Grangeville: Gateway to the Nez Perce War

Grangeville began as a meadow crossing used by prospectors heading to the goldfields at Florence and Elk City in the eighteen sixties. A Grange Hall became the social nucleus around which a town slowly grew.

In eighteen seventy-seven, the Nez Perce War broke out to the southwest at White Bird Canyon. Only a few settlers lived in Grangeville at the time. When the Army engaged and was routed at White Bird, Grangeville became a staging point for subsequent operations, and its tiny population found itself on the edge of a war between the United States military and the non-treaty Nez Perce bands fleeing toward Canada.

Grangeville was later incorporated and became the seat of Idaho County, the largest county in Idaho and larger than several states. Today it serves as the commercial hub for a vast stretch of the Camas Prairie, with the White Bird Battlefield now preserved as part of Nez Perce National Historical Park.

Grangeville sits at about thirty-four hundred feet on the Camas Prairie, with United States Highway ninety-five running along its western edge. Every Fourth of July weekend it holds Border Days, which bills itself as home of the state's oldest rodeo. The Camas Prairie Railroad served the town for more than ninety years, and the tracks from Grangeville to Cottonwood were pulled up in two thousand three. The Idaho County Free Press, founded in eighteen eighty-six, is recognized as the oldest weekly newspaper in Idaho. About thirty-three hundred people live in town today.