Lewiston: Ragtown to First Capital

The city where the Clearwater River meets the Snake began as a gold-rush tent camp so rough its residents called it Ragtown. The summer of eighteen sixty brought Captain E. D. Pierce's discovery of placer gold upstream, and within months sternwheelers were pushing up from the Columbia carrying three hundred passengers at a time. By late that year several thousand fortune-seekers were camped on the riverbank.

In March of eighteen sixty-three, Congress created Idaho Territory and named Lewiston its first capital. The honor lasted less than two years before the legislature voted to move the seat south to Boise. But Lewiston kept one distinction no other city in the nation can claim: it is the farthest inland seaport on the Pacific coast, reachable by ocean-going barge through a series of locks on the Columbia and Snake rivers. The gold is long gone, but the rivers still carry cargo more than four hundred miles from the Pacific.