Salmon Falls

The cascade the sign describes is half gone. Salmon Falls is a series of drops on the Snake, with an upper and a lower fall about five miles apart, and in 1910 the Greater Shoshone and Twin Falls Water Power Company built a dam across the lower falls that drowned half of them. Idaho Power bought the plant in 1916 and rebuilt it in 1949. The fishery the sign records, Shoshone families drying a year's salmon each summer, ended when dams downstream closed the river to the runs.

What the plaque says

Salmon Falls In 1812, Joseph Miller found 100 lodges of Indians spearing thousands of salmon each afternoon at a cascade below here. Each summer they dried a year's supply. After 1842, they also traded salmon to Oregon Trail emigrants. John C. Fremont marveled at Salmon Falls 18-foot vertical drop, adjacent to "a sheet of foaming water... divided and broken into cateracts" by islands that "give it much picturesque beauty, and make it one of those places that the traveler turns again and again to fix in his memory." 204 Text prepared by the Idaho Historical Society Marker made & installed by Idaho Transportation Department

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Box Canyon Springs — 3.1 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 — 6.0 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 — 23 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 — 25 mi
  Higher than Niagara, and turned up and down on a schedule. What reaches the rim is whatever the canals leave.

More markers nearby

• Thousand Springs — steps away
• Fishing Falls — 3.2 mi
• Payne's Ferry — 3.3 mi
• Fossil Beds — 10 mi