Lewiston: Idaho's First City and Stolen Capital

Lewiston sits at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers, a spot where the water has been moving goods and people for a very long time. Lewis and Clark camped here in eighteen oh five and again on their return in eighteen oh six, noting the confluence as a natural crossroads. The Nez Perce had been meeting, trading, and fishing at this junction for generations before that.

The gold rush changed everything. In eighteen sixty, Captain E. D. Pierce discovered gold in the Clearwater country to the east. Prospectors flooded in by river, and at the head of navigation, the farthest point a sternwheeler could reach from the Columbia River, a tent city sprang up almost overnight. By late eighteen sixty-one, Lewiston had several thousand people. Idaho's oldest newspaper began publishing here in eighteen sixty-two.

When President Lincoln created Idaho Territory on March fourth, eighteen sixty-three, the new governor, William Wallace, chose Lewiston as the capital. It was the only Idaho city he really knew. For the first eighteen months of Idaho's territorial existence, Lewiston was where the government sat, the legislature, the territorial seal, the whole apparatus of a new political entity.

It did not last. Southern Idaho's Boise Basin had been found to hold far more gold than the Clearwater fields, and the political center of gravity shifted south. In December of eighteen sixty-four, the legislature voted to move the capital to Boise. Lewiston refused to give up the seal. In eighteen sixty-five, a group loyal to Boise physically removed the territorial records and archives and transported them south. The capital transfer, by some accounts, was completed by force.

Lewiston recovered. The city grew into a regional port, uniquely, it remains one of the farthest inland seaports in the western United States, accessible by ocean-going barge via the Snake and Columbia Rivers through a system of federal locks. It is the lowest elevation point in the state of Idaho, a river city that lost a capital but kept the water.