"A Dangerous, Turbulent Stream"

In 1818, fur trappers working for the Hudson’s Bay Company named the Payette River in honor of their comrade, Francois Payette. Payette was a French-Canadian fur trapper who explored much of southwestern Idaho. In 1837, Payette took charge of Fort Boise, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s fur-trading post on the Boise River near present-day Parma. One visitor to the fort described the trapper as a "merry, fat, old gentleman," with impeccable manners. In 1844 he retired from the company and returned to the family farm in Canada.

In 1904, four loggers were killed on the Middle Fork of the Payette between Banks and Garden Valley. They were floating logs downriver to a sawmill in Payette when their boat capsized. The last of the bodies was pulled from the river two years later at Banks.

Log driving was dangerous work. Forest Service records indicate that lumber companies floated logs from as far away as Clear Creek, located thirty miles upriver near Lowman. After Grimes Pass Dam was built in 1907, homesteaders such as Nathaniel Lowman milled the logs into railroad and fence ties to get them over the dam. In the 1920s, trucks replaced most of Idaho’s log drives.

Although early sawmills existed along the South Fork, extensive commercial export logging really began in the 1930s when the Boise Payette Lumber Company installed a portable sawmill in Garden Valley. Portable sawmills continued to operate along the river until the early 1950s.

Grimes Pass Dam: Harnessing the Payette

Roosevelt’s Tree Army Comes to Town

Alder Creek Bridge