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The first known residents of the Valley and Adams County areas were the Shoshone Indians and Nez Perce Indians, both of whom traveled to the area to catch wild salmon and steelhead, harvest wild plants and roots and hunt big-game animals. A mountain band of the Shoshone, known as the “Sheepeaters” — named so for hunting bighorn sheep — were residents of the present-day wilderness areas to the east of Long Valley.
In the 1820s, during the beaver trade era, fur-trappers worked the streams and rivers with great success. One of the trappers was Francois Payette, a French-Canadian frontiersman who put his name on the Payette River in early Hudson’s Bay maps. The name stuck, and the colorful trapper’s name was applied to Payette Lake, the Payette National Forest and the city of Payette. After the furtrapper era came to a close in the late 1830s, Payette became the master of Fort Boise, located at the mouth of the Boise near present- day Parma. As Oregon Trail emigrants passed through, Payette fed them fresh duck, salmon, sturgeon and dairy products – better food than they’d consumed in months.
After gold was discovered in central Idaho in the 1860s, miners were the first white people to move into the area in significant numbers. They settled remote towns like Florence, Warren, Stibnite and Thunder City, near present-day Cascade. In the 1880s, the railroads were punched into the Rocky Mountain West, and more settlers followed. This was about the time when the first permanent settlers moved to Valley County and the McCall area.
Following the mining era, logging, ranching and farming were the important industries that put the area on the map. Logs were cut in the forest and sent down the Payette River in the early days, until a railroad line was completed in 1913 from McCall to the city of Payette by the Snake River. Roseberry, the site of the Valley County Museum, east of Lake Fork, was one of the largest early towns. Many of the residents were Finns who had moved there from Missouri. They were good workers and built many of the early homes in the area.
Ranching, farming and logging continue to be important industries in the area. Tourism and recreation have taken on increased importance as the sawmills closed in McCall and Cascade, and new four-season resorts and resort communities sprung up in the region.
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