A Better Use of an Urban Lawn

The sagebrush sea surrounding Boise looks much the same as it did in the early 19th century, when a band of travel-weary French fur trappers laid eyes on the comparably lush, tree-lined river valley. “Les bois!” they supposedly shouted, delighted to see shade. “The woods!”

This incident, immortalized by Washington Irving, is almost certainly apocryphal. But it’s easy to see how he came up with the idea. The adjacent country is a drab, sun-baked brown for most of the year, and approaching Boise on I-84 from either direction feels like being offered a cool glass of water on a scorching summer afternoon.

With 235,000 residents (and growing), present-day Boise is far from a cow town. But it wasn’t always that way. When gold was discovered in 1862, someone had to feed all those hungry miners. By 1877, engineer Arthur Foote had drawn up plans to divert the Boise River