So picture this. Before Europeans even really
knew this place existed, you've got an undercover
Pinkerton spy desperately cutting a hole through
the floorboards of a mining camp bedroom, just
to escape an armed mob of union workers. Which
is just an incredible visual. It really is. And
well, welcome to today's Deep Dive. Because if
you're like most people, you probably associate
the state of Idaho with quiet potato farms or
maybe a ski trip. Right, the usual stereotypes.
Exactly. But we are looking at this geographic
fortress that actually holds some of the oldest
human secrets in North America. Our mission today
is to kind of unpack how one of the most unforgiving
landscapes in the lower 48 forged a history full
of shocking contradictions. I mean, we're talking
literal underground spy escapes, massive demographic
surprises, and honestly, some of the bloodiest
labor wars in American history. Yeah. And to
really get this, you have to understand that
the landscape itself is the main character in
this story. Geography didn't just, you know,
influence human destiny here. It dictated it
entirely. He was the boss. Absolutely. The sheer
scale of the mountains, the impassable river
canyons, it acts as this primary antagonist.
Every historical event we're going to look at
today. from ancient settlements to modern political
fractures is a direct result of people either
trying to conquer that terrain or just being
trapped by it. Well, let's start with a timeline
then. because the accepted narrative of American
history gets completely flipped upside down when
you look at the dirt along the Salmon River.
Oh, yeah, completely. Because, like, we usually
think of European exploration pushing west in
the 1700s and 1800s, and that they did arrive
incredibly late here. I mean, the Lewis and Clark
expedition didn't even breach the Bitterroot
Mountains into present -day Idaho until, what,
August of 1805. Yeah, 1805, which, by the way,
was a grueling near -death experience for them.
But while that European story is remarkably recent,
The human story is staggeringly ancient. It's
wild. At a site called Cooper's Ferry, archaeologists
have unearthed these stone tools and fragmented
animal bones that completely rewrite the timeline
of human migration. Radiocarbon dating places
human presence there at roughly 16 ,600 years
ago. 16 ,000 years. I mean, just to put that
in perspective for you listening, that predates
the Great Pyramids of Giza by over 12 millennia.
It's monumental. It really stands as some of
the oldest definitive evidence of human occupation
anywhere in North America. Wow. And it challenges
that old textbook theory, you know, that the
first Americans simply walked down an ice -free
corridor in the middle of the continent. Right,
the whole land bridge idea. Exactly. Finding
artifacts this old, nestled in the river valleys
of the Pacific Northwest, it suggests these early
populations might have traveled down the Pacific
Coast and then followed the rivers inland. And
Cooper's Ferry isn't just an isolated anomaly
either. There's more. Oh yeah. Excavations at
Wilson Butte Cave near Twin Falls have also revealed
arrowheads and human artifacts that rank among
the oldest on the continent. So this land that
would eventually become home to the Nez Perce,
the Coeur d 'Alene, the Shoshone and the Bannock
peoples, it was thriving thousands of years before
a European boot ever touched the soil. Okay so
then those boots do finally show up right? And
the immediate reaction from early explorers seems
to be pure hubris followed by absolute disaster.
That is a very good way to put it. Enter the
fur traders. You have the Hudson's Bay Company
sending a man named Donald McKenzie into the
region around 1819. And he basically looks at
the map and decides, yep, I'm going to establish
a reliable, navigable water route. for trading
right up the Snake River. Right, which sounds
great on paper. So he attempted to bring these
heavily loaded boats up from the Columbia River,
through the Grand Canyon and the Snake River,
and past Hells Canyon. And Hells Canyon is no
joke. No, it's the deepest river gorge in North
America. It actually plunges deeper than the
Grand Canyon in Arizona. Which is insane. Trying
to run commercial freight up Hells Canyon in
1819 is basically like trying to paddle a fragile
canoe of a giant, rocky, deadly waterslide. Exactly.
It's just fun. impossible. The river is choked
with rapids. The canyon walls are sheer rock.
And, well, McKenzie very quickly realized his
grand commercial highway was a death trap. Water
transport was just a total failure. And that
realization of limits becomes a recurring theme
here. The early American fur trappers, like Andrew
Henry, who built a tiny short -lived fort in
1810, They learned the exact same hard lesson.
You just cannot tame this terrain. The land always
wins. Right. The supply lines back east were
impossibly long, the winters were brutal, and
the rivers absolutely refused to cooperate. But
where commerce fails, ideology sometimes pushes
through. Because a few decades later, the missionaries
arrive, and they bring this bizarre combination
of firsts to the wilderness. They really do.
Reverend Henry H. Spalding shows up in 1836.
And this guy establishes a Protestant mission,
sure, but he also builds the region's first school,
engineers a working irrigation system, brings
in a printing press to publish the Northwest's
first book, and crucially for the state's future
identity, he plants the very first potatoes.
The famous Idaho potato is born. Exactly. Meanwhile,
further north, you have Catholic missionaries
working with the Coeur d 'Alene people to build
the Cataldo mission in the 1840s and 50s. And
this is cool. It remains the oldest standing
building in Idaho today. Really? Yeah. And the
architectural ingenuity is just fascinating.
It was designed by a man named Antonio Ravalli
and built entirely without nails. Wait, OK, a
massive multi -story mission building with literally
no nails. How does that even stay standing? So
they use a technique called waddle and daub because,
think about it, transporting heavy iron crates
of nails over the Rocky Mountains on pack animals
was logistically impossible. Oh sure, that makes
sense. So instead they wove this tight lattice
of wooden branches, that's the waddle, and then
they plastered it with a thick, sticky mixture
of mud, clay, straw, and sometimes animal dung.
That's the daub. Wow. And it bakes into this
remarkably durable cement -like wall. It's just
a perfect example of the environment forcing
human adaptation. You couldn't bring the industrial
world with you, so you had to build with what
the earth provided. But then that isolation starts
to crack, right? Around 1860, The discovery of
gold acts like this giant magnet and suddenly
this impenetrable fortress is just flooded with
people. Yeah, the gold rush changes everything.
But because the terrain is so difficult, these
new arrivals don't spread out evenly. They get
funneled into these hyper -isolated pockets,
creating this really unlikely and volatile melting
pot. And the sheer confusion of this early settlement
period is best illustrated by the very first
organized town in Idaho, a place called Franklin.
I love this story. It's so funny. It was settled
in 1860 by a group of Mormon pioneers who were
pushing north. They set up homes, they laid out
streets, built a community, and they had the
absolute conviction that they were still residing
comfortably within the borders of Utah. I am
genuinely stuck on the mechanics of this. Yeah.
How do you accidentally build an entire town
in the wrong territory? Were they just like guessing
where the border was? Well... You have to picture
the reality of 1860s map making. There were no
GPS satellites. Surveyors were literally dragging
metal measuring chains across thousands of miles
of rugged mountains and sagebrush desert. And
the official border was the 42nd parallel, which
is an invisible mathematical concept. It's not
a physical landmark like a river. Though they
just overshot it. Exactly. A subsequent, more
accurate survey finally revealed that the entire
town of Franklin was actually sitting a good
distance north of the Utah line. So the borders
were basically just suggestions at that point.
I mean, the whole region was once part of the
massive unorganized Oregon country, claimed simultaneously
by the U .S. and Great Britain. Then it got chopped
up into the Oregon Territory, then Washington,
then Dakota. By the time Abraham Lincoln officially
created the Idaho Territory in 1863, it only
had about 17 ,000 people. But it covered a landmass
that included most of modern -day Montana and
Wyoming. And those 17 ,000 people were incredibly
diverse. A fifth of the territory was composed
of English immigrants. You had massive influxes
of German farmers. Oh, wow. Yeah, to the point
where German was actually the primary spoken
language in several northern communities all
the way until the outbreak of World War I. You
also had Irish Catholic laborers pouring into
Boise to work the rail center. And you had a
huge wave of Basque immigrants, too. Yes. Which
you might wonder why Boise. Well, The rugged
mountainous terrain of southern Idaho closely
mirrored the Pyrenees Mountains back in the Iberian
Peninsula. It felt like home to them. Exactly.
It was the perfect environment for their traditional
sheep herding. And they built what remains one
of the largest bass communities in the United
States today. But even more striking is the Chinese
population. Right. This was surprising. By 1870,
Chinese immigrants made up almost 30 % of Idaho's
total population. They had initially arrived
through San Francisco and moved inland to work
the plaster mines and lay the railroad tracks.
Thirty percent is a massive demographic footprint.
Huge. Though, of course, they faced intense institutionalized
discrimination from groups like the Anti -Chinese
League. So you have this powder keg of diverse
cultures all pouring into a territory that is
politically unstable and physically divided.
And this tension completely snaps in 1864 when
they decide to move the territorial capital.
Yeah, this was a mess. The capital was originally
in Lewiston up in the northern panhandle, but
the power brokers decided to move it south to
Boise. Moving a capital city today is a bureaucratic
headache. Moving it from Lewiston to Boise in
1864 before highways or telephones. That's like
putting your government headquarters behind a
10 ,000 foot ice wall. It really is. The Sawtooth
Mountains and the Salmon River Gorge sit directly
between the two cities. You couldn't just take
a carriage ride south. The terrain was literally
impassable for half the year. And the communication
breakdown was catastrophic. Yeah. The northern
and southern halves of the territory were effectively
cut off from each other. Natural. This geographic
isolation bred such deep political resentment
that it actually led to pieces of the Idaho territory
being carved off and given away just to help
form the modern, slightly more manageable borders
of Washington, Wyoming and Montana. OK, so the
borders finally get locked in and statehood is
achieved in 1890. But the violence doesn't stop,
it just shifts focus. Because once the population
settles, the objective becomes extracting the
unimaginable wealth buried in those mountains.
We are talking about the cura deline silver boom.
Oh the wealth was staggering between 1860 and
1866 Idaho produced nearly a fifth of all the
gold in the United States, but silver was the
real Titan Roughly 80 % of Idaho's total historical
metallic wealth came from the silver veins up
in the cura deline region But generating that
kind of wealth required a massive industrial
machine and that machine required human labor
working in horrific conditions which sets the
stage for the miners uprisings of in 1899. And
we should be clear, this wasn't some stereotypical
saloon shootout. This was organized, unionized
miners from the Western Federation of Miners
going to war against heavily armed private company
guards. Yeah, it was a literal war. They were
fighting over the defining issues of the modern
labor movement. you know, the right to unionize
maximum working hours and fair pay. Right. But
because they were fighting in this remote high
-stakes environment, the tactics escalated into
outright warfare. In 1892, striking miners actually
blew up the Frisco mine with dynamite. Wow. And
then in 1899, an angry mob converged on the Bunker
Hill mining complex, loaded a massive amount
of explosives into the mill, and completely leveled
it, killing two company men in the process. And
the response was brutal. The federal government
and the state governor sent in the National Guard
rounded up hundreds of union miners and threw
them into literal bullpens without trial. The
paranoia on both sides was absolute. Oh, completely.
The mine owners were hiring undercover agents
to infiltrate the unions. Which brings us back
to the cinematic escape we talk about at the
beginning, Charlie Seringo. Yes, Charlie Seringo.
He was a famous Pinkerton detective working deep
undercover for the mine operators in the town
of Gem. He was posing as a sympathetic miner,
you know, gathering intelligence and secretly
reporting back to the owners. And when his cover
was finally blown, an armed mob of furious union
men marched straight on his boarding house. So
Seringo is trapped in his room, listening to
them coming up for him. It's terrifying. But
instead of shooting his way out, he takes a saw,
cuts a hole directly through his wooden floorboards,
drops down into the crawl space, and just slips
away under the town's raised wooden sidewalks
while the mob is literally tearing his room apart
right above his head. It's a literal espionage
thriller playing out in a dusty mining camp.
It really is. But the conflict doesn't end in
the camps. The violence reaches the highest levels
of state government. In 1905, former Governor
Frank Steinenberg opened the front gate of his
home and triggered a rigged bomb that killed
him instantly. Good Lord. The bomb was planted
by a man named Harry Orchard, right? Yes. Because
Steinenberg had initially been elected on a platform
that was friendly to labor. But when the 1899
Bunker Hill Mill was blown up, he was the governor
who declared martial law and called in the federal
troops to crush the strike. Right. He flipped.
So Orchard claimed he rigged the bomb as revenge
for that betrayal. And also because the declaration
of martial law had caused him to lose a gambling
stake in a highly lucrative silver mine. And
this assassination triggered the 1907 trial of
the century. You have Senator William Borah acting
as the prosecutor going up against Clarence Darrow
for the defense. OK, for context, Clarence Darrow
showing up in Boise is a massive deal. He was
arguably the most famous defense attorney in
American history. Oh, yeah. His presence meant
the eyes of the entire nation and the national
press were suddenly locked onto this remote mountain
courtroom. The prosecution tried to prove that
the top union leaders had orchestrated the assassination
and basically used Orchard as a hitman. But Darrow
systematically dismantled that narrative. He
argued that Orchard was actually a paid informant
operating on behalf of the mine owners themselves
trying to frame the union. Wow, what a twist.
And it worked. Darrow's defense secured acquittals
for the union leaders. Harry Orchard, who had
confessed to planting the bomb, spent the rest
of his life in an Idaho penitentiary. So you
have this intense, radical, almost militant political
energy brewing in these isolated mountains. But
what's really fascinating is that this energy
doesn't just evaporate after the trials. It funnels
directly into the state legislature, transforming
Idaho into a testing ground for some of the most
extreme political experiments of the era. Yeah,
at the turn of the century, Idaho became an aggressive
early adopter of the progressive agenda. Way
ahead of the curve on some things. Exactly. Decades
before the federal government acted, Idaho granted
women the right to vote in 1896. They enacted
statewide alcohol prohibition in 1916. They heavily
backed the populist movement, demanding the unrestricted
coinage of silver to disrupt the East Coast banking
monopolies. But there is a profoundly dark side
to this era of rapid, sweeping legislative reform.
While they were expanding the vote, they were
also exploring eugenics. In 1919, the legislature
actually passed a bill to legalize the forced
sterilization of individuals confined in state
institutions. Right. Now, that 1919 bill was
vetoed by Governor D .W. Davis. He cited serious
flaws in the underlying science and argued forcefully
that the law was a blatant violation of the Equal
Protection Clause of the U .S. Constitution.
He shut it down. He did. But the legislature
was determined. By 1925, they passed a revised
Eugenics Act. The language was explicitly engineered
to bypass the governor's previous constitutional
objections. That is unsettling. It is. They established
a formal state board of eugenics, granting them
the legal authority to forcibly sterilize people
they categorized as, and I quote, feeble minded,
insane, epileptics and habitual criminals. Essentially,
anyone the board decided was a biological menace
to the future of society. And this wasn't just
on paper. No. Between 1932 and 1964, 30 women
and eight men were subjected to forced sterilization
under the authority of this board. And the law
remained officially on the state books until
it was quietly repealed in 1972. See, I really
struggle to square this circle. How does the
exact same political movement champion the expansion
of women's voting rights while simultaneously
legalizing the forced surgical sterilization
of its own citizens? I mean, we use the word
progressive today. Those two concepts seem entirely
mutually exclusive. They really do. But it reveals
a critical truth about the mindset of that era.
At the time, progress wasn't just about expanding
rights. It was about applying hard clinical science
to engineer a better society. Right. Eugenics
was championed by many leading intellectuals
as a necessary public health measure. And for
you listening, it serves as a stark historical
warning. Progress is rarely a straight moral
line. Policies that are celebrated by lawmakers
as cutting edge reform in one generation can
be widely recognized as severe human rights violations
in the next. It's a huge lesson. It really highlights
the danger of unchecked ideological momentum,
especially in an isolated environment where dissenting
voices are so easily drowned. And that geographic
isolation and the fractured identity it creates,
it didn't end with the 20th century. Even today,
the terrain still dictates reality. Always. The
center of Idaho remains this imposing block of
sparsely populated national forests and jagged
mountain ranges. Yeah. I mean, if you live in
the northern panhandle and want to drive to the
capital in Boise, you are often forced to physically
leave the state, cross over into Washington or
Oregon, and drive south on their highways just
to bypass the central mountains. It's crazy.
And that physical divide creates a profound cultural
fracture. The cities in the north naturally gravitate
economically and culturally towards Spokane,
Washington. The heavily Mormon population in
the southeast naturally aligns with Salt Lake
City, Utah. And Boise just sits in the middle,
functioning almost entirely as an isolated city
-state cut off from its own borders. And when
a state is fractured into these disconnected
pockets, it creates safe havens for extreme ideologies.
We saw this in the 1980s and 90s when the dense
remote forests of the northern panhandle became
a magnet for right -wing extremists and neo -Nazi
survivalist groups. Yeah, people who wanted to
drop off the grid entirely flocked to the region,
most notably the Aryan nations who built a heavily
fortified compound near Hayden Lake. And this
tension violently erupted into the national consciousness
in 1992 with the Ruby Ridge standoff. Right.
It began over a failure to appear in court for
a weapons charge, and it escalated into this
massive siege involving U .S. Marshals, the FBI,
and white separatist Randy Weaver and his family
in an isolated cabin near Naples, Idaho. And
the resulting firefight, which left a U .S. Marshal,
Weaver's wife, and his young son dead. It ignited
a massive ongoing national debate regarding the
limits and ethics of acceptable force used by
the federal government against its own citizens.
Is it a defining moment? It was. But the state's
modern history also includes a forceful repudiation
of that extremism. In 2001, following a successful
civil rights lawsuit, the Aryan nation's compound
was legally confiscated, which bankrupted the
organization and drove them out of the state
entirely. Wow. And around that same time, down
in the capital, Boise erected a massive stone
human rights memorial featuring a bronze statue
of Anne Frank, actively cementing a counter narrative
of equality and inclusion. So it's a state locked
in a constant wrestling match with its own extremes.
And that unique city -state isolation actually
played a surprisingly critical role in the modern
era, specifically during the arrival of the COVID
-19 pandemic in early 2020. Yeah, because you
might assume that a ragged sparsely populated
isolated state would be one of the last places
a global virus would reach. That would be the
logical guess, yeah. But isolation in the modern
world often means a heavy reliance on a few major
transit hubs. Right. The state's first confirmed
case wasn't someone slowly traveling across the
plains in a wagon. It was a woman from the southwestern
part of the state who contracted the virus while
attending a conference in New York City. Yep.
Because Boise is so physically isolated from
surrounding major cities, business professionals
have to fly in and out constantly. So the geographic
fortress couldn't stop an airplane. An infection
contracted in the densest city on the East Coast
flew directly into the heart of the state. Within
24 hours, a second case was confirmed in a completely
different county. And within a matter of days,
health officials were announcing the first known
cases of untraceable community spread. Which
brings us right back to the central question
we've been circling this entire time. How do
you forge a single unified identity when the
very ground you stand on constantly pulls you
apart? It's the ultimate question here. We've
traveled from ancient campfires burning 16 ,000
years ago at Cooper's Ferry, past fur traders
trying to run rapids and canoes, through chaotic
border surveying, explosive labor wars, and complex
political reforms, all the way to a modern landscape
that is still deeply physically divided. It really
is a compelling history of resistance and adaptation.
And actually, consider this final thought before
we go. Think about the mining towns of Silver
City or Rocky Bar. In the late 1800s, these were
booming, vital centers of industry. They were
the economic engines driving the territory, generating
unimaginable wealth, and pulling thousands of
people into the mountains. They were everything.
Right. But today, the wind blows through empty
wooden buildings. They are literal ghost towns,
abandoned when the silver ran out, quietly being
swallowed back up by the harsh landscape. It
forces you to look at our own bustling modern
cities today with their sprawling suburbs and
crowded highways and wonder which of them are
permanent fixtures and which are just temporary
camps waiting to be reclaimed by that same unforgiving
geography in another hundred years. Man, from
an ancient stronghold to ghost towns returning
to the earth, a very sobering reminder of who
actually has the final say. Thank you for joining
us on this deep dive. We will see you next time.