Couer D'Alene, Idaho

There are several stories as to how Couer d'Alene got its name but in the beginning, all of them involve French-Canadian fur traders. This area was also explored extensively by David Thompson of the Northwest Company after 1806. The wealth, imagined and real, of the area led to the Oregon boundary dispute between Britain and America. That problem was solved by the Oregon Treaty in 1846 that ceded all lands below the 49th Parallel to the U.S.

Like the rest of Idaho, miners started to flood in in the 1860's, causing problems with the local Native American tribes. After the Civil War ended, the US Army came in and tried to keep a lid on things. General William Tecumseh Sherman had a fort built on the shores of Lake Couer d'Alene and named it Fort Couer d'Alene (hopefully in honor of the Couer d'Alene Indians, so named by the French-Canadians out of respect for their tough trading practices).

The Couer d'Alene district had quite a few mining disputes, including one that led to the assassination of a former governor of Idaho. The nearby town of Harrison was supposed to be the county seat but a large fire in 1917 burned out a lot of the swiftly growing lumber town. The big sawmills moved to Couer d'Alene and that town grew to be the county seat and the city it is today.

These days, the lumber industry is still big in Couer d'Alene but tourism and recreation have become big players, too.