An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day, Part 11

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn
Publication date: 1899
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1014

USA > Idaho > An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day > Part 11

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But to feel all the awe and to mark all the splendor and power that come of the mighty display, one must climb down the steep descent to the river's brink below, and, pressing up as nearly as possible to the falls, contemplate the tremendous picture. There some- thing of the energy that creates that endless panorama is comprehended; all the magnificence is seen. In the reverberations that come of the war of waters one hears something like God's voice; something like the splendor of God is before his eyes; something akin to God's power is manifesting itself before him, and his soul shrinks within itself, conscious as never be- fore of its own littleness and helplessness in the pres- ence of the working of Nature's immeasurable forces, -not quite so massive is the picture as Niagara, but it has more lights and shades and loveliness, as though a hand more divinely skilled had mixed the tints and with more delicate art had transfixed them upon that picture suspended there in its rugged and somber frame.

As one watches. it is not difficult to fancy that away back in the immemorial and unrecorded past the angel of love bewailed the fact that mortals were to

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

be given existence in a spot so forbidding; a spot that apparently was never to be warmed with God's smile, which was never to make a sign through which God's mercy was to be discerned .- that then Omnipotence was touched, that with His hand He smote the hills and started the great river in its flow, that with His finger He traced out the channel across the corpse of that other river that had been fire, mingled the sun- beans with the raging waters and made it possible in that fire-blasted frame of scoria to swing a picture which should be shown first to the red man and later to the pale races, a certain sign of the existence, the power and unapproachable splendor of the Great First Cause; and, as the red man through the centuries watched the spectacle, comprehending nothing except that an infinite voice was smiting his ears and insuffer- able glories were blazing below his eyes; so through the centuries to come the pale races will stand upon the shuddering shore and watch, experiencing a mighty impulse to put off the sandles from the feet, under an overmastering consciousness that the spot on which they are standing is holy ground. There is nothing elsewhere like it, nothing half so weird, so wild, so beautiful, so clothed in majesty, so draped in terror; nothing else that awakens impressions at once so start- ling, so winsome, so profound. While journeying through the desert, to come suddenly upon it, the spectacle gives one something of the emotions that would be experienced to behold a resurrection from the dead. In the midst of what seems like a dead world, suddenly there springs into irrepressible life something so marvelous, so grand, so caparisoned with loveliness and irresistible might, that the head is bowed, the strained heart throbs tumultuously and the awed soul sinks to its knees.

J. P. McMeekin, a photographer of Hagerman, Idaho, thus describes these wonderful springs: "Of all the wonderful and beautiful scenes of earth there are none, in all probability, more worthy the attention of the lover of the grand and beautiful than Thousand springs. This sublime spectacle is situated in the heart of the great Snake river desert, Idaho, some twenty-four miles from Shoshone, a town on the Oregon Short Line, and owing to its isolated position is known but to few; yet it is doubtful whether it has a parallel on the globe. Imagine a cliff or cliffs from two to four hundred feet high, from which for a distance of two miles, at a height varying from ninety to two hundred and eighty feet, rush crystal streams of water forming water- falls of almost every conceivable form, and you have but a faint idea of this lovely scene. It must be seen to be appreciated, and the senses become even bewildered by its extent and beauty.

"Viewed from the green, placid bosom of Snake river, but a few hundred feet distant at this point, the scene is sublime, the foaming tor- rents contrasting well with their dark back- ground of lava, or where they trail their beautiful lace-work over carpetings of velvet moss of the most gorgeous hues-green, scarlet, orange and crimson. Below, on the banks of the numerous streams formed by these springs, grow the birch, cedar and willow, their varied foliage dripping with the never-ceasing spray. Wild flowers are scattered here in profusion and coloring not known to other localities near by.

"A boat may be taken the whole distance around the base of these falls, when the river is high, say in June or July. It is then that their variety, extent and beauty may be seen to full advantage. Then, too, you can look down into the clear, cool water below, where trout and other fish may be seen darting through their beautiful, blue depths or over shallows of golden sand and bright-hued pebbles. And then, as we look upward to the dizzy heights, what a trans- formation we behold! Rainbows are everywhere visible in the spray as it rises in masses or de- tached fragments, coloring the snowy jets into flame and colors for which there are no names; and the most gorgeous colorings of the palette become lifeless compared with them. Set in its frame of adamant and surrounded by a barren waste, its beanty is greatly enhanced, and forms a wonderful and lovely picture,-one on which the eye loves to linger until wearied of trying to trace the endless torrents as they plunge madly onward to rest in the placid river below."

The eastern gateway to the Snake river valley and also to Idaho, is the famous South Pass, where the lowest point on the summit of the di- vide is nearly seven thousand and five hundred feet above sea level, while the peaks in the vicinity rise to an elevation of ten to over thirteen thou- sand feet, Fremont peak being thirteen thousand five hundred and seventy feet. The pass to the north to the Blackfoot country is six thousand feet above the sea level, which is the general level of that region. Various peaks in the Bitter Root range rise to elevations between seven and ten thousand feet. Fort Boise is in the lowest part of the Snake river valley in Idaho, being only two thousand feet above the sea. The

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

Florence mines are about eight thousand feet above the level of the sea. The largest body of level land affording grass instead of the almost omnipresent sage brush is the Big Camas prairie, on the headwaters of Wood river. Camas prairie comprises five hundred square miles of rolling farm lands. Much of the southern part is a dry, black lava desert four hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, cut deep down a thousand feet or more by the sheer canyons of the Snake river and other streams and by many great crevasses. The northern part of the plain has a wonderfully weird appearance, as of a black sea suddenly turned to stone. The soil elsewhere in the val- ley is sandy and unstable, and the chief vegeta- tion consists of enormous sage-brush and bunch- grass ; but irrigation is redeeming it for farming. Within the bend of the Snake river is an immense basaltic plain, out of which rise the granite crests of the Three Buttes,-famous landmarks for overland emigrants. South of the Snake the valleys and foot-hills contain bunch-grass and arable bottom land, alternating with abrupt ranges of mountains, which are dotted with a few evergreens and aspens. The beautiful Ma- lade, Cache, Gentile, Bear river and other valleys open the way into the Utah basin and are oc- cupied by Mormon hamlets, around which ex- tend broad farms, with efficient irrigation sys- tems. Southwestern Idaho contains a dreary, alkaline desert, out of which rise the Owyhee mountains. A small portion of the wonderful Yellowstone National Park is included within the state.

Almost everything grand or mysterious in na- ture, in her land exhibits, is represented here in the state now beautifully characterized as the "Gem of the Mountains." Even a magnificent volcano exists within its limits. Buffalo Hump, an isolated butte between Clearwater and Salmon rivers, has had three or four eruptions within the period of white settlement, flames shooting high into the sky and lava flowing down the sides of the mountain. In 1881 an outburst of lava oc- curred in the mountains east of Camas prairie, while at the same time an earthquake occurred. In 1864 the Salmon river rose and fell several feet, rising a second time higher than before, and was warm and muddy.

But volcanic action has never been so exten -

sive as to destroy the fine paleontological char- acter of most of the country. The country be- tween Reynolds creek, in Owyhee county, and Bruneau river is one vast bed of organic remains of extinct species of animals. Even parts of the human skeleton have been found which were so situated as to indicate that a race of men once ex- isted here before the present Indians. Many lo- calities are rich in organic remains, whence the paleontologist will find interesting material for his museum for ages to come. In Scribner's Magazine for February, 1890, there is a scientific account of a miniature but finely wrought image, a few inches long, of a human skull, apparently representing the skull of an extinct race of men, found at the bottom of an artesian well over two hundred and sixty feet deep at Nampa, in sand- stone, below vegetable soil. S. F. Emmons, of the geological survey, considered that the strat- um in which this relic was found was far older than any others in which human remains had ever been found, excepting perhaps those under Table mountain, in California. It raises a ques- tion of the stability of geological developments,- upheavals and subsidences that are impossible to calculate.

On the hills and mountain spurs almost the only vegetation consists of Artemisia tridentata, or "absinthe," as the early Canadian voyageurs used to call it, and sage-brush, another species of artemisia, and cactus, the whole giving a uni- formly dull gray tint of inconceivable melancholy to the landscape. The hills themselves consist of black lava, and this is slightly covered in spots with vegetable soil, almost always dry.

There was primarily no particular reason for calling the Rocky mountains by that name. This appellation was probably given it by some trav- elers who first saw the range where it was ex- clusively rocky, or possibly by Indians who lived in its vicinity, who, never having seen any other mountains in the world, considered these great elevations peculiarly rocky. At any rate, along the eastern boundary of Idaho, on both the west- ern and eastern slopes the mountains are in gen- eral beautifully rolling masses like the waves of the sea, covered to a certain height by rich forage grasses, shrubbery and trees. The "Poet of the Sierras" thus describes the general scene in his peculiar style :

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

"The only thing that strikes the stranger with awe and admiration on first looking at these great mountain slopes, is their massiveness. As you climb up the rounded, grassy steeps, either from the west or from the east, you first notice a tremendous hill before you, and massive, grass-set tumuli to your right, to your left, behind and before, as you proceed. You pass huge hills dotted with herds, ribbons of rills threading down and around and running together, here and there forming wooded streams. Then you see before you more massive, grassy hills, more herds, more massive hills now, more herds, more herds, then more massive and mighty hills.

"Such was the sublime aspect of this land when my eyes first looked upon it more than a genera - tion ago, and such it must remain until 'the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds.' Man may break this sublime monotony of nature a little, as time sweeps on, by a harvest field where the ever-fertile hilltops tempt him to sow and reap; he may set his little city and center of trade by the meadow brook at the base; he may grid- iron the great, rounded domes of grass that stretch in billowy succession east and west and north and south; but he will never be able to drive from the mind of the stranger the convic- tion, as he first beholds Idaho, that it was at the first cast in a tremendous mold."

All the streams emptying into Snake river at a distance below the great falls sink before reaching it and flow beneath the lava, shooting out of the sides of the canyon with beautiful ef- fect and forming a variety of cascades. The lava presents phenomena like breathing-holes, where strong currents of air find continual vent. Chasms extending seemingly to immense depths, "devil's" corrals of lava walls, extinct craters, a pile of basalt resembling a magnificent city in ruins, and numerous other basaltic masses pre- senting 'a weird and suggestive appearance and having correspondingly significant names, many of them having the word "devil" as an essentially descriptive element.

Salmon river, in the descriptive language of a miner, almost cuts the earth in two, the banks having a perpendicular height of about four thou- sand feet for miles and backed by rugged moun- tains that seem to have been rent by the most

violent convulsions. Godin or Lost river is a con- siderable stream from the Wood River moun- tains, which disappears near Three Buttes-hence the name Lost-and reappears at a distance. Op- posite the Big Camas prairie is a range of moun- tains whose tops glisten with perpetual snow. Stretching southward is a sea of cinder, wavy, scaly, and sometimes cracked and abysmal. All the rivers of Idaho run into the Columbia ex- cepting the Bear river, which flows into the Great Salt Lake.

Curious mineral springs have been discovered in various parts of the state, the most famous of which are the soda springs in the Bear river re- gion. Around these springs are circular embank- ments of pure white soda several feet in height and twenty to thirty feet wide. In the Bear river valley there is an area equal to a square mile in which there are masses of pure soda, and others of soda mixed with sulphur, others with iron, etc .; and some are warm, some cold, some bub- bling, others quiet, etc.

The climate of the valleys of Idaho is found to be far milder than had been expected from their great elevation, while the mountains, of course, present their usual variety. In the mountainous regions are some picturesque lakes, many of them navigable. Lakes Coeur d'Alene and Pend d'Oreille are navigable, being thirty to thirty- five miles in length, and they abound in choice varieties of fish. Kaniksu is a clear body of water twenty miles long and ten wide. Hindoo lakes are a group of small bodies of alkaline wa- ter of medicinal qualities.

Bear lake is a magnificent oval, twenty by twenty-eight miles in dimensions, whose deep and mountain-fed waters abound in trout and mullet, and ripple up sandy shores below Paris, Montpelier and other peaceful Mormon villages. The valley is five thousand and nine hundred feet above the sea. Bear lake remains ice-bound from January to April.

Lake Pend Oreilles is thirty miles long and from three to fifteen miles wide, studded with islands and surrounded by Granite mountain, the snowy Pack-saddle range, the purple Coeur d'Alene mountains and other peaks, nearly ten thousand feet high. This lake has two hundred and fifty miles of shore line and is navigated by several small steamboats. The Northern Pacific

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

Railroad follows the north shore for twenty-five miles.

Coeur d'Alene lake fills a wide gorge in the spurs of the Coeur d'Alene mountains, and bears the form of the letter E, with the branches point- ing southeast. Its irregular and lonely shores are clad with forests of pine and tamarack. The ex- panse is twenty miles long and one to four miles wide, with a depth reaching one hundred and eighty feet, a wild Windermere of clear, cold, light-green water, abounding in trout and other fish, and stocked with millions of white-fish. St. Joseph river, flowing into this lake, is navigable for twenty-five miles. The lake is said to be agitated in the evening by mysterious swells, like those on lake Geneva in Switzerland. Out of the northern end of this lake flows the Spokane river, which runs a hundred miles west to the Columbia. At the head of this lake, ten miles from Rath- drum station, is an eight-company post, Fort Sherman, established by General Sherman.

Farther north, under the lonely Cabinet moun- tains, in a land inhabited mainly by caribou, deer and bears, lake Kaniksu covers two hundred square miles. This remote locality, forty miles from the railway, is visited only by hunters.

· In the southeastern part of Idaho are Henry and Cliff lakes, surrounded by high peaks and basaltic cliffs of the Rocky mountains. Each of these is three to four miles long. The clear, cold, deep Payette lakes, one of which is two by ten miles in magnitude, lie at the head of the beau- tiful Long valley.

The Bear lake country has a mountain of sul- phur and deposits of lead and coal. The latter is also mined on Irwin creek and at Lewiston. Near Bear river is the soda springs health resort, with its alterative and tonic iron, sulphur and magnesia waters, sparkling, effervescent and pleasant, and highly charged with carbonic-acid gas. One of these fountains Fremont naned the Steamboat spring, on account of its measured puffs of steam. In this vicinity are sulphur lakes, a deep ice cave and the beautiful Swan lake. The most famous springs are the Mammoth and Ninety Percent; and there are also mud, hot, ammonia and gas springs. These waters are 5,779 feet above the sea, among the Wasatch mountains, in a pure and dry air, which is of great benefit to consumptives. They were the

favorite resort of Brigham Young, and many Salt Lake Mormons frequent them still. Also other well-to-do persons have built summer cot- tages here. Large quantities of this water are bottled and shipped to the markets.

Besides the abundance of fish in the waters, there is yet a great number of game animals, even of the large class, as bear, deer, antelope, elk and mountain sheep, among the quadrupeds; besides large quantities of partridge, quail, grouse, swan and wild duck. Formerly there was also an abundance of the fur-bearing animals, including the beaver, martens and muskrats, etc., and also wolves, red and silver-gray foxes and some speci- mens of the mountain lion.

In the vegetable world there are grapes. cherries, blackberries, gooseberries, huckleberries, strawberries, salmon-berries, several useful spe- cies of pine and fir, white cedar, hemlock, yew, white oak, live oak, cottonwood, poplar, moun- tain mahogany and madrono. Among the curi- osities were the camas root, which was formerly eaten by the Indians, and the quallah, an inferior root, also consumed as an article of diet by the natives.

Professor F. V. Hayden, in his "Geological Survey of the Territories," in referring to the sur- face of a large portion of Idaho, describes it as literally crumpled or rolled up in one continuous series of mountain ranges, fold after fold. Per- haps even better examples of these remarkable folds may be found in the country drained by Salmon river and its branches, where lofty ranges of mountains, for the most part covered with limestones and quartzites of the carboniferous age, wall in all the little streams. None of our published maps convey any idea of the almost innumerable ranges. We might say that from longitude 110° to 118°, a distance of over five hundred miles, there is a range of mountains, on an average, every ten to twenty miles. Some- times the distance across the range in a straight line, from the bed of a stream in one valley to the bed of the stream in the valley beyond the range, is not more than five to eight miles, while it is seldom more than twenty miles. "From these statements," says the Professor, "which we believe to be correct, the reader may form some conception of the vast amount of labor yet to be performed to explore, analyze, and locate on a

HISTORY OF IDAHO.

suitable scale these hundreds of ranges of moun- tains, each one of which is worthy of a name."

Though the foregoing may be somewhat exag- gerated, Idaho is in reality a mountain territory. It is from the interior of her mountains that the chief source of her wealth is derived. It is her mountain sides that afford the nutritious grasses that sustain hundreds of thousands of her cattle, and it is her intermountain vales that furnish the soil of her farms and ranches.

In the north are the Cœur d'Alene and Bitter Root mountains, a portion of the latter range, together with the crest of the Rocky mountains, forming the dividing line between Idaho and Montana. Spurs from the main range of the Rockies ramify into all sections of the state. The Sawtooth, Salmon river, Wood river, Boise, and other ranges are the scenes of active mining operations in central Idaho; while the Wahsatch and Owyhee mountains are among the more im- portant in the southeastern and southwestern portions, respectively.

The average elevation of the state is about 4.700 feet, being from 2,000 to 3,000 feet less than that of Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, or Colo- rado. The highest peaks range from 9,000 to 13,000 feet in height. The lowest altitude is at Lewiston, where the Clearwater joins the Snake at an elevation of 680 feet.

A bird's-eye view of the state would represent a vast, wedge-shaped plateau, rising from an elevation less than 700 feet in the extreme west to over 10,000 feet in the extreme east. Over this rugged surface countless streams are flowing as tributaries to the three principal streams. In its long serpentine course through the state, the Snake absorbs the waters of such streams as the Clearwater, Salmon, Payette, Boise, Owyhee, Bruneau, Wood and others. Of these the largest is the Salmon, which, rising in the Sawtooth range, after a long circuitous course, receiving numberless tributaries, and forcing the very mountains asunder, finally empties into the Snake not many miles above Lewiston. The immense water power of Idaho is one of its great resources, affording as it does ample facilities for irrigating, mining, and manufacturing purposes.

This "northern" region, as Colonel McClure

justly remarks, is not in all respects "northern." It is, indeed, the "cold blue north" in this respect, where the stars glitter in the clear, sparkling air of the majestic winter; but the cold is not un- comfortable. The air is so dry, pure and bracing that even zero does not make the resident flinch; he rather enjoys it. Men wear fewer clothes than in the same latitude in the east, and at the same time suffer less. Overcoats are seldom worn, ex- cepting by travelers in conveyances. Rheuma- tism and consumption are unknown here except in the cases of those immigrants who had such ailments before locating here. Catarrh, or "cold in the head," is seldom experienced. And even those who come here with these troubles, if in the incipient stage, are almost always cured. The same remarks are practically applicable to asth- ma and all other throat and lung diseases. Moun- tain fever, however, is sometimes contracted, but the people are learning to avoid this, and to treat it successfully when contracted.

No community can be continuously prosperous with but a sole dependence. This has been shown repeatedly in the history of our own country. Fortunately for Idaho, she is not so situated. She is not a land of mineral veins and gold placers only. The wealth of these mineral veins and deposits, and the fact that their discovery and development came in advance of the natural movement by which her other resources are now being developed, have served somewhat to give the impression that Idaho is only a mining state. As a matter of fact, this is only one of her re- sources, and one that is destined gradually to be overshadowed by those giving a more stable basis of permanent and unbroken prosperity. Five great industries occupy the attention of her people,-mining, agriculture, stock-raising, fruit- growing and lumbering. The last four are in- creasing year by year and have such capabilities of expansion that it may be safely predicted that in a few years they will absorb the attention and contribute to the support of a large majority of the population, in connection with the manufac- turing that will be based upon them and grow out of them and be provided by them, with the home market supplied by the largely increased population.

Big Redfish Lake.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FIRST SETTLEMENTS-THE MARCH OF PROGRESS-INDIAN DEPREDATIONS-MINING DEVELOPMENTS.

T HE first settlements made by whites with- in the present boundaries of Idaho were effected by Jesuit missionaries, as is true throughout the Pacific coast region; and pre- viously to 1863, the beginning of a new era in this region, there were but two or three settle- ments made by others. In the primeval stage the country was not at all inviting to civilized people. The almost omnipresence of red savages precluded all thoughts of prospecting in the mountains for valuable minerals, while the val- leys seemed to be only arid deserts absolutely irreclaimable for agricultural purposes. In the outside world ideas as to the climate were de- rived only from hunters and trappers, who spent only the winters here, in the mountains, where the cold was intense and snow abundant, and from emigrants, who passed through here only during hot weather, when the valleys they trav- ersed seemed to deserve connection with what was known as "the Great American desert."

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An illustrated history of the state of Idaho, containing a history of the state of Idaho from the earliest period of its discovery to the present time, together with glimpses of its auspicious future; illustrations and biographical mention of many pioneers and prominent citizens of to-day, Part 11

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn Publication date: 1899 Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company Number of Pages: 1014

Author: Lewis Publishing Company. cn
Publication date: 1899
Publisher: Chicago, The Lewis publishing company
Number of Pages: 1014