Burley and the Minidoka Project: Water That Made a Desert Bloom

Before nineteen oh four, the Snake River plain around what is now Burley was high desert: basalt ridges, sagebrush flats, and a river that flowed through country too dry to farm without irrigation. The federal Reclamation Service, newly created by the Newlands Reclamation Act of nineteen oh two, chose this stretch of the Snake River for its first major irrigation project in Idaho. The Minidoka Dam, built between nineteen oh four and nineteen oh five, was one of the first multipurpose dams in the American West, designed to divert water into canals serving both gravity-fed fields to the north and pump-lifted fields to the south.

The town of Burley was platted in May of nineteen oh five, named for David E. Burley, a land agent for the Oregon Short Line Railroad whose tracks had just crossed the Snake River here. The railroad and the irrigation project arrived simultaneously, and together they transformed the landscape in a matter of years. By the early twentieth century the surrounding fields were producing sugar beets, potatoes, and grain in quantities that would have seemed impossible to the cattle ranchers who had worked the same land a generation earlier. Rupert, Heyburn, and Burley grew up as the planned towns of the Minidoka Project, each with its own bank, school, church, and newspaper.

During World War Two, Minidoka also became the name of an internment camp, one of the ten major War Relocation Authority sites, built on project lands about fifteen miles north of here. Roughly ninety-three hundred Japanese Americans from the Pacific Coast, most of them from the Seattle and Portland areas, were incarcerated there between nineteen forty-two and nineteen forty-five. Many of them had been farmers themselves, and some of the camp's incarcerated residents were put to work in the very sugar beet fields their captivity was meant to serve. The Minidoka National Historic Site now preserves part of the camp.