Priest River

About

Priest River, Idaho — 1890s Valencia Era, Priest Lake 1950 Dam, 500+ Photo Historical Collection. The river's modern identity began with a small clerical dispute. The settlement that grew along its banks was first called Valencia, only to surrender that name to another Idaho town already laying claim to it. Among its earliest settlers were Henry Keyser, John Canton, and Charles W. Beardmore, hardy pioneers who staked their futures along the water. That founding-era friction over a name would eventually give the river and its town the same title.

Long before the pioneers, this was Kalispel (Pend d'Oreilles) territory. The Kalispel people fished the river for cutthroat trout and bull trout and hunted the surrounding Selkirk Mountains. Jesuit missionaries, who arrived in the 1840s, gave the river and lake their current names — the source of the "Priest" that replaced Valencia on the maps.

The river's character was shaped further by the Great Northern railroad, which between 1880 and 1920 drew a substantial wave of Italian immigrants into the surrounding country. They threaded new languages and traditions through the timber camps and townsites, arriving as the watershed's forests were being cut. The Priest River watershed was logged from the 1830s through the 1920s to support the regional timber industry of roughly 1850 to the 1910s and the railroad expansion of roughly 1860 to the 1910s. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. For nearly half a century the river itself carried the load: its annual log drive ran every season from 1901 through 1949.

Several forces ended the large-scale logging. The old-growth stands were exhausted by 1910, state forestry conservation began in 1915, and state forests were established in the 1930s. When the last drive ended in 1949, it marked the close of the era that had built the communities along the banks. The river's hydrology had been studied throughout this period, from the USGS surveys of the 1870s to 1890s and gauging-station work of the 1880s to 1910s, through state streamflow assessments and, later, Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 to 2000 that addressed a century of logging and industrial impacts.

In the 1980s the river saw extensive restoration work by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, and it is today a designated trout stream supporting westslope cutthroat trout and bull trout. The corridor also marks a stark modern loss: the Selkirk Mountains above the watershed held the last remaining woodland caribou herd in the contiguous United States, a herd that dwindled to near zero by 2019, making the Priest River corridor one of the last places these animals were seen in the Lower 48. The watershed's history is documented in the University of Idaho Library's Marylyn Cork Priest River Historical Collection, which holds more than 500 images. The river runs across land managed within the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, still carrying the legacy of the communities it built.