This valley was discovered in 1822 by an expedition of Hudson's Bay Company trappers led by Michel Bourdon. Bourdon had come to the Northwest with David Thompson, who had started the Idaho fur trade in 1808-9. Trappers searched everwhere for...
The Black Canyon Dam was constructed on the Payette in 1924 not as a storage facility, but to divert water into the Emmett and Black Canyon Canals, which vastly increased the irrigated acreage in Gem County and the Emmett Valley. This photograph...