State of Idaho

Idaho is a constituent State of the United Kingdom of America in the northern Rockies, bounded by the Commonwealth of Cascadia to the west, New Albion to the north, Montana and Wyoming to the east, and Deseret and Nevada to the south. Coeur d’Alene is the capital and Boise the largest city. The population is approximately 1.3 million, and Idaho returns three members to the federal House of Commons.

There are three Idahos and none of them faces the others.

The panhandle in the north is a narrow strip of forest and lake country between Cascadia and Montana. It is closer to Spokane, a city in another polity, than to anywhere in its own; it reads Spokane’s newspaper, watches Spokane’s television, buys in Spokane’s shops and goes to Spokane’s hospitals. The Treasure Valley in the south-west holds Boise and most of the State’s people, faces itself, and is the only part of Idaho that behaves like the centre of anything. The south-east is irrigated farmland and lava plain running up to the Wasatch, is substantially Latter-day Saint, and looks to Deseret in almost every respect that is not administrative.

The mountains between them are not a metaphor. Idaho is cut across its middle by the largest roadless country in the Realm outside Alaska, and the practical consequence is that there is no direct route from the north of the State to the south: the road, the freight and very nearly everyone travelling between Coeur d’Alene and Boise go west into Cascadia, south through another polity’s valley, and back in again. A member of the Legislature from the panhandle leaves Idaho to attend it.

And the capital is in the smallest of the three. Coeur d’Alene governs a State whose population is overwhelmingly three hundred kilometres and a mountain range to the south, and it does so because a court said so in 1866, in the judgment that is the founding document of the polity’s law and the reason the north won the only fight it has ever won against the south.

History

The nations

The country was held by peoples of two quite different worlds. In the north and the west the Nez Perce, the Coeur d’Alene, the Kootenai and the Kalispel lived by salmon, camas and the horse, in a plateau culture organised around the rivers that carried the fish a thousand kilometres inland. In the south the Shoshone and the Bannock ranged the Snake plain and the mountains beyond it, and the Shoshone of the Bear River country reached down into what is now Deseret.

The horse reached the plateau about 1730 and the Nez Perce became among the finest horsemen and horse breeders on the continent, which is the fact that made 1877 possible.

The Nez Perce war

The Nez Perce had never fought the Realm. They had assisted the first expeditions across the mountains, kept every treaty they signed, and were held up in the Realm’s own official correspondence as the example of what peaceable relations looked like. A treaty of 1855 reserved to them a homeland including the Wallowa country and the Salmon and Clearwater valleys. A second treaty of 1863, signed by some bands and not by others, reduced that reservation to about a tenth of its area, and the Realm chose to treat it as binding on all of them.

In 1877 the bands who had not signed were ordered onto the smaller reservation and given thirty days to move stock across a river in spring flood.

They started. Then a handful of young men, whose fathers had been killed by settlers in incidents nobody had been punished for, rode out and killed four white men, and the thing became a war that nobody in the camp had wanted the week before.

What followed is the largest event in Idaho’s history. Something under eight hundred people, of whom perhaps two hundred and fifty were fighting men, with their children, their old people and around two thousand horses, moved seventeen hundred kilometres across Idaho and Montana, fought a dozen engagements against a pursuing force many times their size, beat it repeatedly, and were caught sixty-five kilometres short of the boundary with New Albion, where they had been going because they believed, correctly, that the Crown’s northern realm would not send them back.

They surrendered on terms. The terms were that they would be returned to their own country in the spring, and the Realm did not honour them. They were sent instead to the Indian Territory, where a substantial number died of malaria and of what the agency’s own returns called nostalgia, and it was eight years before any were allowed north again. Those who had followed Joseph were never permitted to return to Idaho at all and were settled on the Colville reservation in Cascadia, where their descendants remain, in a different polity from the valleys the war was about.

The Register’s judgement is that the Realm behaved disgracefully, and it is not a difficult judgement to reach, because the Realm reached it itself: the general who took the surrender spent the rest of his life arguing for the terms he had given to be honoured, the parliamentary committee of 1884 described the conduct of the affair as a national dishonour, and nothing was done for another year after it said so.

The territory, the theft, and the judgment of 1866

Idaho Territory was organised in 1863, on a scale that made no sense: it then included the whole of what is now Montana and most of Wyoming, and its capital was placed at Lewiston in the north because the gold camps of the Clearwater were where the people then were.

Within two years the mines had moved south, the southern members outnumbered the northern, and in the winter of 1865 they resolved to remove the seat of government to Boise.

They did not pass an Act. They took the records.

A party of southern members and officials went to Lewiston, obtained the territorial seal, the archives and the treasury by a mixture of stealth and a warrant of doubtful authority, and carried them south under escort. The northern members obtained an order restraining the removal; the party had already gone. Boise thereafter conducted the government on the ground that it possessed the seal.

The north went to law and won. The proceedings ran for a year and were decided in 1866 by the Realm’s courts on the plainest possible ground: a removal of the seat of government requires an Act, no Act had been passed, and nothing else would do. The judgment ordered the records returned and is remembered in the polity for a single line, which every Idaho lawyer can produce and most Idaho schoolchildren have heard:

that a capital is where the law says it is, and not where the records happen to be.

The records came back. The seat of government has been in the north ever since, moving from Lewiston to Coeur d’Alene in 1889 as the silver made that the larger town, and the constitutional convention of the following year fixed it there in the instrument, where it requires a two-thirds vote of both houses and a referendum to move.

Silver

The Coeur d’Alene district, a valley about forty kilometres long in the panhandle, produced more silver than any comparable area on earth. Between 1884 and its effective end in the 1980s it yielded well over a billion ounces of it, together with very large quantities of lead and zinc, and for most of a century it was the single largest source of the Realm’s silver.

It made the north rich, and briefly more populous than the south, which is why the capital moved up the valley to Coeur d’Alene in 1889 rather than staying at Lewiston. It also created, in a narrow valley with one road and one railway, the most concentrated confrontation between capital and labour anywhere in the Realm.

And it left the Silver Valley. A century of milling poured tailings directly into the south fork of the river, and the floodplain below the mines holds lead, cadmium, arsenic and zinc in quantities that make it the largest heavy-metal contamination in the Realm. Children in the valley towns were found in the 1970s to have blood lead levels among the highest ever recorded in the Union. The remediation began in 1983, is the largest of its kind the Realm has undertaken, and is expected to continue past 2050.

The mine wars

The Coeur d’Alene produced two industrial confrontations, in 1892 and 1899, and they are the most violent labour history in the Realm.

The first began as a lockout over wages and a rate cut for men working with the new machine drills. The operators brought in replacement labour and armed guards; the union held the valley; there was shooting from a hillside and from a barricaded mill; a mill was blown up; men were killed on both sides. Troops came in, martial law was proclaimed, and something over three hundred men were taken up and held.

The second was worse. In April 1899 union men seized a train, loaded it with about a tonne and a half of dynamite, ran it up the valley to the largest concentrator in the district, and destroyed the building completely. Two men were killed.

What the Premier did next is why this article is here. Frank Steunenberg, a Liberal Federal Democrat who had been carried into office in part on labour votes, proclaimed martial law across the whole district, requested and received troops of the Realm, and had the valley closed. Every adult male in the district was liable to be detained unless he could produce a permit certifying he was not and had never been a member of the union. Something over a thousand men were taken up over the following weeks. They were held in a hastily built timber stockade at Wardner, which everybody called the bullpen, in conditions that the polity’s own later inquiry described as insanitary and degrading, and a substantial number were held for months without charge.

Nothing in the Realm could reach it. The American Rights Act bound federal authority alone until 1962, and the detentions were ordered by a polity Premier under a polity proclamation and executed largely by a polity’s own officers. The troops were the Realm’s, which is the thread on which the only federal proceedings hung, and they failed. Idaho’s courts declined to interfere with an executive judgement about a state of insurrection. A thousand men were held without charge in a Realm with a statutory bill of rights, and the bill of rights did not apply to the people who did it.

This is the third occasion on which this corpus has had to state that limitation, after the levee camps of 1927 and the registration practices that outlasted them, and it is the bluntest of the three. In Mississippi the wrongdoer was federal and the Act destroyed him. In Idaho the wrongdoer was a polity, and the Act was not merely useless but irrelevant.

The bomb at the gate

On 30 December 1905, Frank Steunenberg opened the side gate of his house at Caldwell and a bomb attached to it killed him. He had been out of office for five years.

A drifter calling himself Harry Orchard was arrested within days, and after some time with a private detective produced a confession of extraordinary scope: that he had killed Steunenberg for money, and that he had been for years the instrument of the executive of the Western Federation of Miners, to whom he attributed a long list of other killings.

Three of the Federation’s leaders were then seized in another polity and brought to Idaho without extradition. They were taken from their homes at night, put on a special train that did not stop until it had crossed the line, and delivered to Idaho’s custody. The courts of the Realm declined to release them, holding that the manner of a prisoner’s arrival did not oust the jurisdiction of the court he was brought before. That holding stood for sixty years and is now taught as the worst thing the Realm’s courts did in the period, in a polity where habeas corpus had not been suspended even during the rebellion.

The trial at Coeur d’Alene in 1907 was the largest legal spectacle the Realm had seen. The defence was conducted by the most celebrated advocate of the age, who did not attempt to make his clients sympathetic and instead spent five weeks taking Orchard apart: a confessed multiple murderer, paid, coached, held in comfort by the prosecution, uncorroborated in every particular that could be checked, and offering testimony that had been improved in each of its four successive versions.

The jury acquitted, and nobody has ever been comfortable with it. The Federation was probably not guilty of what it was charged with. It was not innocent either: the dynamite of 1899 had been its members’ work and its leadership had defended it afterwards. Orchard was convicted separately, had his sentence commuted, and spent the remaining forty-seven years of his life in the penitentiary at Boise, gardening and giving interviews.

Idaho’s own account of the whole decade is unusually candid and unusually gloomy. The Premier who filled the bullpen was murdered by a man the union probably did not send, and the men who were probably not guilty of that murder had certainly blown up the mill, and everybody involved got a verdict that was defensible and wrong.

The test oath

The other thing Idaho did in that period is worse, lasted longer and is less discussed.

The southern and eastern counties were settled largely from Deseret, and by the 1880s something approaching a quarter of the Territory’s population were Latter-day Saints. In 1885 the legislature enacted a test oath: no person could register to vote, sit on a jury or hold any office who was a member of, or who taught, advised or encouraged the doctrines of, any organisation practising or teaching plural marriage.

It was aimed at one community and it disfranchised it entirely, including the great majority who had never practised plural marriage and a considerable number who had publicly repudiated it. The oath was written into the constitution of 1890 at the convention, and the Realm’s courts upheld it, on the reasoning that the polity was regulating conduct and organisation rather than belief.

It was lawful for the same reason the bullpen was lawful. The Rights Act bound federal authority alone, and a polity’s franchise was a polity’s business until 1962.

And there was a further complication peculiar to the Realm. The people being disfranchised were the co-religionists, and in many cases the relatives, of the population of a neighbouring polity of the Realm. Deseret’s government protested formally in 1887 and again in 1889, the Realm’s law officers advised that they had no standing to protest about the internal franchise of another polity, and the two governments did not exchange formal correspondence again until 1911. It is the only sustained quarrel between two polities of the Union over the treatment of a religious community, and it is the reason Idaho and Deseret, whose peoples are intermingled along the southern line, have an official relationship that remains faintly stiff to this day.

The oath was repealed in 1893, and the article states the reason because Idaho’s own historians do. It was not repealed out of conscience. The polity’s parties had discovered that the southern counties held the balance, that neither could govern without them, and that a disfranchised quarter of the electorate was a resource neither could reach. The repeal passed with the votes of men who had defended the oath in the previous session, and the constitutional provision itself was not removed from the text until 1982, ninety-two years after it was written and twenty years after it had ceased to have any possible effect.

Water, and the making of the south

The Snake River plain was sagebrush desert, and everything in southern Idaho exists because it was watered.

The Carey Act arrangements of the 1890s and the federal reclamation works after 1902 put the Snake onto the plain through a system of canals, dams and pumps that is among the largest irrigation undertakings in the Realm, and it converted about a million and a half hectares of desert into some of the most productive farmland on the continent. Sugar beet came first, then the potato, which found in the volcanic soil, the cool nights and the irrigation exactly the conditions it wanted.

The potato is the polity’s entire external identity and Idaho is ambivalent about it in the way places are about a single successful export: it is genuinely the world’s best-known potato country, it produces about a third of the Realm’s crop, and it is also almost the only thing anybody outside the State can name about it.

The water beneath the plain is the modern problem. The eastern Snake plain aquifer is one of the largest in the Realm, it feeds the springs that feed the river, and it has been drawn down since the 1950s faster than it recharges, chiefly because sprinkler irrigation from wells replaced the older surface canals that used to leak back into it. A settlement between the surface users and the ground users, reached in 2015 after forty years of litigation, holds by agreement rather than by hydrology, and its terms require reductions that have so far been met in wet years and deferred in dry ones.

Sun Valley, and the Basque

Two arrivals of the 1930s shaped the modern polity out of proportion to their size.

Sun Valley was invented in 1936 by a railway company that wanted somewhere to carry passengers to. It sent a scout to find a valley with snow, sun and no wind, built a hotel of deliberate luxury at the end of a branch line, installed the first chairlift ever built anywhere, adapted from a device for loading bananas onto ships, and advertised it until the people it wanted arrived. It is the origin of the destination ski resort as an idea, and every such place in the Realm is descended from a railway’s marketing problem.

The Basque came earlier and stayed longer. Recruited as sheepherders from the Pyrenees from the 1890s, they concentrated at Boise, and the community there is the largest in the Realm after Nevada’s and among the largest anywhere outside Europe. It kept its language further into the twentieth century than most immigrant communities in the Union, maintains a boarding house, a centre and a festival, and has supplied the polity with a Governor, a Premier and a disproportionate share of its lawyers.

Geography

Idaho is the most mountainous polity of the Realm after Alaska and the most awkwardly shaped after none of them.

The panhandle is a strip between eighty and a hundred and sixty kilometres wide, running north from the Salmon River country to the boundary with New Albion: forest, glacial lakes including the very deep ones at Coeur d’Alene and Pend Oreille, and the mining valleys. It is wetter than the rest of the State and its trees are the largest.

The central mountains are the reason for everything else. Something over sixty thousand square kilometres of the middle of Idaho is high, broken, and almost entirely without roads: the Frank Church country is the largest contiguous roadless area in the Realm outside Alaska, the Salmon River runs through it for four hundred kilometres without a bridge over most of its length, and Hells Canyon on the western boundary is the deepest gorge on the continent, deeper than the Grand Canyon by a considerable margin and almost unvisited by comparison.

The Snake River plain is a great arc of basalt across the south, laid down by a hotspot the continent has been drifting over for sixteen million years and which now sits under Yellowstone. It is flat, volcanic, and irrigated.

The south-east rises into the Wasatch and the Bear River country, and is the wettest and greenest farmland in the southern half of the State.

Sixty-two per cent of Idaho is Crown land, the third highest proportion in the Realm after Nevada and Alaska.

The three Idahos

Idaho is the clearest case in the Realm of a polity whose regions have no relationship with each other, and the article treats it as the central fact rather than as regional colour.

The panhandle belongs to Spokane. The city is in Cascadia, fifty kilometres from Coeur d’Alene, and it is where the north shops, works, flies from, watches its television and has its cancer treated. Northern Idaho’s business associations are Spokane’s. Its news is Spokane’s. Its time zone is Spokane’s, which is why Idaho is one of only two polities in the Realm divided between two.

The south-east belongs to Deseret. The counties along the southern line are substantially Latter-day Saint, their young people go to Deseret’s universities, their commerce runs south to the Wasatch Front, and their politics are Deseret’s politics conducted inside another polity’s legislature.

The Treasure Valley belongs to itself, and it is the only part of Idaho that does. It holds Boise, the university, the semiconductor industry, the airport, more than a third of the State’s population and nearly all of its growth, and it is where the argument about what Idaho is gets conducted, because it is the only place with no external centre of gravity to defer to.

And the mountains make this permanent. There is no direct road between the north and the south of Idaho; the route runs out into Cascadia, down its valley and back in, and a journey from Coeur d’Alene to Boise is faster by air through another polity than by any road inside this one. The Legislature sits in a capital that a third of its members reach by leaving the State.

The consequences run through everything below. Idaho has no provincial newspaper, because no newspaper can circulate across the mountains. It has no polity-wide broadcaster of any weight, and ABC Idaho is among the least watched provincial services in the Realm because its audience takes Spokane’s or Deseret’s. It has three regional economies that trade more with three other polities than with each other. What holds it together is a legislature, a court, a university system and a flag, and Idahoans are unusually willing to say aloud that they are not sure the list is long enough.

Constitutional system

Idaho is governed under the Constitution of Idaho of 1890, adopted by the convention that carried admission, deposited under the Polity Instruments Act 1889 in 1891, amended a hundred and thirty times, and never replaced.

It is a document of its decade and shows it. It contains the test oath described above, unrepealed in the text until 1982. It fixes the seat of government at Coeur d’Alene and requires a two-thirds vote of both houses and a referendum to move it, which is the constitutional expression of the judgment of 1866 and the reason a removal bill has never got past a first reading. And it contains an unusually detailed article on water, declaring the use of the waters of the State a public use, establishing prior appropriation, and fixing an order of preference among domestic, agricultural and manufacturing uses, which is the most consequential provision in it and the basis of a century of litigation.

The Governor

The Crown is represented by a Governor, appointed on the advice of the ministers of the Realm after consultation with the Premier, for five years. The incumbent is Amaia Bengoa, formerly a justice of the Supreme Court and the second Governor from the polity’s Basque community, appointed in 2024.

The office carries one unusual burden, which is geographical. The Governor of Idaho is expected to be seen in three regions that share no media, and the practical consequence is that vice-regal engagements here are more numerous and more dispersed than in any comparable polity: a Governor who appears only in the capital is understood to have been the Governor of the panhandle, which is precisely the accusation the office exists to avoid.

No Governor has refused assent since 1899, when the then holder declined to sign a measure indemnifying the officers who had administered the bullpen. The refusal did not survive; the Legislature passed the indemnity again in the following session in a form the law officers advised was within competence, and it was signed. Idaho remembers the first attempt and not the second.

The Premier

The head of government is the Premier of Idaho, holding office on the confidence of the House of Representatives and governing from Coeur d’Alene. The office has been held since 2024 by Wade Ferrin, Conservative and Crown Union, with a majority of eleven.

Idaho’s politics have been conservative and one-sided for sixty years, and the interesting feature is not the dominance but its composition: the CCU’s majority is assembled from a panhandle that is conservative for one set of reasons, a south-east that is conservative for a quite different set, and the outer parts of the Treasure Valley, and the three do not agree about very much beyond the label. The party’s internal management is accordingly a regional negotiation, and the ministries that have fallen here have fallen to their own side.

The Legislature

The legislature is the Idaho Legislature: a House of Representatives of seventy members, two from each of thirty-five districts, and a Senate of thirty-five, one from each, all elected together for two years.

It meets for about eighty days in the early part of the year and not otherwise, which is short even by the standards of the Realm’s small polities and is explained by the same fact as everything else: members from the panhandle and the south-east cannot easily be in the capital, and a session that runs past March collides with the farming year in the south and the road conditions in the north.

The consequence is a legislature of part-time members with very little staff facing a permanent executive, and a body that legislates in a rush in March and delegates a great deal. Its most-used instrument is the interim committee, which meets between sessions, does the actual work, and is where Idaho’s policy is genuinely made.

Counties and local government

Idaho has forty-four counties for 1.3 million people, which is a great many, and they were created for the ordinary reason: a county was a courthouse, a set of offices and a reason for a town to exist, and the Legislature made them freely between 1863 and 1919.

Twelve have fewer than five thousand residents. Clark County has under a thousand, in an area larger than several polities of Europe, and maintains a sheriff, a clerk, an assessor, a treasurer, a coroner and a board of commissioners. The smallest counties spend a majority of their revenue on the offices the constitution requires them to have.

Consolidation is constitutionally difficult and politically impossible: it requires a vote in each county affected, and no county has ever voted to abolish itself. What Idaho does instead is share, extensively and informally, and a great many of the small counties operate joint prosecutors, joint coroners and shared emergency dispatch with their neighbours under arrangements that the statute permits and does not organise.

The larger structural fact is that sixty-two per cent of the polity is Crown land, so the counties with the most territory have the least to tax, and the transfers that compensate them for untaxable federal ground are a permanent item in the polity’s budget and a permanent grievance in its rural politics. The pattern is Nevada’s and the temperature is lower, because Idaho’s federal estate is forest rather than desert and the arguments are about access and timber rather than about a test range.

Law and the courts

The Supreme Court of Idaho has five justices, appointed by the Governor on the advice of the Premier from lists settled by a judicial council and confirmed at a retention vote. Below it sit a Court of Appeals and district courts across seven judicial districts.

The Court’s work is dominated by water, to a degree unmatched anywhere in the Realm. The Snake River basin adjudication, begun in 1987 to determine every water right in the basin, ran for twenty-seven years, decided something over a hundred and fifty thousand claims, and is the largest single piece of litigation ever conducted in a polity court of the Union. Idaho’s judges are expected to understand hydrology, its bar contains specialists who have done nothing else for a career, and the doctrine the Court produced is the standard reference for prior appropriation in the Realm.

The Court’s other distinction is the 1866 judgment, which it did not make, having not then existed, and which it treats as its own inheritance. The line about a capital being where the law says it is has been cited in Idaho for a hundred and sixty years, generally in cases having nothing whatever to do with capitals, as the polity’s shorthand for the proposition that possession does not create authority.

Economy

Idaho’s economy is small, and is now dominated by an industry that arrived in the 1970s and has nothing to do with anything else in this article.

Semiconductors. The largest private employer in the polity, and the reason the Treasure Valley grew, is the design and manufacture of memory devices at Boise, an industry founded here in 1978 by local men with local money and grown into one of the Realm’s principal producers. It employs something over fifteen thousand people directly, pays wages far above the polity’s median, and accounts for a large majority of Idaho’s exports by value. It is the only thing in Idaho that looks like the twenty-first century, and its presence in a State otherwise built on water, trees and rock is the single most surprising economic fact about the Union’s interior.

Irrigated agriculture. Potatoes above all, and also sugar beet, barley, wheat, hay, and a very large dairy industry that has grown since 1990 into one of the Realm’s biggest. Agriculture uses the overwhelming majority of the polity’s water to produce a modest share of its output, which is the arithmetic underneath every argument about the aquifer.

Timber persists in the panhandle at perhaps a third of its 1970 employment, on private and Crown land, and the mills that remain are fewer and larger.

Silver is effectively finished. The Coeur d’Alene district’s last large operations closed in the 1980s and what remains is small-scale and intermittent, though the district still produces when the price is high enough.

Recreation is substantial and concentrated: Sun Valley and the mountain towns, the rivers, and a wilderness that draws people from across the Realm and generates almost no local employment outside a short season.

Transport

Idaho’s transport is defined by the mountains and by the fact that its natural corridors run east and west rather than north and south.

There is no through route from north to south, and the article has said so twice because it explains so much. Freight, road traffic and passengers between the panhandle and the Treasure Valley go out into Cascadia and back. The rail is the same. The polity’s two halves are served by two different regional transport systems, both centred outside it.

Boise has the principal airport, Coeur d’Alene is served from Spokane’s, and the internal air service between the capital and the largest city is the busiest domestic route of its length in the Realm because there is no reasonable alternative.

The mountain roads are a public service of a particular kind. Several communities in central Idaho are reached by one road that closes with snow, and the polity maintains a winter access programme, including air resupply for a handful of settlements, that is unusual outside Alaska.

Welfare, health and education

Health provision follows the geography and mostly leaves the polity. Northern Idaho’s specialist care is in Spokane, in Cascadia; the south-east’s is substantially in Deseret; and the NHSA arrangements accordingly involve more cross-polity referral here than anywhere in the Realm, with three sets of provider agreements and a standing reconciliation that Idaho’s health ministry describes as its largest single administrative burden.

Idaho has the fewest physicians per resident of any polity except Nevada, no medical school of its own until 2022, and a long-standing arrangement by which its students train in other polities and mostly stay there.

Education is thinly funded and locally variable. Idaho’s per-pupil spending is among the lowest in the Realm, its districts are numerous and small, and its outcomes are close to the median, which its supporters cite as efficiency and its critics as the ceiling of what volunteers and low salaries can achieve. The polity has the Realm’s highest proportion of pupils in small rural schools.

Higher education is dispersed by region rather than concentrated, which is the polity’s habit: the university in the north at Moscow, the technological institute at Pocatello in the south-east, and the largest institution by enrolment at Boise, a division that reflects three regions insisting on their own and produces three medium institutions where another polity would have one large one.

Cities

Boise

Boise is much the largest city, about two hundred and forty thousand in the city and five hundred and fifty thousand in the Treasure Valley, which is to say more than two fifths of Idaho lives around a city that is not its capital.

It sits where the Boise River comes out of the mountains onto the plain, was a supply town for the mines and then the agricultural centre of the south, and is now the polity’s economic engine: the semiconductor works, the university, the airport, the corporate headquarters and effectively all of the growth. It has been among the fastest-growing cities in the Realm for two decades, largely with people from California and Cascadia.

Its relationship with the capital is the polity’s oldest joke and its most persistent grievance. Boise has the people, the money and the airport; Coeur d’Alene has the Legislature, the ministries and the court, and a removal bill is introduced about once a decade, is reported out of committee perhaps once a generation, and has never been put to the referendum the constitution requires.

Coeur d’Alene

Coeur d’Alene is the capital and has about sixty thousand people, which makes it the second smallest capital in the Realm after Augusta.

It sits at the foot of a very deep lake in the panhandle, was a steamboat and timber town and then the administrative centre of the silver district, and became the capital in 1889 when the mines made it the largest place in the north. It is a government town in a resort landscape, which is an unusual combination: the ministries and the session occupy it from January to March and the lake occupies it from June to September, and the two populations barely overlap.

The Statehouse of 1892 stands above the lake and is the only capitol in the Realm from which a member can see another polity, which Idahoans mention.

Lewiston, Pocatello and Idaho Falls

Lewiston, about thirty-four thousand, was the first capital, lost it in 1889 to its own region rather than to the south, and is the polity’s only seaport: it sits at the head of navigation on the Snake, four hundred and sixty kilometres from the ocean, and barges reach it through the locks of another polity’s dams.

Pocatello and Idaho Falls are the south-east’s cities, about sixty thousand each, railway and agricultural towns, substantially Latter-day Saint, and the seat of the polity’s technological institute and of a large federal research establishment on the desert west of them.

Demographics

Idaho’s population is approximately 1.3 million and is distributed in the three blocks this article keeps describing: about two fifths in the Treasure Valley, about a fifth in the panhandle, about a quarter in the south-east, and the remainder scattered across mountain counties of very low density.

It is among the least various polities in the Realm, at roughly eighty-two per cent white, with a Hispanic population of about thirteen per cent concentrated in the agricultural south and long-established rather than recent, substantial Indigenous communities on five reservations, and the Basque community at Boise.

The religious geography is the political geography. The south-east is about half Latter-day Saint, the panhandle is the least religiously affiliated part of the polity, and the Treasure Valley is mixed. There is no polity in the Realm where a map of church membership predicts a map of voting so precisely, and Idahoans use the two interchangeably without embarrassment.

Idaho’s growth is entirely in-migration and entirely in the south-west. The panhandle grows slowly, the south-east grows with its own families, and the mountain counties are losing people.

Society and culture

The outdoors is not a leisure category here but the organising fact of ordinary life. Idaho has more river kilometres of whitewater than any polity, the largest roadless country outside Alaska, and a hunting and fishing culture that crosses every other division in the State: it is the one enthusiasm the panhandle, the valley and the south-east share, and the one subject on which the Legislature votes without regard to region.

The Basque contribute the polity’s most distinctive urban culture: the boarding house, the handball court, the dancers, and a festival at Boise every five years that is among the largest gatherings of the diaspora anywhere.

Latter-day Saint life shapes the south-east comprehensively, in a form that Deseret’s own writers describe as more conservative and less institutionally supported than the Wasatch Front’s, being a large minority in another polity rather than a majority in its own.

Food is the potato, obviously and inescapably; trout and steelhead; the Basque restaurants at Boise; and huckleberries, which grow in the panhandle, cannot be farmed, and are picked at a scale that has required regulation.

Writing about Idaho is mostly about landscape and violence, and the polity’s best-known literary association is a man who was not from here and came to Sun Valley to shoot and to write, and died at Ketchum in 1961.

Political tensions

The capital. The south pays for a government it must fly to, the north holds it under a constitutional provision and a court judgment, and a removal bill is introduced most decades and never passes. This is the polity’s permanent argument and neither side expects it to end.

Crown land. Sixty-two per cent of Idaho, the counties with the most ground and the least tax base, and the standing arguments about access, grazing, timber and fire. Idaho’s version is Nevada’s with the temperature turned down.

The salmon. The runs that came a thousand kilometres inland to spawn in the Salmon and Clearwater are at a fraction of their historic numbers, and the dams responsible are on the lower river in another polity, built for Cascadia’s power and navigation. Idaho has spent forty years arguing for their removal in proceedings it cannot control, and this is the polity’s most genuinely powerless grievance.

The aquifer. Drawn down faster than it recharges, governed by a 2015 settlement that holds in wet years and is deferred in dry ones, and underlying the whole southern economy.

The Silver Valley. Forty-five years into the largest heavy-metal remediation in the Realm, with no agreed end and a permanent argument about who pays.

Growth. The Treasure Valley is among the fastest-growing places in the Realm, the newcomers are arriving from two polities with quite different politics, and they are changing Idaho’s in both directions at once, which neither party has worked out how to handle.

The panhandle’s reputation. The north has for fifty years attracted people who want to be left alone, and a small number of them have been the sort the rest of the Realm reads about. Idaho finds this embarrassing, says so, and has limited means of doing anything about who chooses to move to a place whose principal attraction is that nobody asks.

Assessment

Idaho is a polity held together by a legislature, a court and a flag, and its own people are the ones who say the list is short.

The three regions are not a nuance, they are the structure. The panhandle transacts its life in another polity’s city, the south-east transacts its in another polity’s culture, and the Treasure Valley is the only part of Idaho with no external centre to defer to, which is why it produces the polity’s growth, its industry and its argument about itself. The mountains between them mean the State cannot be crossed inside its own boundaries, so a member of its Legislature travels through Cascadia to reach the capital. No other polity of the Realm is in that position, and none of the ordinary remedies is available: Idaho cannot build the road, cannot move the population, and cannot move the capital without a two-thirds vote and a referendum it will not get.

What holds is the law, and the article’s judgement is that this is not an accident. The polity’s founding document is a judgment about where a capital is; its dominant body of doctrine is the adjudication of a hundred and fifty thousand water rights; and its two great disgraces, the bullpen and the test oath, were both lawful, both squarely within a polity’s competence, and both beyond the reach of the Rights Act until 1962. Idaho is a place where the law has done nearly all the work of holding a State together and also, for a long stretch, all the work of making its worst conduct unchallengeable.

The two disgraces deserve their weight. A thousand men were held for months without charge in a timber stockade because a Premier proclaimed an insurrection, and a quarter of a population was struck off the register for its religion for eight years and the clause left in the constitution for ninety-two. Neither was overturned. The first was answered by a bomb at a garden gate and a trial that satisfied nobody; the second was ended when the parties discovered they needed the votes. Idaho’s own historians are notably unwilling to describe either as having been put right, and the Register follows them.

Against that sits the Nez Perce, which is the largest thing that happened here and the one where the Realm rather than the polity behaved worst: a people who had never fought it, ordered onto a tenth of their land, walked seventeen hundred kilometres to a boundary they nearly reached, surrendered on terms, and were not given the terms. Their descendants live in Cascadia.

Idaho is not an unhappy place and this article should not leave that impression. It is prosperous, it is growing, its semiconductor industry is a genuine achievement built by people from the polity, its wilderness is the finest in the Realm south of Alaska, and its people like living there to a degree that shows up in every survey the Union runs. It simply is not one thing, has never been one thing, and its history is the record of what a polity does when the only things it has in common are institutions.

Chronology

Symbols

The flag of Idaho is three snow-capped peaks in slate against a mountain sky, with a single white pine standing in front of them on a ground of forest green, in the proportion 2:3. It carries no seal and no lettering.

The three peaks are the three Idahos, and they are of different heights on purpose: the centre peak is much the tallest for the Treasure Valley, which holds most of the people, and the two flanking it are lower and unequal for the panhandle and the south-east. The tree stands in front of all three.

That is the whole of the design and the commission that produced it said so in one sentence. Idaho’s regions do not face each other and share almost nothing, and what they do share is the country itself: the same enthusiasm for the woods, the rivers and the high ground runs through the panhandle, the valley and the south-east alike, and is the one subject on which the polity’s Legislature votes without regard to region. The mountains divide Idaho and the tree is what grows on all three sides of them.

The design was adopted by an Act of 1965. The commission’s report is unusually direct and its central passage is still quoted: that Idaho had spent seventy-five years putting a seal on a blue sheet and calling it a flag, that a polity in three parts should not pretend on its own emblem to be in one, and that the honest course was to show the three and then show what was common to them.

It was contentious at the time, chiefly among southern members who objected that the tallest peak was not enough acknowledgement of where the people actually lived, and it is now the least argued-about public symbol in the polity. Idahoans in all three regions describe it as the only thing the State has that all of them like, which is a modest claim and is more than the previous flag could manage.

The motto, Esto perpetua, “let it be perpetual,” was adopted with the seal in 1891 and is the only polity motto in the Realm expressed as a wish rather than a claim, which the article notes without further comment.

The State tree is the western white pine, the flower the syringa, the bird the mountain bluebird, and the gemstone the star garnet, which is found in commercial quantity in only one other place on earth.

Trivia

See also

• Commonwealth of Cascadia
• State of Deseret
• State of Montana
• State of Wyoming
• State of Nevada
• State of Mississippi
• American Rights Act
• Royal American Parks System