Happy 125th birthday! Idaho State Quarter Coin

Today, the Idaho State Quarter Coin remembers 125 years ago when on July 3, 1890, Idaho became the 43th state in the Union.

Through the years, historians have not agreed on the origin of the state’s name.

Perhaps one of the most colorful explanations came from Joaquin Miller, the “Poet of the Sierras.”

The book “An Illustrated History of the State of Idaho” published in 1899 by the Lewis Publishing Company included part of Mr. Miller’s description of the origin of the state name’s.

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The literal meaning is, “sunrise mountains.” Indian children among all tribes west of the Rocky mountains, so far as I can learn, use the word to signify the place where the sun comes from. Where these tawny people live out of doors, go to bed at dusk and rise with the first break of day, sunrise is much to them.

The place where the sun comes from is a place of marvel to the children; and indeed it is a sort of dial-plate to every village or rancheria, and of consequence to all.

The Shoshonee Indians, the true Bedouins of the American desert, hold the mountains where the first burst of dawn is discovered in peculiar reverence. This roving and treacherous tribe of savages, stretching from the Rocky mountains almost to the Sierras, having no real habitation or any regard for the habitation of others, but often invading and overlapping the lands of fellow savages, had some gentle sentiments about sunrise.

I-dah-ho, with them, was a sacred place, and they clothed the Rocky mountains, where it rose to them, with a mystic or rather a mythological sanctity.

The Shasta Indians, with whom I spent the best years of my youth, and whose language and traditions I know entirely as well as those of their neighbors to the north of them, the Modocs, always, whether in camp or in winter quarters, had an I-dah-ho, or place for the sun to rise.

This was a sort of Mecca in the skies, to which every Indian lifted his face involuntarily on rising from his rest.

I am not prepared to say that the act had any special religion in it. I only assert that it was always done silently, and almost, if not entirely, reverently.

Yet it must be remembered that this was a very practical affair nearly always and with all Indians. The war-path, the hunt, the journey — all these pursuits entered almost daily into the Indian’s life, and of course the first thing to be thought of in the morning was I-dah-ho.

Was the day to open propitiously? Was it to be fair or stormy weather for the work in hand?

But I despair of impressing the importance of sunrise on those who rarely witness it, although to the Indian it is everything.

And that is why every tribe in the mountains, wherever it was and whatever its object in hand, had a “Mount I-dah-ho.”

This word, notwithstanding its beauty and pictorial significance, found no place in our books till some twenty-one years ago (during the early ’60s), and then only in an abbreviated and unmeaning form. Indeed, all Indian dialects, except the Chinook, a conglomerate published by the Hudson’s Bay Company for their own purposes and adopted by the missionaries, seem to have always been entirely ignored and unknown throughout the north Pacific territory.

This Chinook answered all purposes. It was a sort of universal jargon, was the only dialect in which the Bible was printed, or that had a dictionary, and no one seemed to care to dig beyond it. And so it was that this worthless and unmeaning Chinook jargon overlaid and buried our beautiful names and traditions.

I had left California before this rush, settled down, and been admitted to the bar by ex-Attorney General George H. Williams, then judge, of Oregon, and had now come, with one law-book and two six-shooters, to offer my services in the capacity of advocate to the miners. Law not being in demand, I threw away my book, bought a horse and rode express.

But even this had to be abandoned and I, too, was being borne out with the receding tide. Suddenly it began to be rumored that farther up the Shoshonee, and beyond a great black and white mountain, a party of miners who had attempted to cross this ugly range and got lost had gold in deposits that even exceeded the palmy days of ’49.

Colonel Craig, an old pioneer, who had married an Indian woman and raised a family here, proposed to set out for the new mine. The old man had long since, through his Indians, heard of gold in this black mountain, and he was ready to believe this rumor in all its extravagance.

He was rich in horses, a good man, a great-brained man, in fact, who always had his pockets full of papers, reminding one of Kit Carson in this respect; and indeed it was his constant thirst for news that drew him toward the “expressman” and made him his friend.

I gladly accepted his offer of a fresh horse and the privilege of making one of his party. For reasons sufficient to the old mountaineer we set out at night and climbed and crossed Craig’s mountain, sparsely set with pines and covered with rich, brown grass, by moon light.

As we approached the edge of Camas prairie, then a land almost unknown, but now made famous by the battlefields of Chief Joseph, we could see through the open pines a faint, far light on the great black and white mountain beyond the valley.

“I-dah-ho,” shouted our Indian guide in the lead, as he looked back and pointed to the break of dawn on the mountain before us. “That shall be the name of the new mines,” said Colonel Craig quietly, as he rode by his side.

The exclamation, its significance, the occasion and all conspired to excite deep pleasure, for I had already written something on this name and its poetical import, and made a sort of glossary embracing eleven dialects.

Looking over this little glossary now, I note that the root of the exclamation is dah! The Shasta word is pou-dah-ho. The Klamath is num-dah-ho. The Modoc is lo-dah, and so on. Strangely like “Look there!” or “Lo, light!” is this exclamation, and with precisely that meaning.

I do not know whether this Indian guide was Nez Perce, Shoshonee, Cayuse or from one of the many other tribes that had met and melted into this half- civilized people first named. Neither can I say certainly at this remote date whether he applied the word i-dah-ho to the mountain as a permanent and established name, or used the word to point the approach of dawn; but I do know that this mountain, that had become famous in a night and was now the objective point of ten thousand pilgrims, became at once known to the world as I-dah-ho.

Passing by the Indians’ cornfields and herds of cattle and horses, we soon crossed the Camas valley. Here, hugging the ragged base of the mountain, we struck the stormy and craggy Salmon river, a tributary of the Shoshonee, and found ourselves in the heart of the civilized and prosperous Nez Perces’ habitations. Ten miles of this tortuous and ragged stream and our guide led up the steep and stupendous mountain toward which all the prospectors were now journeying.

At first it was open pines and grass, then stunted fir and tamarack, then broken lava and manzanita, then the summit and snow. A slight descent into a broad, flat basin, dark with a dense growth of spruce, where here and there was a beautiful little meadow of tall marsh grass, and we were in the mines — the first really rich gold mines that had as yet ever been found outside of California.

“Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for the gold where they fine it,” says the Bible, meaning that the only certain place to look for gold is where they refine it. Certainly the text never had a more apt illustration than here; for of all places for gold in the wide world this seemed the most unlikely.

The old California miners who came pouring in after us, almost before we had pitched tent, were disgusted. “Nobody but a parcel of fools would ever have found gold here,” said one, with a sneer at the long-haired Oregonians who had got lost and found the new mines.

But the wheat-like grains of gold were there, and in such heaps as had never been found in California; and so accessible, only a few inches under the turf or peat in the little meadows and little blind gulches here and there in this great black, bleak and wintry basin that had never yet been peopled since it came fresh from the Creator’s hand.

In less than a week the black basin was white with tents. Our party located a “city” where we first pitched our tent, with the express-office for a nucleus. Look at your map, tracing up from Lewiston over Craig’s mountain and Camas prairie, and you will find “Millersburg,” looking as big on the map as any town in the west. Yet it did not live long.

A man soon came with a family of daughters, Dr. Furber, an author of some note at the time, and settled half a mile farther on. My “city” went with and clustered about the ladies. The Doctor named the rival “city” after his eldest daughter, Florence. It flourished in the falling snow like a bay, and was at one time the capital of the territory. There is little left of it now, however, but the populous graveyard.

And, alas for the soft Indian name! The bluff miner, with his swift speech and love of brevity, soon cut the name of the new mines down to “Idaho!” And so, when the new gold-fields widened out during a winter of unexampled endurance into “Warren’s Diggins,” “Boise City,” “Bannack City,” and so on, and the new territory took upon itself a name and had a place on the map of the republic, that name was plain, simple Idaho.

Should anyone concerned in the preservation of our native and beautiful names care to know more particularly the facts here sketched, let him address Colonel Craig (since deceased), of Craig’s mountain, a well read and the best informed man on the subject to be found in the far west; and he is the man who found and named I-dah-ho.

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The Idaho State Quarter Coin shows against an image of the Twin Springs Placer Company’s 10-mile flume across buttes in Idaho, circa 1898.

Idaho State Quarter Coin