Hi! Today's story is a look at the different industries that have been a driving force in Boise, even before it was a city. It was researched and written by Amanda Patchin. Thanks for reading!

Boise has been shaped and identified by her chief industries, from a rough and ready mining outpost to a stable and fruitful agricultural community, to the “changing my major” young adult city she is today.

These industries have molded the community in profound and interesting ways. The Oregon Trail runs right through our city and Boise Avenue traces the old wagon ruts, some of which are still visible right outside town. Old mines dot the foothills and make for fun hiking destinations. The surrounding rich farmland still supplies the fresh produce we enjoy. The Simplot company, founded by our most interesting farmer, employs hundreds. And, vibrantly innovative tech companies drive economic opportunity today.

Human settlements have generally followed a fairly strict pattern: they cluster along coasts and fan out upstream following the rivers that meander to the ocean. People do venture inland, but generally only if there is a significant body of water calling them or if the region has been inhabited for millennia and the pressures of population have driven groups away from one another. Boise does have a significant body of water. The river that wends through town carries sufficient water to support a large population. However, without the work of the various dams flung across its currents, the majority of that water would be squandered each spring in rough and rapid floods.

Boise is the most geographically isolated city in the continental United States: home to a quarter of a million people in the city proper and approaching a million in the wider metro region, Boise is rapidly growing and still in the middle of nowhere.

I wonder how the fragmenting forces of the present will confirm our future.

Mining

While pioneers rode their covered wagons through Boise following the Oregon Trail to the lush lands west of the Cascade mountains, miners were discovering and exploiting gold deposits around the Boise Basin.

With more than 2.8 million ounces of gold extracted over the course of a century, Boise’s gold rush was one of the most productive in America’s history. The Boise County website claims that this gold helped preserve the Union by strengthening the federal treasury in the midst of the Civil War. Mining was the catalyst for settlement.

An arid valley bordered by high-desert steppe, the Boise Basin needed the lure of treasure to prompt settlement and development. The Shoshone and Bannock peoples that lived here before being driven out by settlers were never very numerous because of the spare vegetation and animal life. In its natural state, the valley cannot support more than a few thousand people spread along the river, subsisting on farmed camas root, biscuit root, and wild onions, and hunted fish and venison. As miners rode steamships up the Columbia River and then stagecoaches or pack-trains across the high desert, their food followed them in sacks.

With the profitability of the mines came the impetus and ability to develop larger settlements. Idaho City, long the largest town in the region, was entirely dependent on imported food due to its short growing season. Some histories describe food riots when supplies were delayed and how the expense of transporting goods helped relieve miners of their newfound wealth. As was usual with new mineral discoveries in the 19th century, whoever managed to import the most supplies near gold strikes always made more profit than even the luckiest mining claims.

Placer mining – the practice of “panning” for gold, either literally using gold pans or more efficiently with rockers – dominated the early days of the Boise Basin gold rush. As the easy gold was all gathered from stream beds and their immediately adjacent hillsides, miners turned to hydraulic and stamp mills to extract gold from the quartz veins threading the mountains. Literally carving away entire mountainsides with pressurized water, hydraulic mining reshaped the landscape, turning sloping hillsides of trees, brush, and grasses into scattered mounds of crushed rock.

This extractive beginning perhaps explains the way Boise sits a bit oddly on its landscape. The ecology of the region dictates a small and mobile population sensitive to seasonal rhythms but the lure of metallic wealth enabled a hybrid civilization. The thousands who settled up in Idaho City were partly sustained by a sort of IV of nutrition shipped up from the coastal regions of Oregon Territory. Basic commodities commanded ten-times their ordinary prices as they were transported hundreds of miles on the backs of ships, mules, donkeys, and men.

First gold, in Idaho City and throughout the mountains north of Boise, then silver, in Boise and across the Owyhee mountains to the south, paid for these imports. Through its need for timber structures and firewood for steam engines, the mining industry kickstarted the timber industry which survives to this day.

Gold and silver deposits, and to a lesser extent timber, can only offer temporary prosperity. Formed by the geologic processes of superheated water moving through the Earth’s crust, gold veins then require millions of years of slow weathering and wearing under wind and lichen and water flows to deposit flakes, nuggets, and dust in stream beds. Two or three steady years of placer mining in the various stream beds of the basin collected all of the work of the previous millions of years.

Not to be deterred by the frailty of mortality and finitude, miners then burned thousands of trees to fire steam engines to pump water against the hillsides with all the force of a million years compressed into mere moments. Time – time embedded in tree rings – was combusted to make immortal men who could not wait for gold to wash down on its own schedule.
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While there are recent and controversial attempts to revive serious mining in the mountains of Idaho, mining is little identified with Boise’s present. The ironically named Perpetua Mining Group, would like to develop an old mining site to source gold (naturally) as well as antimony (a mineral used in various microelectronics and other than Idaho’s deposit unavailable in the US) from the mountains north of Boise Basin.

Agriculture

As the bulk of the easy mineral wealth was being washed, dug, and crushed out of the mountains, farmers began to settle the Boise River Valley to supply the mining communities. Pack trains could only carry so much and the high price of food made the effort of farming in the high desert worth it. As early mining efforts consumed millennia of geologic processes, agriculture worked to intensify and accelerate organic processes. The strip of fertile land along the Boise River offered the first and best opportunity for agriculture in the region and Tom Davis planted a large fruit orchard where Julia Davis Park now sits.

The bottom land next to the river is an obvious choice for farming, especially for planting orchards. Tree roots dig deep into water tables, are able to withstand minor flooding, and are a logical development of the natural landscape which universally includes riparian forests growing up along river and stream beds. Less obvious was the development of the rest of the valley into farmland, and yet, this effort transformed it from a scrubby wild landscape into a fertile, productive and profitable farming community.

Idaho is known for her potato production. We grow a third of the US supply and proudly proclaim our “Famous Potatoes” on our license plates. I found that you can even eat them in Bogota, Columbia; at a steak restaurant I was able to order genuine Columbian beefsteak with a genuine Idaho potato.

Of course, Idaho agriculture is far more than just potatoes. We produce an enormous amount of wheat for export, malt barley, sugar beets, onions, oilseeds like canola and safflower, and mint, and fruits. One of the most important aspects of the agriculture industry in Idaho is our seed production. At hundreds of millions of dollars, the seeds we produce and export around the world are a significant chunk of our economy and are foundational for international agriculture industries.

Building an agricultural economy on a desert landscape required several local innovations to transform our ecology. Not all of these transformations are sustainable and all of them have environmental impacts. Irrigation was one of the first developments to the agricultural economy and its transformative effect is readily apparent. A network of canals spiders across the valley. Branching off of the huge New York Canal, a project originally begun by Arthur De Wint Foote (husband to Idaho author Mary Hallock Foote who was the inspiration for Wallace Stegner’s controversial Angle of Repose), large and small ditches carry water from the level of Boise’s Diversion Dam out to farms, fields, and suburban lawns.

Boise’s Diversion Dam is backed up by both Lucky Peak Dam, built in the 1950s primarily to control flooding, and Arrowrock Dam, which was built much earlier in the 1910s to store water for the irrigation system that Diversion Dam then supplies with water. We still rely on these dams for irrigation water and for backup power during times of peak demand.

Diverting water from its natural course is not necessarily damaging to an ecosystem, although it inevitably alters it. The irrigation water from both the New York Canal and the Ridenbaugh Canal (starting further downstream of Diversion Dam) goes to nourish the crops grown to the west of Boise proper. These are all rooted in the rich topsoil of the region. Taking approximately 1000 years per inch to form, topsoil is the key point of traditional agriculture. Without the weathering effect of water and the digestive effect of microbial life, stone would refuse to break down into anything more useful than sand and sand does not grow crops.

Topsoil can be intentionally created on a more accelerated time frame, but as a natural resource it can be squandered. Boise’s topsoil is rich and plentiful, and the century of intensive agriculture in the valley has cared responsibly for it. However, despite the richness of topsoil, without careful fertilization, a few short years of farming can deplete the nutrient content of the dirt.

Potash (“pot-ash”) is a sulfur and potassium compound originally produced as a byproduct of burned wood. It can also be found by mining ancient seabed and crushing the ore to extract the salt compounds. Potatoes are rich in potassium, beating out their more famous competitor, the banana, by a margin of 2 to 1. Bananas generally have around 400 mg of the nutrient while a medium potato carries nearly 900 mg. And so, for Idaho to be famous for her potatoes, she had to find potassium to enrich the soil.

J.R. Simplot, Idaho’s most famous and richest farmer, recognized the opportunity and bought potash mines to support growing millions of tons of potatoes. He then developed innovative processing techniques to freeze and dehydrate them for easier transport. During World War II, U.S. servicemen were sustained by Idaho’s spuds.

Tech

According to Comptia.org, almost 10% of Idaho’s economy is in the tech industry, while Idaho.gov reports that 13% of our GDP is agriculture.

Given that most of us are conscious of interacting with technology each day, we may not be fully aware of just how much is mostly invisible to us. We are much more likely to take the agricultural realities of being human for granted. We eat food every day, but it comes to us so far removed from the dirt it grew in that we forget the gritty realities of planting, watering, fertilizing, and harvesting. I would venture that no one bites into a McDouble and thinks about the cucumber on its path from seed to fruit to pickle.

Similarly, we may be oblivious of the computers embedded in our cars, our traffic lights, or the algorithms that govern the ads we see or the ordering of our search results. However, we tend to be quite conscious of the phones in our hands, the apps we use to order our lives and to entertain us, and the ubiquity of Big Tech in our shopping, socializing, and working lives.

And so, while agriculture still leads Idaho’s GDP, if you live in Boise you are probably less conscious of the pressure the city’s growth places on the surrounding farmland and more conscious of the opportunities Idaho’s homegrown tech companies offer the city.

The huge Micron complex sits as awkwardly in the landscape as any building could and yet the company’s presence in the city feels natural. Founded in Boise as a semiconductor consulting company, Simplot invested in the business tying it solidly to Idaho’s history, and Micron now makes the world’s first terabyte micro SD card. It seems that every fifth person you meet as you socialize in the valley works there and the names of its founders and CEOs crop up on buildings and tennis courts around BSU. As Boise’s original tech company, the relative prosperity of Micron has a direct effect on Boise’s housing market and the success of her service industries.

However, unlike in the 90s and early oughts, Boiseans can now turn to dozens of other tech companies founded in the valley for work or investment opportunities. Clearwater Analytics and Meta Geek, TSheets and Cradlepoint, Keynetics and Balihoo, ConvertKit and Order Desk, companies large and small, companies with huge offices and ones that work entirely remotely, companies that make physical technology and companies that work with data or with software.

Boise is, in some ways, a miniature Silicon Valley, with the housing prices to match.

Conclusion

Without the mining past, Boise wouldn’t be here. Without the mineral wealth that drew settlers, Boise would not have developed the farms that still define the landscape.

Yet, as housing prices climb, and as Boiseans new and native try to build enough homes to accommodate the growing population, farms are disappearing. Can the city sustain responsible growth that preserves the fruitfulness of the land?

Can the tech industry and the people it attracts, which rely on abstracting human experience away from the physical, engage with the high desert steppe, its hundred and fifty year old mining legacy, its hundred and twenty year old farming industry, and its ongoing love affair with the beauty of the landscape? Can Boise today recall the limitations of ecology? Can it attempt to live with respect for time? For the necessity of putting back into the earth the nutrients we draw from it? The need to use only as much water as falls and flows?

Without a conscious willingness to question the philosophical implications of abstraction, I fear the answer is no. However, between the love of the native Boisean for what is already here, and the awareness a transplanted Boisean will have for the problems they fled, maybe we can turn the “no” into a “perhaps”.

Perhaps the ready availability of locally grown produce will seem worth preserving. Perhaps the historic buildings of Idaho City and Placerville and the Adelmann Mine will seem deserving of admiration and care. Perhaps the fortunes Boiseans make will go toward strong development that considers both human and ecological needs.

This story was written by Amanda Patchin, a freelance writer and born-and-raised Boise local. You can find more of Amanda's work at www.amandapatchin.com.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

-Marissa

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