Idaho became a state because national politics finally allowed it and local conditions had long argued for it. The Idaho State Historical Society sets out the political half plainly: after Colorado’s admission in 1876 no territory could get in unless one party held both houses of Congress and the territory as well, a divided Congress admitted nobody between 1882 and 1888, and the blockade broke when the majority party’s needs “suddenly demanded admission of six northwestern states in 1889-1890”. The date and the mechanics are on when Idaho became a state.
Mining had already filled the place
Gold was found at Pierce on 30 September 1860, the Salmon River rush followed in 1862, and the Boise Basin discoveries of 2 August 1862 pulled a still larger rush into country far from the older settlements of western Washington. Within two years the mines held more people than the settlements they had been governed from. More than forty thousand people turned up in Idaho in the summer of 1863, most of them in the Boise region. Growth kept up: the Census Office’s Bulletin No. 86, issued 1 July 1891, counted 84,385 people in Idaho at the census of 1 June 1890 against 32,610 in 1880, an increase it put at 158.77 per cent for the decade.
A government nobody had elected
The 1863 statute that made Idaho was titled “An Act to provide a temporary Government for the Territory of Idaho.” Territorial governors and the other territorial officers were appointed by the president of the United States, and they clashed with a legislature Idahoans elected — from 1864 to 1880 the legislature was dominated by the territory’s Confederate Democrats, and in 1867 Governor D. W. Ballard called out U.S. Army troops for protection from it. The first years were worse than quarrelsome: the code of laws adopted in February 1864 was repealed that December, Governor Caleb Lyon fled the territory at the end of 1864, Idaho went more than two months in 1865 with no government at all, and H. C. Gilson — brought up from San Francisco by a territorial secretary who then died in office — took the entire territorial treasury, $41,062, and left. Statehood meant electing a governor instead of receiving one, and it meant a voting Representative in Congress: section 3 of the admission act gave the new state one seat in the U.S. House until the next general census, in place of the non-voting delegate a territory sent.
The threat of being carved up
Statehood also settled a question of survival. Until a congressional committee decided on 29 February 1888 to keep Idaho whole rather than divide it among its neighbours — Nevada and Washington chiefly — an early constitutional convention looked unlikely, and Nevada’s designs on southern Idaho went on threatening admission until after the 1888 national election.
What the state stood to gain
The admission act carried the material terms. Sections 16 and 36 of every township went to the state for common schools, fifty sections for public buildings at the capital, and specific grants followed for a scientific school, normal schools, the state university at Moscow and the penitentiary at Boise City. Congress also appropriated $28,000 to cover the convention and its elections, which the territorial legislature had refused to fund.
The contested parts
The record does not present this as unanimous. Delegates were not chosen by ordinary elections: in ten counties party committees picked them, in six more county conventions did, and only Owyhee and Custer held a popular vote. Ratification on 5 November 1889 passed by 12,398 to 1,773, but the Historical Society states that Mormons were not allowed to vote and that the constitution was written to keep them from voting in future, adding that they would have opposed it had they been consulted, and that it would have been approved even if they had voted.