Payne's Ferry

The ferry the sign describes changed hands and names. According to the Idaho Transportation Department's history of Snake River ferries, three men from Boise built one near the mouth of Salmon Falls Creek in the summer of 1863, and Payne soon bought out a partner and ran it. A man named Lewis later bought the ferry and ran it until his death in 1896, so it appears in some records as the Lewis Ferry. In the twentieth century the Uhrlaub brothers ran the Riverside Ferry just upstream.

What the plaque says

Payne's Ferry A scow powered by oarsmen let Oregon Trail wagons cross Snake River here from 1852 to 1870. Then Overland Stage service from Boise to a rail terminal in Kelton, Utah was moved to this crossing, and M. E. Payne installed a large (14 by 60 foot) new cable ferry that used river current for power. After stage service was shifted to a more direct route at Glenn's Ferry in 1879, this boat handled mostly local traffic until 1910, when it broke away and sank 3 miles below here. 206 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

• Fishing Falls — steps away
• Thousand Springs — 3.2 mi
• Salmon Falls — 3.3 mi
• Fossil Beds — 13 mi