The Sheepeaters and the Nez Perce of the Payette Valley
Near Mccall, Idaho
Long before loggers or tourists came to Payette Lake, the mountains around McCall were summer territory for several Native peoples who moved with the seasons through the high country of central Idaho. The Tukudika were a subgroup of the Shoshone who had adapted their lives entirely to the high ranges. They were called Sheepeaters by early white travelers because bighorn sheep were central to their hunting and their material culture.
They made bows from the sheep's curved horns, hunted along the ridgelines of what are now the Sawtooth and Salmon River mountains, and spent summers at elevations where the animals grazed before descending to lower ground as winter closed in. The Nez Perce, whose homeland stretched across north-central Idaho, northeastern Oregon, and southeastern Washington, also traveled through this valley seasonally. French Canadian fur trader Francois Payette, whose name was given to the lake and the river and the national forest surrounding the town, passed through the region in the early eighteen hundreds.
The name he left on the landscape endured for generations, while the peoples whose knowledge of that landscape predated his visit by thousands of years were removed to reservations far from the mountains they had used. By the time Thomas McCall arrived in eighteen eighty-nine to stake his claim on the lake's south shore, the indigenous inhabitants had already been displaced from this country.
