silver Creek, but didn’t take them on the Middle Fork. The guides strongly discouraged waders in the boats, something about getting thrown out, waders filling with water, and drowning. All things being equal I’d just as soon not.

Our gear was limited by the weight we could take on the bush plane, 30 pounds apiece, and I was already taking 11 pounds of guitar and case. I paired down and then paired down again. Instead of taking all ten foam hoppers that I’d tied, I only took five. Really. I’m stupid.

We took a bottle of Four Roses bourbon in honor of William Faulkner’s birthday, and poured the contents into a plastic water bottle to save weight. Happy birthday William!

I gave myself a new guitar case for my birthday, a Visesnut, maybe the best guitar case made (though they make a carbon fiber model for about $800 more). For years I’ve traveled with a cheap 3/4 size classical that I would stow in the overhead bin. Coming through Chicago Midway on Labor Day I talked to a guy who always checked his guitar with his luggage, and when I asked Kris if I should get a better case and check my guitars she immediately said yes please. Apparently with a guitar case on a plane I’m a nuisance.

We took too many clothes, but that’s probably because we had great weather. I discovered that I really liked wearing a fishing shirt on the water, the kind with lots of pockets, because, well, pockets. When I just wore a knit pullover I wanted pockets.

I bought a new pair of shoes for the trip, Simms Riprap wet wading shoe. They worked great, except that I didn’t wear socks until the final day on the water. I should have worn socks. They’re better with socks.

What We Lost. Where We Didn’t Go.

Kris destroyed her IPhone on Silver Creek by dunking it. I destroyed my Nikon Coolpix W300 waterproof camera on Silver Creek by ignoring the warnings about cleaning the seals and then dunking it. If you ignore the warnings it’s not waterproof. I had to take pictures the rest of the trip with my GoPro, which was better for stills than I thought it would be. Kris had to use my phone. She takes most of the photos I post, and is better at it than I am.

We didn’t go to McCall or Couer d’Alene, both of which my parents loved 60 years ago. I’m sure they haven’t changed. We didn’t fish the Henry’s Fork.

What We Ate.

On the way out of Boise we stopped by the Basque Block and bought a baguette and cheese, which got us to Ketchum. Ketchum is a strange mix of college town sans college and affluent resort, but I enjoyed the Pioneer Saloon, where I had a long conversation with an older south Idaho rancher and his daughter about barrel racing, how I could never break 20 seconds as a kid, and why I don’t much like horses. Some of us just aren’t really horse whisperers.

The guides kept us fed on the river, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In order of dinner entrees: fried chicken, pork chops, fajitas, salmon, steak. It was always excellent, though Idahoans could use some advice on how to serve tortillas. I got two deserts on my birthday, though one may have been for William Faulkner.

Books

I’ve already written about Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, which stands alone as a peculiarly great book about Idaho. Hemingway famously died there, but he didn’t really write anything important in Idaho except maybe A Moveable Feast, and that’s about Paris. But did you know that Hemingway’s buddy Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho?

Ezra Pound is at the heart of American literature, he really is. I like some of his poems very much, and there is still no writing more beautiful to me than Pound’s The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

Ezra Pound circa 1913, doing his best Bob Dylan, from the Paris Review.

That said, I suspect I wouldn’t have much liked Pound in the flesh. Since college, whenever I’ve thought of Idaho, I’ve wondered how Pound could have been bred and born in Hailey? I finally looked it up. Turns out he was born there because his broke father took a political appointment in Hailey’s general land office. He was born and then a month later Mom left one of the most beautiful places on earth for New York City because she wouldn’t raise her son in such a God-forsaken wilderness. Dad soon followed. It explains a lot.

Baseball

When we left Ketchum and civilization, the Astros had clinched the American League West. When we got back to Salmon they had clinched home field advantage over the Yankees and the Dodgers. It was a good way to return to WiFi. That whole Ukraine thing happened with the President too.

Birds

Kris birds, seriously birds, as in she’s permanently attached to a pair of binoculars and a birding guide, and she spent as much time in Idaho looking at her copy of Peterson’s New Birder’s Guide as I spent playing the guitar. There are birds, eagles and ospreys, that fish for a living, and we saw ospreys but we never saw an eagle. She was thrilled with the osprey skull found at a campsite.

There is a small bird on the river, called an ouzel by the guides but the American dipper by the guidebooks. It lives in the rocks by the river and is a delight and joy. They’re the only aquatic songbird in America, and one dusk when we heard a bird song I said to Kris that sounds like a mockingbird. Of course I always tell Kris every pretty bird song is a mockingbird, even when in Idaho where there are no mockingbirds, but for once I was sort of right; it was an ouzel. The New Birder’s Guide said its strong sweet tones sound like a mockingbird. And they do.

Andy Reago & Chrissy McClarren – American Dipper, from Wikimedia Commons.

Music

After Kris got tired of my collection of Josh Ritter (which is surprisingly extensive, and his Wolves is a great favorite), she found a bunch of songs with Idaho in the name or the lyrics and an internet comment that said there are a lot of songs with Idaho in the name or the lyrics, none of which have much to do with Idaho. Like I said, you can substitute Idaho for Mexico anytime you want, and it looks like lots of songwriters do.

Victor Wooten, a well-known jazz bassist and the bassist for Bella Fleck and the Flecktones, was born in Idaho. His parents were military, and he apparently stayed about as long as Ezra Pound.

  • b-52s, Private Idaho. I could do without ever hearing this song again.
  • Riders in the Sky, Idaho (Where I’m From). Ranger Doug is a great Western Swing guitarist, and Too Slim is responsible for the Paul is Dead Hoax.
  • Bryan Lanning, Idaho. It is stunning that there are so many songs called Idaho. This may be the only pop anthem called Idaho.
  • IDAHO, To Be the One. And this may be the only band called Idaho. I’d change my name, just because it’s so hard to google.
  • Gregory Alan Isakov. Idaho.
  • Gorillaz, Idaho. Bon Iver meets Harry Nilsson, and I’m not sure it works,.
  • BoDeans, Idaho. I’m just a BoDeans kinda guy. They’re from Wisconsin.
  • Jeffrey Foucault, Idaho. I liked this. Foucault is also from Wisconsin, and this song would have worked if sung about Mexico.
  • Y La Bamba. Idaho’s Genius. A Spanish lament out of Portland that mentions Idaho. I should have had these people on our Portland playlist.
  • Hot Buttered Rum, Idaho Pines. Bluegrass. Tennessee mountain music about Idaho.
  • Caitlin Canty, Idaho. Clean voices, clean guitars. Good Nashville.
  • Down Like Silver, Idaho. This is also Caitlin Canty, with Peter Bradley Adams. She must have a thing for Idaho.
  • Ron Pope, Twin Falls Idaho. Road song. More ok Nashville, but it’s kind of the problem with songs about Idaho: they don’t have to be about Idaho. It’s convenient. It’s exotic. It’s a place to yearn for in a sadly yearning sort of way.
  • Rick Pickren, Here We Have Idaho. This is the state song. It’s kind of a polka song.
  • Jeremy McComb, Bury Me in Idaho. McComb was born in Idaho. McComb sounds like he’s from Nashville. What is it with Nashville and Idaho?
  • Old Bear Mountain, Idaho. More Idaho Bluegrass.
  • Ronee Blakly, Idaho Home. This was from Robert Altman’s Nashivlle. Inauthentic old-time Nashville meets Idaho, and Blakly is still authentically great.
  • Clare Burson, Take Good Care. I don’t know what this song has to do with Idaho.
  • Cori Connors, Idaho Wind. I don’t know what this song has to do with Idaho.
  • Rosalie Sorrels, Way Out In Idaho. Sorrels was part of the 50s-60s folk movement, and recorded a number of Idaho timber and mining songs. They’re very earnest.
Tony Rees, John Renbourn and Stefan Grossman, 1978, Norwich Folk Festival.
  • John Renbourn, Idaho Potato. For guitarists of a certain type and age, Renbourn is a hero. This is classic Renbourn. If I were picking out a road trip playlist, this would be my Idaho song.
  • Drew Barefoot, Idaho. Instrumental that would fit just fine on an Ennio Morricone Spaghetti Western soundtrack.
  • David Robert King, Bad Thing. This guy listened to too much Tom Waits as a child. This is off his album “Idaho.”
  • The Eisenhauers, Idaho. Every time this came on I had to pick up the phone to see who sounded so great. They’re Canadian. I think they thought they were writing about Mexico.
  • Amy Annelle, Idaho. Annelle is from Austin, and has a troubled medical history and a lovely voice. Apparently writing about Idaho in Austin isn’t quite the thing that it is in Nashville. She’s the only Austin musician on the list.

All those songs called “Idaho?” You may not believe it but every one is a different song. If I ever write a song I think I’ll call it Idaho, and it will never mention Idaho once.

Reckless Kelly is from Idaho. I think of them as an Austin band. My fail.

One song named Idaho stood out: Idaho by Afroman. “Idaho, Idaho, Idaho baby/potatoes ain’t the only thing they grow.” Then the song gets obscene. Really really party rap obscene. Don’t listen to this with your children. Don’t listen to this if you’re squeamish. I’m squeamish, but it was funny to listen to once or twice.

Middle Fork Salmon River, Idaho, September 23-28, 2019.

We rafted six days down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, and except when we had to sit down through rapids we fished. We caught and released fish too, lots of fish: native west slope cutthroats, a couple of small parr-marked rainbows evidencing a prior successful steelhead romance, and two eight-inch Chinook smolts ready to attempt the 1000-odd mile trip to the Pacific. We didn’t raft on our own; Kris never rowed and I never set up a tent. We were with Solitude River Trips, along with 16 other clients and 11 guides. The guides did everything of importance, including rowing, making coffee, cooking food, and untangling leaders. The guests were an unnecessary but happy accompaniment to the guides’ good work.

The guests drank coffee in the morning and beer in the evening and fished. I gained weight during my wilderness experience, which weight gain was fun at the time but not so good in retrospect.

The Middle Fork of the Salmon cuts through the Frank Church Wilderness, which is the largest contiguous protected wilderness in the lower 48, which is a long way around to saying it’s big but don’t forget Death Valley and Alaska. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act no new improvements–roads, mines, convenience stores, or apartment complexes–are allowed. It’s name is actually the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, changed in 1984 to honor Idaho Senator Frank Church.

U.S. Forest Service, A User’s Guide: Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness

The Salmon River Mountains dominate the Wilderness. The Mountains are a discrete range of the Rockies, defined by the Salmon River and its tributaries. The Main Fork canyons are actually deeper than the Grand Canyon, though not so sheer or dramatic. It’s plenty dramatic enough. There’s low brush and trees along the river, steep barren elevation changes marked by scattered pines and granite faces, blocks, and scree, and high crags covered by new snow. Like I said, plenty of drama.

It isn’t the River of No Return Wilderness because you go there and never come out, but because if you come out by river you can’t turn around and go back by river. Even going down the Salmon is hard, and the lower canyon of the Middle Fork is impassable except by boat. I guess that’s why somebody named it Impassable Canyon. I’m quick that way.

When Lewis and Clark reached the Salmon they abandoned their original plan to float the river to reach the Pacific. It could have been done, the Salmon to the Snake, the Snake to the Columbia, the Columbia to the Pacific, but it ain’t easy. The Middle Fork is the same only more so, and in these late days while the Main Fork is generally accessible by car we could only reach the Middle Fork by bush plane.

Bush plane, a tiny four-person piper, to the put-in at Thomas Creek Airstrip on the Middle Fork. The pilot Mike pointed out we were often flying below terrain. That meant that when we looked out the window we were as often as not below nearby mountain ridges. It was all pretty exciting, though Mike wouldn’t roll down the windows and let us fish.

The Middle Fork runs northish, and the guides brought the rafts downriver from the south to meet us when we got off the planes. During higher spring and summer water the float trips are longer, 100 miles. We did 60, which made things both leisurely and less crowded. School was back in session and late-fall Idaho weather can be iffy, wet and cold, so there weren’t a lot of other parties on the river. Flows were very low, about 1.6 feet at the USGS gauge near where we put in. While coming downriver we could look up to see 15 feet above us where early-season high water had slammed debris into rock crevices and the forks of trees.

The weather, by the way, was perfect. Sunny and cool, clear except for a bit of spitting rain one afternoon and a lot of wind the final day.

We were there for west slope cutthroat. Seven states have cutthroat as their state fish, and the list reads like a Who’s Who of western fly fishing: Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. William Clark wrote the first description of cutthroat, and the species, Oncorhynchus clarkii, was named for Clark. The subspecies, west slope (Oncorhynchus clarkii lewisi), was named for both Lewis and Clark. It is such an American fish.

USGS, Native Range of Cutthroat Trout, excluding southeastern Alaska, in ochre. That’s the orangy brown.

There are 14 identified subspecies of cutthroat, spread across the western states and Canada. Two subspecies are extinct. Two subspecies, the Lahontan and the greenback, were thought extinct but were rediscovered in remote streams.

Loss of habitat has decreased cutthroat populations. Because of its seclusion, the Middle Fork remains one of the great cutthroat rivers. The great fish, like the great places, often survive on the margins.

United States Forest Service.

The cutthroat looks like its closest kin, the rainbow, without the brightly-colored side-bands. The cutthroat’s distinguishing mark, and one of the prettiest (and most violently named) marks in fishdom are the crimson symmetrical slashes at the bottom of its jaw, the slashed throat, the cutthroat. The west slope’s back is green, and marked by tiny sparse fine dark spots towards the head accelerating in density down the back and sides through the tail. The belly is bright silver. In the middle fork they are small, with a good fish at 14 inches, and until the wind drove me to a 5 weight a 3 weight was the very thing.

The Middle Fork runs into the Main Fork, where we would take out six days after we put in. The anadromous fish, steelhead and salmon, make the run the opposite way from the Pacific to have sex and die–which I guess is better than making the run the opposite way just to die. Even though impeded by power dams and predators and whatnot, there are still both salmon and steelhead that make the journey, the longest fish migration in North America, the river of sometimes some return. Do you think salmon quote Kipling as they head upriver? Ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do or die. It is such a cruel joke: Sex and death: they’re just piscine Romeos and Juliets.

Snake River Watershed, by Shannon1, under GNU Free Documentation License.

After packing the stuff in our tent–the hardest work of our day and really almost too much to bear–and after breakfast we were on the river by 9ish. I played the guitar in the morning, sitting as close to the river and the fire as I could get, drinking coffee, trying to remember bits and pieces of Bach and Gaspar Sanz and Tárrega. It was the most pleasant thing in the world, at least for me. I can’t speak for the poor people who had to listen.

When we weren’t on the river we spent considerable time lazing around with the 16 other clients while waiting for the guides to do all the work. We were from a narrow range of circumstances. The largest contingent was from Portland or just on the Washington side of the Oregon-Washington border. There were five Texans (including us), with four from greater Houston and one from Austin.  Two clients were from New Mexico, two from Idaho, and then some outliers, Alabama, Maine. There were doctors, lawyers, hydrologists, retirees, a nurse, and a consultant.

It was a congenial group, educated, mostly older, tending towards the same predispositions and attitudes. There was an evening when I sat with Lynn and Dan, Mike and Carol, Russell and Cathy at dinner, and we veered into politics.  Lynn from Maine believed that Susan Collins would retire rather than run for the Senate again, which was interesting to me. No one was injured because of the political discussion, which was also interesting to me, but then there wasn’t a lot of voiced disagreement either. I suspect some who differed from the voiced opinions kept their mouth shut.

On the way downriver groups are permitted for designated campsites, and at night we would arrive with tents up and dinner underway. We hiked some during the day, once to see Shoshone pictographs, once to a waterfall, but mostly we floated and fished, or in the two boats of non-anglers floated and watched the wilderness. I supposed at my most intense all of the Middle Fork looked to me like the couple of square feet of water around the fly I was fishing. It’s no wonder that back home from time to time I find myself standing in the middle of a fire ant bed. I kinda narrow my focus when I fish.

We fished dry flies, big hoppers mostly, or hoppers with a purple haze dry dropper, or hoppers with a weighted underwater purple prince nymph dropper. It didn’t matter. The fish were gullible and eager. I had checked the hatch chart–the chart of bugs that are likely to appear in that place at that time–in my ancient copy of Great Hatches, Great Rivers, a classic that I’m sure is on everyone’s shelf. The Middle Fork isn’t one of the listed rivers, but Silver Creek was, and I figured that was close enough. Grasshoppers it said, grasshoppers and flying ants and blue-winged olives.

I tried to tie some size 20 blue winged olives, tiny wee things that could fit four flies comfortably together in the cup of a contact lens. It wasn’t my best effort, producing lumpy, misshapened mayfly imitations that would have embarrassed the Creator if they looked like anything in creation. It took me three weeks to crank out five, and then I left them in my box, ashamed and distrustful. Hoppers on the other hand were more in my wheelhouse, and I found an easy pattern from FlyFish Food that I could crank out simple as kiss my hand. Flying ants were easy too.

And I caught stuff on the hoppers, if not the flying ants. So did Kris, and for the most part Kris caught better fish than me all week. There was a day, my birthday, when she outfished me all day and I spent most of the day untangling leaders and maybe, maybe, managed five fish. I reckon God was punishing me for those ugly blue-winged olives and for being old.

There was a day too when I outfished Kris, and at the end of the day the guide held the boat past an underwater granite shelf where clear green water dropped off of a riffle into a deep slow hole. I made perfect casts back over my shoulder and each time caught a fish and too often crossed Kris’s line. I had already caught dozens of fish over the course of the day and Kris finally caught two, all day, and not that we’re in the least competitive but yeah, we are sometimes competitive. I’m lucky I made it off the river and am not still treading water in that deep green hole. In any event the last day I was punished and sent to the back of the boat.

The middle fork is a wild and scenic river, undammed, as is the Main Fork. At dinner the final evening—steak night! Baked potatoes, surely from Idaho! Sautéed mushrooms! More red wine! Did I mention the food was just fine? And red wine?—Mike and Russell discussed Snake River dam removal. In 2020 the Corps of Engineers is scheduled to publish its report on removal of four dams on the Snake down drainage from the Middle Fork, so the report is likely to be completed in the next decade or so.  In the Columbia River drainage most dams were built first for cheap power and second for irrigation and flood control. Woody Guthrie, that shill for Bonneville Power, wrote Roll On Columbia and 25 other songs in the 30s as damned dam propaganda. Cheap power changed lives. It also changed rivers.

Mike sided with dam removal. Russell argued that removal wouldn’t matter, that there would still be plenty of dams left to kill salmon and steelhead on their way to or from Idaho. Mike said the loss of salmon and steelhead was increased incrementally dam by dam. Russell countered that collected sediment made removal impractical and probably harmful. I stayed quiet, but that last seemed like an engineering problem, and the popular notion is that rivers heal quickly after dam removal.

Russell was passionate, Mike was passionate. Russell said that the economic upheaval from removal would be enormous.  Oddly the damaged people were more abstract to me than the restored river and the steelhead and salmon—my reaction reminded me of the incident in Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitude, where Abbey says that he’s a humanist, that he’d rather kill a man than a snake. I was a bit surprised at my own callousness, but all-in-all I’d just as soon let both the man and the snake be. If I parsed it correctly though Russell’s argument seemed to be that people who depended for irrigation and recreation from the dams have a right to dam preservation.

I doubt that there is any right to preservation, or if there is that it couldn’t be compensated–that’s my lawyerly training–but I have to admit my own reasoning was largely selfish. Those wild cutthroats in that wild river were not trophy fish, there were plenty of places to go to catch bigger fish and rarer fish, but these were wild and native fish, fish whose species and subspecies had been in that drainage from before our predecessors crossed the Bering Strait. Each one we caught was a beautiful fish, and when you watched them rise to your hopper, suddenly appearing suspended in the river a foot below your fly, it was somehow just better, better than other fish, as perfect as anything in all the world.

Idaho, Here We Go

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.

Lee, Russell,  Rupert, Idaho (vicinity). Potato field, 1942, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, Library of Congress.

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.

Skin tepees, Shoshone, 1908, National Photo Company Collection (Library of Congress)

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.

Dorothea Lange, Basque sheep herder who speaks broken English coming down from summer camp with pack animals. Adams County, Idaho, 1939, Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).

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.

Oncorhynchus clarkii
A.H. Baldwin, Oncorhynchus clarkii, West Slope Cutthroat, Evermann, B.W. and E.L. Goldsborough, 1907, The Fishes of Alaska, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 

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