Spacious State Is No Small Potatoes : Riddle of the Rockies: Just Where Is Idaho?

Wedged between six states, in a region so remote settlers once viewed it as more of an obstacle than a destination, is the last frontier of the America that was. The place is called Idaho, and although everyone has heard of its potatoes, there seems to be some national confusion over whether Idaho really exists, and if it does, whether it’s east or west of the Mississippi.

“Very few Americans seem to know what we are or even where we are,” says the governor, Cecil D. Andrus. Adds historian Carlos Schwantes: “In Pennsylvania a gas-station attendant looked at my license plate and said: ‘Tell me, exactly where is that?’ ”

Last to Report AIDS

Well, first of all, Idaho is where there’s more high-mountain wilderness than in any state but Alaska, where the journey from Bonners Ferry to Montpelier covers more miles than the trip between Portland, Me., and Atlanta. Idaho isn’t just a potato patch for McDonald’s french fries. It’s the great unknown, unspoiled and uncorrupted--the last territory to be seen by white men (in 1805) and the last state to report a case of AIDS (1985).

“You see that point out there?” said publisher and developer Duane Hagadone, motioning toward Lake Coeur d’Alene out his office window. “A lady caught a 40-pound Chinook salmon there just last August. Within an hour of here, we’ve got 120 fresh-water lakes and 1,500 miles of rivers and streams. Talk about an asset in recruiting! We bring people in and they don’t leave. If you want to work and play in your back yard, Idaho is unbelievable.”

The only problem is that you can’t eat the scenery and living in Idaho has always been a trade-off: Lower salaries in exchange for more elbow room. Per capita income ranks in the lower third nationally; only six states pay their teachers less. In 1986, 1,449 of the state’s 23,000 farmers went bankrupt, the fifth highest percentage of failures in the nation. But start talking about Idaho here, and the natives’ eyes mist over and everyone sounds as if he took his cue from the director of the chamber of commerce.

“Idaho is like tapioca pudding,” said a non-native professional who moved here from California. “It’s nice, but it’s not exotic or interesting. It’s a good place to raise a family, a good place to fish, a good place to feel safe. And God, what I wouldn’t give for someone to exchange ideas with!”

Cohabitation Against Law

As old-fashioned as it is conservative, Idaho is where cohabitation is still against the law, where kids can drive at the age of 14 and tooling down the highway with an open beer can is not illegal. No other state, other than neighboring, Mormon-dominated Utah, has a higher percentage of homes occupied by married couples, where up to 80% of eligible adults vote in presidential elections. Republican victories in 1980 and 1984 were more substantial than in any state except Utah.

Unlike trendy Colorado, Idaho hasn’t been gentrified or yuppified. It doesn’t have skateboards, nouvelle cuisine, singles bars or much of a homosexual community that has dared to come out of the closet. What it does have are fierce environmentalists, some state legislators who are so anti-government (although 63% of Idaho is federally managed) that they abhor even public education and a good many California transplants who found Orange Country too liberal.

“When I lived in Wisconsin, I considered myself a conservative Republican, but here I think of myself as a liberal Democrat, even though my views haven’t changed,” said Robert Dwelle, who teaches potato science at the University of Idaho in Moscow and has a license plate that identifies him as “Mr. Spud.”

Perhaps unfairly, the 1988 World Almanac and Book of Facts lists only five “Famous Idahoans” (all of whom are dead). Only Wyoming, with three, has fewer prominent citizens. Ezra Pound was born here and Ernest Hemingway died here, but other than those, many Americans would be hard-pressed to name an Idahoan of note or an Idaho town other than Boise. When historian Schwantes plays association games with his students at the state university in Moscow, “Idaho” is always matched with “potato.” Then, the state image starts to fade and silence fills the room.

No Geographic Sense

Part of the state’s fuzzy identity stems from the fact that geographically Idaho makes no sense at all. Ideologically, politically and economically, it is really two states--a north and a south--with three capitals. It has three state universities, all competing for the same funds, and three state fairs, each representing a region. As if to accentuate the division, Congress in 1934 yielded to a coalition of eastern Washington businessmen and northern Idaho miners by turning the north-south time zone at the Salmon River so that it zigs east-west like a Mason-Dixon line, thus putting northern Idaho on Pacific Time and southern Idaho on Mountain Time.

The lushly forested, sparsely populated (and potatoless) north depends on timber and mining, is more Democratic and liberal despite the presence of a California-born, neo-Nazi movement, and looks to Spokane, Wash., as its economic capital. The notion of northern Idaho joining eastern Washington and western Montana in the new state of Columbia is not without appeal to some northerners who resent the economic and political domination of “Boise State.”

“I can tell you more about politics in Washington than in Idaho because that’s what we’re exposed to every day,” said Undersheriff Larry Broadbent of northern Kootenai County, where local TV emanates from Spokane and the best-selling newspaper is the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Below the central mountains, so impenetrable that they forced the Lewis and Clark expedition to turn back to Montana in 1805, are the prairies, sagebrush plains and potato fields of the south, a region as Republican and conservative as any in the country. Southwest Idaho is drawn to Boise as its capital, while the Mormons of the southeast--who originally settled around Pocatello thinking they were in Utah--look spiritually to Salt Lake City.

The two Idahos are connected only by a single, two-lane state highway, Route 95, which Gov. Andrus has called a “goat trail.” The train never made it over the hump dividing Idaho and no scheduled jetliners fly between north and south. So transportation, commercial and communication links run east-west--often to the neighboring states. As a result Idahoans don’t know each other very well and don’t seem particularly interested in becoming better acquainted.

‘Surly and Insolent’

“Those of us in the north are getting downright surly and insolent,” state legislator Tom Giovanelli said during the northerners’ recently successful battle to get the ubiquitous potato off the state’s centennial license plates. “You all oughta just kick us out the state. We deserve it.”

The sectionalism dates back to 1863, when congressional map makers included Montana and much of Wyoming in the original Idaho Territory, thus creating an entity bigger than Texas. A year later Montana was carved off and made a separate territory and most of Wyoming was returned to the Dakotas. That same year, with Gov. Caleb Lyon out of state allegedly hunting ducks, armed horsemen captured the Idaho seal and archives in Lewiston and spirited them south to Boise, where they set up the new capital. In the late 1880s, President Grover Cleveland vetoed a measure that would have given northern Idaho to eastern Washington.

Idaho--a Shoshonean phrase translating roughly as “light on the mountains”--lost population during much of the 20th Century, but boomed in the 1970s as Americans fled the cities in search of rural simplicity. It grew by a third to nearly a million in that decade with the largest number of immigrants--more than 43,000 between 1975-80--coming from California.

Idahoans welcomed their money as tourists but not necessarily the colonial presence they symbolized as residents. The Californians come with their bigger bankrolls and better educations, forcing up real estate prices and grabbing top jobs. Worse yet, Idahoans fear, the Californian invasion could bring with it the freeways and hamburger stands and social values of that overbuilt, overpopulated and overly liberal land to the south.

“I’ve had people simply walk away from me when I tried to interview them and let on I was a Californian,” said a newspaper reporter who got here via New York and San Francisco. “So now if they ask, I tell them I’m from New York.”

With a density of only 12 people per square mile (California’s is 14 times higher), Idaho remains, unlike Arizona and Colorado, a state where the population is not centered in metropolitan areas. It also remains one of the “whitest” states west of the Mississippi with only 3,000 blacks, 6,000 Asians and 37,000 Hispanics.

On the dirt road out of Hayden Lake, there is an obscure fork that leads across the rolling hills and into a cluster of small buildings. Howling dogs greet a visitor’s car there and the hand-lettered sign on the guard shack warns: “Whites Only.”

The compound is the national headquarters of the Aryan Nations, a white-supremacist group that believes Caucasian Christians have been chosen by God to rule the world. Inside at his desk is the movement’s leader, Richard Butler, 70, a World War II veteran and former California aviation engineer, acquitted with 12 others last April on charges of wanting to overthrow the U.S. government and start an all-white nation in the Pacific Northwest.

“Idaho is an enclave of the remnant of our race,” Butler said. “In my view any sane person knows it’s impossible to have civilization without the white race.

“About half the people who’ve come up here in the last 10 years are from L.A. We don’t have to tell them what the mongrelization of a city does. I’ve lived in India and I know what a multiculture is like when it comes to an ultimate end. Just ask any biologist. Every species has to have a territorial imperative to survive.”

Annual Convention

Some 300 supporters nationwide showed up last summer for the Aryan Nations’ annual congress--all were videotaped entering the compound by sheriff’s deputies--and Butler says many Idahoans tell him privately they back his movement, though few dare do so publicly. For a visitor, he has a parting shot: Hitler was a great man for Germany because he tried to save “our civilization.”

The Aryan Nations’ presence seems a source of intense embarrassment to Idahoans, who pride themselves on being both independent-minded and tolerant. Said one businessman: “With all the publicity they’ve gotten, people think we’re just a state full of potatoes and racial bigots.”

Undersheriff Broadbent, who monitors extremist groups in the north and says he has been targeted for assassination by Bud Cutler, the Aryan Nations’ former security chief, believes the white supremacist group has been rendered largely ineffective because of public revulsion and law-enforcement vigilance. Since 1980, nearly 200 people who at one time or another attended an Aryan Nations congress have been indicted nationally on charges ranging from murder to tax evasion, he said.

Northern Idaho responded to the threat the Aryan Nations posed to the region’s image and healthy tourist industry by setting up a task force on human relations that has drawn national recognition. And Idaho itself passed a malicious-harassment bill and a domestic-terrorist bill that are among the toughest in the country. Idaho also is part of a new five-state coalition in the Northwest designed to combat racial and religious discrimination.

For most Idahoans, the dwindling presence of the white supremacists is no longer much of an issue. What consumes their attention is the battle between the boomers (developers) and the greenies (environmentalists) and the question facing other mountain states that live off the generosity of the land: Is it possible to develop and create jobs without destroying the isolated splendor they hold so dear?

Some of the trends are unsettling. Boise’s first shopping mall is being built on the outskirts of town, near Interstate 84. The old mining town of Kellogg is being remodeled with a Bavarian theme. In Coeur d’Alene, where 7 million cars a year use nearby Interstate 90, a $10-million dog track is about to open, next to 270 acres recently rezoned for light industry. And the golf course that developer Hagadone is building will have a floating green on a barge in Lake Coeur d’Alene, to be moved by cables every day to a new location. He predicts it will be the most-photographed green in the world.

Gov. Andrus, who drives a GMC pickup with a gun rack mounted by the rear window and who served the Carter Administration as secretary of the Interior, believes Idaho has the space to have both planned growth and environmental protectionism. His top concern, he said, is to improve the quality of public education in the state, which ranks 49th nationally in per-student expenditures. Only 3% of the state’s school-age youth attend private schools.

‘Business, Education’

“Business follows education,” he said, noting that one prospective company located elsewhere when the high school went on double shifts in the town where it had intended to build a plant. Another corporation, U S West, chose Colorado over Idaho as the site of a major plant, saying Colorado’s education system was stronger.

In two years Idaho will celebrate its 100th year of statehood. The chairman of the centennial commission, Harry Magnuson, a millionaire miner whose father was a butcher, recently walked with a visitor into the Jameson saloon and restaurant he owns in Wallace (where the Western movie “Heaven’s Gate” was filmed).

Wallace is said to have yielded more silver--over 1 billion ounces since the boom of the 1800s--than any mine in the world. The town fell on terrible times with the collapse of the mining industry a few years back, but is being authentically restored and looks grander than perhaps it did even in its heyday. The 88-year-old Jameson, once a dismal place with water running through the gutter at the foot of the bar, has been transformed into as elegant a rest stop as you could find anywhere between Spokane and Missoula, Mont.

“I’ll tell you what I find as I travel around the state,” Magnuson said. “The people here have pride and they’re not afraid to work. They have roots that go down. You just don’t find that in Illinois or Massachusetts where everyone’s so mobile.

“Hell, when disaster hit this camp in 1982 to ’85 and the mines closed, we lost 6,000 jobs. But people didn’t leave. They toughed it out because this is where they want to be. I mean, you can drive through eastern Montana for 800 miles and you’re not even out of Montana and what have you seen except sagebrush and flatlands? But here . . . .”

And, as happens when discussing Idaho, his eyes misted and his right hand slipped over the lapel of his gray, pin-stripped suit, just above his heart. . . . “Here in Idaho,” he went on, “God put it all together.”