The Snake River

Snake River was named for the people who once lived in the high desert surrounding it. The story is that they marked sticks with the image of a snake and posted them to mark their territory. When they greeted people, they made a motion with their hand imitating the gliding motion of a snake. Today, an affectionate name for the Snake River, the longest river in Idaho at 1,056 miles, is the "mighty Snake." The river gives life to a remarkable string of cities and towns that hang on the river like beads on a string. Because of this, Snake River has yet another name, one invoked often by politicians.

When politicians talk about Snake River, they use its political name, "the lifeblood of southern Idaho." No political cliche could be more apt or more accurate. The river is everything in the life of southern Idaho.

The river rises in the Grand Tetons and flows from the snowmelt on the western side of the Continental Divide. Over the centuries it cut a channel through the basalts of the Snake River Plain. It had to do this work several times because of repeated episodes of magma flow. The magma would fill up the canyon, forcing the river to find a new path around it. Then the same thing would happen a few million years later.

Snake River falls from an elevation 9,840 feet above sea level to 340 feet where it meets the Columbia River in Washington. It does not fall gently, as the place names along the river suggest: Idaho Falls, American Falls, Shoshone Falls, Twin Falls, Swan Falls. After all that, the river still has to pass through Hells Canyon, another apt name. No wonder the early French trappers called the Snake a "mad" river.

The river is the "lifeblood" of southern Idaho because of the complicated work that it does. Its water is diverted and sent to irrigate tracts of fertile desert land in highly organized systems of storage reservoirs, distribution canals, and pumping stations. Idaho laws regarding water use and water rights are elaborate and refined. The basic legal principle is "first in time, first in right." Settlers who had to share a ditch learned that cooperation was the way to mutual prosperity--and also how to resolve disputes in reasonable ways.

As soon as the feasibility of hydroelectric power plants had been demonstrated at Niagara Falls, eastern investors sent agents into Idaho to appraise the Snake's potential dam sites. There were many. In 1900 the Trade Dollar Consolidated Mining and Milling Company built the first hydroelectric dam and power plant on the Snake at Swan Falls. The plant sent power 28 miles to the Trade Dollar Mine at Silver City, Idaho.

By the time the Silver City mines played out a few years later, a new demand for the electricity had arisen. Farmers needed electricity to power irrigation and drainage pumps. By 1913 pumps in southwestern Idaho were lifting water 170 feet directly from the river onto the land. After that, the progress of irrigated agriculture and power production went hand in hand all across southern Idaho. Hydroelectric plants appeared in rapid succession. The last on the river were built by Idaho Power Company in the 1960s. Including diversion and power dams, the flow of the main stem of Snake River today is blocked by 25 dams.

One of the dams is Milner Dam, located about midway between the towns of Burley and Twin Falls. So much water is diverted above this point that the river often runs completely dry. Below it, streams and springs replenish the river, forming what amounts to a second river. Historian Tim Palmer has likened the Snake to a "wet Phoenix," a river that is "repeatedly killed off but repeatedly returns to life."

Snake River irrigates 3.8 million acres of land and produces well over ten million megawatt hours of electrical power. With these numbers, it's no surprise that the residents along its banks also call it a "working" river.

Despite all of its work, the river manages to be other things at different places--a vacation paradise for anglers; a habitat for fish from trout to catfish to sturgeon; a canyon home for the largest gathering of nesting owls, hawks, eagles, and falcons on the continent; and a federally-designated "wild and scenic" river. Mad mighty working wet-phoenix wild-and-scenic lifeblood: that's the Snake River.

Sources:
Tim Palmer. "The Snake River: Window to the West." Washington, D.C., Island Press, 1991.
Todd Shallat, editor. "Snake: The Plain and its People." Boise: Boise State University, 1994.