Idaho

A name nobody can explain

Idaho’s name has one of the oddest histories of any state. Around 1860 it was first used in the Colorado gold camps, where a settlement, today’s Idaho Springs, carried the name. Promoters suggested “Idaho” for the new territory that became Colorado, saying it was an Indian word meaning “gem of the mountains.” When the territory’s delegate learned the word had probably been invented, most likely by a lobbyist named George M. Willing, he asked Congress to use “Colorado” instead.

The name did not disappear. A steamboat called the Idaho, launched on the Columbia River in 1860, carried miners toward the new gold fields of the Clearwater and Salmon rivers, which became known as the Idaho mines. In 1863, when Congress created a new territory in the northern Rockies, a bill briefly called it “Montana,” but on the last night of the session the name was changed back to Idaho. The true origin of the word is still unknown.

Gold, a stolen seal and statehood

Gold drew settlers to Idaho in the early 1860s, and Congress created the Idaho Territory on March 4, 1863. Its first capital was Lewiston, in the north, but new gold strikes in the Boise Basin shifted the population south, and in 1864 the legislature moved the capital to Boise. Lewiston did not give up easily. Its residents put the territorial records under armed guard, and in 1865 the acting governor needed soldiers to carry the seal and archives to Boise. The capital page tells the story. Idaho became the 43rd state on July 3, 1890.

The Gem State

“The Gem State” echoes the story that Idaho meant “gem of the mountains,” and Idaho does have gems. The state gem is the star garnet, which shows a four- or six-rayed star and is found almost only in Idaho and India; the public can dig for them at a Forest Service site near St. Maries. No law makes the nickname official.

The state motto is Latin: Esto perpetua, usually translated “Let it be perpetual.” It appears on the state seal, which was designed in 1891 by Emma Edwards Green, who won a competition and became the only woman to design a US state seal.

Bluebirds, potatoes and huckleberries

Idaho has 20 official symbols. The mountain bluebird and the syringa were both adopted in 1931, and the western white pine, which grows to great size in the forests of north Idaho, in 1935. Idaho’s most famous crop, the potato, became the state vegetable in 2002, and the huckleberry, a wild mountain berry Idahoans prize, the state fruit in 2000. The Appaloosa, the spotted horse bred by the Nez Perce, is the state horse, and the Hagerman horse, a fossil horse about 3.7 million years old, is the state fossil. In 2026 Idaho added hunting as its official state sport. See every symbol on the Idaho symbols page.

The flag shows the state seal on a blue field above a red band reading “State of Idaho.”

Land and people

Idaho covers 83,569 square miles, the 14th largest state, stretching from the Canadian border in its narrow northern panhandle to Nevada and Utah in the south. It also borders Washington, Oregon, Montana and Wyoming. It had about 2.03 million residents in 2025, 37th in the country, after growing by about 10 percent since 2020, one of the fastest rates in the nation. Most Idahoans live in the Boise area: Boise, Meridian, Nampa and Caldwell are four of the state’s five largest cities.