Tribute: Idaho became the 43rd state on July 3,1890

July 3, 9:32 AMSalt Lake City Cross Country Travel ExaminerLindsay Godfree

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   Idaho state bird the Mountain Bluebird

This week Idaho celebrates not only the birth of our nation, but the birth of the state. On July 3, 1890, Idaho became the forty-third state of the Union. Idaho population then was 88,548. The Oregon Trail had opened in 1842, but for two decades, people merely crossed Idaho over it; virtually no one settled. In 1860, 14 years after Idaho had officially become US land through the Oregon Treaty with the United Kingdom, Mormons from Utah established Franklin, Idaho's first permanent settlement.

Those pioneers are immortalized in the Idaho State Song
“There’s truly one state in this great land of ours,
Where ideals can be realized.
The pioneers made it so for you and me,
A legacy we’ll always prize.”

Boise became the capital of Idaho in 1864, and the following decade saw the inauguration of telegraph service, the linking with the transcontinental railway, and the birth of the territory's first daily newspaper.  The pressure of white settlement impinging on Indian hunting and fishing grounds touched off a series of wars in the late 1870s. The most famous of those was the Nez Percé War, culminating in Chief Joseph's surrender in Montana on October 5, 1877 and in the subsequent confinement of Idaho Indians to reservations.
 

It was a difficult birth for the state to unite northern and southern interests.  The sixty-eight members of Idaho’s constitutional convention debated for 28 days to create and adopt the state’s constitution. More than once during the seventeen years since Abraham Lincoln had signed the act organizing Idaho as a territory in 1863 the territory had come perilously close to being divided up and split among its neighbors.

Lewiston had been chosen as the Territorial Capital, but it hadn’t taken long for southern Idaho legislators to garnish the votes to move the capital to Boise. Offended by the action, north Idahoans wanted out. Most people living in Lewiston and northern parts favored union with Washington or Montana Territory, or creating a new territory out of parts of each. At the same time, southern Idaho was being recruited by Nevada.
 

By the 1880’s, more people lived in southern Idaho Territory than in the State of Nevada. The legislature had previously voted to locate the University of Idaho at Eagle Rock (Idaho Falls).  By moving the site of the university to Moscow in 1889, north Idaho’s demands for secession were pacified and most northerners resigned themselves to their inclusion in the new state of Idaho. Finally, Idaho the state was born.  It is a tribute to the determination of the people of Idaho who were more committed to public unity than to diversity; more dedicated to high ideals than to geographical rivalries.