Craters of the Moon Historic Context Statements

Settlement Patterns in the Craters of the Moon Region, 1879-1933:
OVERVIEW OF SETTLEMENT PATTERNS ON THE SNAKE RIVER PLAIN

The Snake River Plain was known to Euro-American fur trappers, explorers, and missionaries since the first decades of the nineteenth century, yet it attracted little interest from American settlers. Repelled by the plain's inhospitable and desiccated environment, Oregon-bound emigrants of the mid-nineteenth century viewed the region more as a barrier to cross and survive than settle. They not only feared its waterless and treeless wastes but its Indians as well. Many, perhaps, shared the observations of Wilson Price Hunt who characterized the plain as a "dreary desert of sand and gravel." Washington Irving, in his widely read and influential account of Hunt's expedition, offered a more powerful criticism when he stated: "It is a land where no man permanently resides; a vast, uninhabited solitude with precipitous cliffs and yawning ravines, looking like the ruins of the world; vast tracts that must ever defy cultivation and interpose dreary and thirsty wilds between the habitations of man." Similarly, a traveler in 1839 reported that no land west of Fort Hall would grow "grains or vegetables." [1] Thus settlement in the Snake River country required enticements to offset its negative image. These enticements came in the form of new lands open for settlement, mineral wealth, transportation improvements, and the construction of large-scale irrigation projects for agriculture.

The first community in southern Idaho emerged on the plain's eastern margin when Mormon colonists settled Franklin in 1860. The Franklin settlers were the first of many communities, composed mostly of Mormons, who left behind the crowded settlements of northern Utah for the fertile valleys of the Bear Lake region and the irrigable fringes of the Snake River Plain during the 1860s. The trend continued in the late 1870s and 1880s when large numbers of Mormons settled the upper Snake River Valley, as far north as Rexburg. They were drawn to the region by new prospects for agriculture, expanded railway service, and religious incentives. [2]

Mining, however, stimulated the greatest interest in Idaho settlement during this period. After 1860 gold and silver strikes throughout the region, especially those of the Boise Basin in 1862, drew many emigrants. Some settled in the new mining communities of the Boise Basin, taking advantage of supplying the mines with agricultural products and other merchandise. Similarly when the Wood River mines boomed in the 1880s, ranching and farming interests settled in the Wood River Valley, while other more modest ranching and farming enclaves appeared in the Little Wood River and Lost River valleys in response to mineral strikes in the region. [3]

Communities--whether in Boise, Wood River, or the upper Snake River country-- became more stable by supplying mining centers, (although federal homestead legislation and the placement of Indians on reservations by the late 1870s and 1880s also provided powerful incentives to settlement). Because the mining communities served as local markets and the plain as open range, cattle raising thrived during the 1860s and 1880s. Stockmen had driven cattle toward the Boise mines in the 1860s from the Oregon country, and by the 1870s they expanded their operations across the ranges of southern Idaho from Oregon, Washington, California, Texas, and Nevada. Large numbers of cattle were not only driven into Idaho but also through Idaho to railheads in Wyoming and Utah for transportation to eastern markets. Later sheep and horses occupied the ranges of the plain and these, too, were herded across southern Idaho for markets beyond the territory. Hard winters, overcrowded ranges, a lack of adequate markets, and a persistent depression in the 1870s and 1880s seriously harmed the cattle industry. Although this turn of events opened up more rangeland for sheepmen, eventually both cattle and sheep "empires" diminished as settlement increased and federal regulations closed the open range at the turn of the century. [4]

Transportation developments in the later nineteenth century played an important part in settling the plain as well. In 1884 the final tracks were laid for the Oregon Short Line across southern Idaho following and thus replacing the overland trail. Afterwards, spur lines spread to the upper Snake River Valley, the Lost River country, and Wood River. Beyond the rails, stage and freight lines serviced the more remote sections of the plain where many hardy souls hoped to strike it rich or try their luck at homesteading. [5] Adapting the arid plain for agriculture, however, contributed the greatest attraction to settlement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State and federal irrigation projects under the Carey Act and Newlands Act between the mid-1890s and World War I reclaimed much of the desert land for farming throughout the Snake River Valley and the northern valleys of the plain. All of this aroused greater interest in and settlement of this one-time spurned desert country; the "tarnished reputation and continued negativism about the Snake River Plain," according to historian Hugh T. Lovin, deterred settlement no longer. During this period, Lovin writes, "thousands scurried" to the plain to claim land on "several dozen reclamation tracts" as promoters "preached that 'honest fortunes' were 'going to waste' on the long-maligned Idaho deserts." Between 1900 and 1920, these newcomers nearly quadrupled the state's population to more than 400,000. [6]