Malad City: Wales in Idaho

The valley you are driving through has a strange name with a stranger origin. Malad, pronounced muh-LAD locally, comes from the French word meaning sick, or bad. A Scottish-Canadian fur trapper named Donald Mackenzie passed through here between eighteen eighteen and eighteen twenty-one with a party of Hudson's Bay Company men. Some of his trappers fell ill after eating tainted meat near the valley's main stream, not from the water itself. Mackenzie named the creek Malade, the sickness river, and the name stuck to the valley and eventually to the town.

Malad City is one of the oldest communities in Idaho, founded in eighteen sixty-four. What makes it genuinely remarkable is who settled it. The founders were Welsh, specifically Welsh converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had come west as part of the Mormon migration. Seven Welsh men and boys arrived in the valley in the summer of eighteen sixty-four and began irrigating the benchlands where the town now stands.

More followed. Welsh immigration to this corner of Idaho was substantial enough that for decades, early town meeting minutes were recorded in both English and Welsh. Residents sang in Welsh. They maintained Welsh chapels and Welsh social customs. The old country did not fade here as it did in most immigrant communities. It persisted.

Today Malad City claims to have more people of Welsh descent per capita than anywhere outside of Wales itself. That claim is difficult to verify precisely, but the cultural evidence is real. The town hosts a Welsh festival, Gymanfa Ganu, a traditional Welsh hymn-singing gathering that has drawn participants from across the United States and from Wales for generations.

At roughly two thousand residents, Malad is small by any measure. But it is arguably the most Welsh square mile in the United States, a piece of a small nation planted in the high desert of southern Idaho, named after a sickness that struck a fur trapper two hundred years ago.