How Driggs Got Its Name

The town of Driggs began with a wagon train of Mormon settlers who forded the Teton River and set up along Teton Creek at the end of the eighteen eighties. Latter day Saint families, several of them named Driggs, took up land here as the valley opened to homesteading. When Benjamin Woodbury Driggs sought a post office for the young settlement, he submitted a petition to Washington.

So many of the signers shared one surname that the postal authorities simply assigned the name Driggs to the new office around eighteen ninety one. Growth was slow. The community did not formally incorporate until the early nineteen hundreds.

From those first irrigation ditches and log cabins grew the seat of Teton County and the largest town in Idaho's slice of the valley the trappers had called Pierre's Hole. Long before the settlers, John Colter had entered the valley in eighteen oh eight, and trappers held a well-attended rendezvous there in eighteen thirty-two, followed by the Battle of Pierre's Hole. Driggs sits at six thousand one hundred forty-five feet and counted one thousand nine hundred eighty-four residents in the twenty twenty census.

Grand Targhee Resort lies about twelve miles away, across the Wyoming line in Alta.