Fishing Falls

The village Frémont found belonged to the Newe, the Shoshone, and its people speared salmon here at the highest cascades the fish could climb on this stretch of the Snake. The sign gives the place two names. Fishing Falls is what it was for; Kanaka Rapids, the name on maps now, borrows the Hawaiian word for a person, which the fur trade used for the Hawaiian men who worked for the Hudson's Bay Company across the Northwest. The rapids lie north of Buhl, about river mile 592.

What the plaque says

Fishing Falls When John C. Fremont came this way mapping emigrant roads in 1843, he found an important Indian village at Fishing Falls (Kanaka Rapids) about 4 miles above here. He reported that native salmon spearers there were "unusually gay... fond of laughter; and in their apparent good nature and merry character. ...entirely different from the Indians we had been accustomed to see." As Snake River's highest salmon cascades, Fishing Falls was included on many early western maps. 330 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Box Canyon Springs — 2.0 mi
  The eleventh-largest spring in the United States, pouring from the head of a dead-end canyon with water that sank into the lava far to the northeast.
• Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument — 7.3 mi
  Idaho's state fossil is closer to a zebra than a horse, and nearly the whole herd is in a museum in Washington.
• Perrine Bridge — 22 mi
  Four hundred and eighty-six feet of air between deck and river, and the one span in the country you may jump from without asking.
• Shoshone Falls — 24 mi
  Higher than Niagara, and turned up and down on a schedule. What reaches the rim is whatever the canals leave.

More markers nearby

• Payne's Ferry — steps away
• Thousand Springs — 3.2 mi
• Salmon Falls — 3.2 mi
• Fossil Beds — 13 mi