McCall: Payette Lake's Logging Town Turned Mountain Resort
Near Mccall, Idaho
You are at the southern end of Payette Lake in the mountains of central Idaho, in a town that has remade itself several times over without losing its character in the process. McCall sits at roughly five thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by the Payette National Forest, with a long blue lake stretching north toward mountains that hold snow well into summer. The town's story runs from indigenous summer camps through fur trade routes, logging booms, a wartime firefighting program, and a full transformation into one of Idaho's most beloved mountain destinations.
The first people to use these shores were the Tukudika, a subgroup of the Shoshone known as the Sheepeaters, who hunted bighorn sheep in the high mountain country around the lake. Nez Perce people also traveled through the valley seasonally. French Canadian fur trader Francois Payette, for whom both the lake and the river are named, passed through the region in the early eighteen hundreds along with mountain men like Jim Bridger and Peter Skene Ogden.
Miners arrived in the eighteen sixties, called the place Lake City for a time, found only surface gold, and moved on. The real founding came in eighteen eighty-nine when Thomas McCall, a man who had been trading horses in the territory, swapped horses with a settler named Sam Dever for a cabin and one hundred sixty acres of land on the lake's south shore. He built a school, a hotel, a saloon, and a post office, and named himself postmaster.
The town took his name. What made McCall viable for its first half century was timber. The Oregon Short Line Railroad, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific, completed its track from Emmett to McCall in nineteen fourteen, making commercial logging profitable at scale.
The Hoff and Brown Lumber Company became the community's largest employer. The last sawmill closed in nineteen seventy-seven. By then McCall was already well into its next life.
After the Second World War, businessmen from Lewiston decided that McCall and the lake were ideal for a resort. Shore Lodge opened on the lakefront in nineteen forty-eight. Ponderosa State Park, a thousand-acre peninsula of old-growth ponderosa pine, was established in nineteen sixty-five.
Today McCall draws visitors for summer boating and fishing, fall color, winter skiing, and the Winter Carnival it has held nearly every year since the nineteen twenties.
