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"They called it a metropolis," 1884
In 1884, Mary Hallock Foote arrived in Boise via Kuna by stagecoach and train. An accomplished writer and illustrator, Foote spent twelve years raising a family above Boise City while her husband, engineer Arthur Foote, supervised the New York Canal. Excerpted from Rodman Paul, ed., A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West (1992).
No one remembers Kuna. It was a place where silence closed about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hummed through the telegraph wires and a stage road went out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another; but that wind had magic in it. It came across immense dry areas without an object to harp upon except the man-made wires. There was not a tree in sight * miles and miles of pallid sagebrush: as moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. It gives a great intensity to the blue of the sky and to the deeper blue of the mountains lifting their snowcapped peaks, the highest light along the far horizon. As to foreground * we were the foreground, bowling along in our light livery rig. We did not go over to Boise by stage, and there were no protests from the family economist this time.
But what a morning! Meadowlarks were springing up all about us * it was April and we knew there were nests and wild flowers hid in the sage beneath those jets of song. ... Their note was a brief song, sad and sweet, that rained down to us from the sky. It haunted us, that song, every spring of all our years in Idaho, as it welcomed us that April morning. The birds and the wind filled the vast, brooding silence * the desert wind that talks, that whispers, that brings messages from the infinite filled with whatever each human soul that listens can put into it.
From time to time the front seat looked back to see how the back seat was "making it," and how we liked it on the whole. We liked it very much! Over there, we were told, was the Sawtooth Range where the Boise River heads up in southern Idaho; War Eagle [Mountain} and his brethren of the Owyhees might be fifty miles away * there was no guessing distances in that pure light and featureless perspective. We were driving "straight across the drainage," and the wife of the new irrigation engineer marked the phrase as part of the language she was expected to know. We came out on the last long bench above the valley of the Boise and saw, across a bridge in the distance, the little city which was called the metropolis of the desert plains, the heaven of old teamsters and stage drivers crawling in at nightfall; saw the wild river we had come to tame, slipping from the hold of the farms along its banks that snatched a season's crops from it as it fled. Multiply that inconstant water a hundredfold, store it in those reservoirs the man talked of building up in the crotches of the hills, cover the valley with farms, and even to the mind of the misbeliever, here was a work worth spending a lifetime for, even the one life that is man's in this world.