Boise, Idaho: A French Word for the Trees by the River

Boise, Idaho, takes its name from French fur traders who called its river the wooded one for the trees along its banks. Henry Gannett’s 1905 guide to American place names, put out by the U.S. Geological Survey, sums it up: the word means “woody,” and it was “given by the early French traders because of the trees upon the banks of the river.”

“See the woods”

If you’ve heard a livelier version, it probably goes like this one, which the Boise Sentinel printed in June 1897 and James Hawley reprinted in his 1920 History of Idaho. In the summer of 1834, a party of French-Canadian voyageurs traveling with Captain Bonneville’s expedition crossed what the paper called “the treeless and arid Snake River plains.” From the edge of a plateau they looked down on a valley full of cottonwoods, and they shouted, “Les bois! les bois! voyez les bois!” That’s “The woods! the woods! see the woods!” They named the stream “La Riviere Boise,” which the paper translated as “the wooded.”

It’s a good scene, but look at how the Sentinel set it up: “this is what the ancient chroniclers tell.” None of the voyageurs has a name, and the paper was writing more than 60 years after the fact. Gannett’s plain version, French traders naming a river for its trees, is the part both accounts share.

A river with other names

Boise wasn’t the river’s only name, or even its first one. John Rees, who worked through the state’s place names in his 1918 book Idaho Chronology, Nomenclature, Bibliography, says it was called Reed’s River after John Reed, a trapper killed along it in 1813. In 1819, the fur trader Donald Mackenzie called it the Skamnaugh, after a band of Nez Perce living on it, and Rees says the Hudson’s Bay Company and the trappers kept using that name.

That’s a wrinkle for the 1834 story. Rees also records that in 1834, the same year the voyageurs supposedly named the river, Thomas McKay built a log trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company eight miles above its mouth, and it was called Fort Boise. Whoever said it first, the French name was going onto the map that year.

From an army post to Boise City

The city itself came much later. According to Hawley, Maj. Pinckney Lugenbeel picked a plateau about a mile from the river in early July 1863 for a military post, which was named Fort Boise and later Boise Barracks. Rees, for his part, insists that calling the 1863 post “Fort Boise” was an error. Either way, the post is what drew the town, which was laid out on July 7, 1863. In Hawley’s words, “in accordance with the western habit of adding ‘City’ to a hamlet of two or three houses,” it was named Boise City. The federal place-names database still notes that it was incorporated as Boise City. You can see the army post, labeled Boise Barracks, just east of the street grid on the 1892 map above.

There’s a nice irony in the townsite, too. The river was named for its trees, but Hawley describes the spot where the city was laid out as “covered with an unusually scrubby growth of sagebrush.”

Sources & further reading

• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States, 2nd ed. (USGS, 1905), entry “Boise.” A French word meaning “woody,” given by early French traders for the trees along the river.
• James H. Hawley, ed., History of Idaho, vol. 1 (1920), pp. 687–688. Reprints the Boise Sentinel’s 1897 account of the voyageurs and “Les bois!”; Lugenbeel’s post in July 1863; the town laid out on July 7, 1863, as Boise City; the sagebrush on the townsite.
• John E. Rees, Idaho Chronology, Nomenclature, Bibliography (1918), entries “Boise River” and “Fort Boise.” The river’s earlier names, Reed’s River and Skamnaugh; Thomas McKay’s Hudson’s Bay Company post of 1834; Rees’s note that the 1863 post was not properly “Fort Boise.”
• GNIS feature 400590 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Boise: incorporated as Boise City, capital of the State of Idaho.