By the time Euroamericans started keeping historical accounts of the aboriginal ways of life they were displacing, those lifestyles had been adapting to the stresses placed on them by populations to the east for decades.  For millennia, a very low population density and a nomadic lifestyle had allowed the Northern Shoshone and Bannock of the Snake River Plain to exist in relative harmony with neighboring Basin and Plateau cultures.  The Great Plains cultures to the east posed periodic threats as Blackfeet and (less commonly) Crow bands came west of the Rockies to steal horses.  But the more significant threat came when, sometime around 1750, the Blackfeet acquired firearms from the Europeans.  When Lewis and Clark arrived in the Lemhi Valley in 1805, the Shoshone of that area had already been driven back from their earlier expansion into the northern Great Plains by a combination of mounted, well-armed Blackfeet, and the ravages of smallpox (Murphy and Murphy 1960:295), in other words, by the ripple effects that preceded Euroamerican expansion.  By the time Lewis and Clark reached them, the Northern Shoshone had possessed horses for over a century, but they had ceased making forays into the northern Great Plains for bison except when joined by Flathead, Bannock and other Shoshone to increase their own defenses.  The bison they had hunted even on the Snake River Plain were infrequently pursued anymore for fear of raiding, well-armed Blackfeet (Lewis and Clark in Steward 1938:192).  Although bison were still numerous on the Snake River Plain in 1834 when Nathaniel Wyeth built the original Fort Hal, they began to decline soon after that, hastened by the increasing numbers of Euroamerican trappers and explorers entering and exploiting the lands west of the Rockies.  Wyeth noted in a letter to Schoolcraft, “Near Fort Hall, in 1834, there were plenty of buffalo, but soon after the Fort was established they disappeared from its neighborhood.  The beaver disappeared next” (Schoolcraft 1851:217).

With the opening of the American Frontier came forces that would utterly disrupt the human ecology that had been developing along the Snake River Plain for thousands of years.  The fur trade began in about 1810.  By 1840 it had essentially come to an end, but the intervening years had seen a steady decline in game (including small mammals and birds) traditionally hunted by native human populations (Steward 1938).  The Oregon Trail was well established by the 1840’s, enabling the passage through southern Idaho of an estimated 240,000 emigrants and their 1.5 million grazing animals by the year 1857 (Madsen 1980).  Native plant communities suffered massive overgrazing and trampling as a result, further depleting the resources on which Northern  Shoshones, Bannocks and their livestock traditionally depended.  By 1868, treaties had been signed forcing the native populations onto the reservation at Fort Hall;  for a time, a reservation in the Lemhi Valley was established, but that group too was moved to Fort Hall, in 1907.  By the 1870’s, miners had entered the Salmon River country, providing the impetus for farmers, ranchers, and others to follow.  And even though treaty provisions allowed for seasonal subsistence rights to traditional resource areas, such as the Camas Prairie, “native plants had been so reduced by cattle grazing and native animals by hunting that complete reliance on them was no longer possible” (Steward 1938:249).   

The eastern Snake River plain contained enough resources, if one knew where to find them, to allow passage across it, and it offered seasonal usage of some choice areas (e.g. the Sinks and the buttes).  Prehistoric and early historic humans were attracted to it for a wide variety of reasons ranging from bison to obsidian.  In contrast, the first Europeans were largely repelled by what appeared to their agriculture-accustomed eyes to be a wasteland:  “[These lands] are unfeasible for any kind of cultivation . . . from the extreme coldness of the nights . . . superadded to extreme dryness and poverty of soil” (Wyeth in Schoolcraft 1847:210).  Or, they were simply in search of something besides what the desert had to offer.  Trappers and fur traders were some of the first to make their way across the Plain, probably following trails blazed and long-used by the Shoshone and Bannock.  (approximate routes of trappers and explorers across the INEEL) Their routes cut directly across the INEEL, sticking close to sources of water wherever possible.  Emigrants employed the part-Indian Tim Goodale and other guides to usher them across the Plain on an offshoot of the Oregon Trail that came to be known as Goodale’s Cutoff (wagon, stage and emigrant roads at INEEL).  The only travelers that settled prior to the 1860’s were Mormon farmers sent by Brigham Young to colonize the region.  In 1855, they were digging irrigation canals and successfully homesteading to the northeast of the INEEL (Clements n.d.).  Meanwhile, stockmen made mad dashes across the Plain and wrote about their desert crossings in nightmarish terms:

Few of us will forget the torture of those two days and nights from Lost River to Blackfoot.  It was through lava-ash and lava-dust country, covered mostly with sagebrush, where the lava was not on the surface to prevent brush from growing.  It was by far the hottest weather we had experienced, and a blistering, dry, scorching wind blew out of the southeast . . . There were a few small depressions where a little brackish rain water had collected, but this was only an aggravation to our suffering animals.  Every steer’s tongue hung out, and there was a hopeless expression in their faces . . .  (Rollinson 1948:96-97). 

Real incentive to attempt settlement on the eastern Snake River Plain came with Federal Legislation.  The Homestead Act of 1862 gave 160 acres to settlers willing to cultivate and reside on their newly acquired property for five consecutive years.  The Desert Claim Act of 1877 provided 640 acres to settlers able to irrigate that land.  In the Carey Act of 1894, Idaho obtained one million acres of Federal land for homesteading, with the proviso that the state would supervise its irrigation.  And in 1902, Idaho received funding through the Reclamation Act to build diversionary canals in an attempt to “reclaim arid lands” (Reed et al. 1987).  Of the hundreds of kilometers of major canals and distribution laterals that were dug within the first three decades of the century, only one system, the Owsley Canal (part of the Mud Lake project) in the INEEL’s northeast corner, was successful, but only partially so.

Among the other attempts at making the desert bloom, the Carey Act’s Powell reclamation project was notable and notorious.  During the first decade of the project, a diversionary dam on the Big Lost River and nearly 160 km of canals and laterals were constructed by Powell Tract settlers to supply water from a proposed reservoir above Mackay¹, in the Lost River Valley, to the proposed village of Powell (also known as Pioneer) in what is now the INEEL’s southwest corner.  The next decade and a half were spent revamping the project until its final demise in 1927.  The canals, the larger of which were “70 feet wide at the top, 40 feet wide at the bottom and 8 feet deep”, never held water (Reed et al. 1987, Schmalz 1963, Arco Advertiser 9/10/1909).  A similar project with the same fate was attempted on the Little Lost River, with portions of canals extending across the INEEL’s northwest boundary (Idaho State Journal 5/15/1989).  The ruins of homesteads along the Big Lost River and foundations near abandoned canals are all that remain of these strenuous efforts to “reclaim” the desert.

During the Second World War, the Navy and the Army Air Corps used several hundred square kilometers of the eastern Snake River Plain as a gunnery range (map).  In 1949, the Federal government coupled these ranges with a large parcel of land withdrawn from the public domain and some purchased private lands to form what was called the National Reactor Testing Station.  Livestock grazing on the newly established “Site” (as it has come to be known by modern residents of the area) was disallowed until drought forced the issue in the 1950’s (Robert Sherwood, Nevada BLM, personal communication, 1994).  Now, domestic grazing is allowed on about 60% of the INEEL, including much of the area north of Highway 33 and elsewhere along the periphery. 

Disruption of natural water flows² and introduction of exotic plant species in those areas most heavily grazed (e.g. the Sinks) has severely degraded their historic plant diversity; for example, some of the wetlands communities that once thrived in the vicinity of the Sinks have been invaded and largely replaced by stands of Russian thistle (Salsola kali) and fanweed (Thlaspi arvense).  In other areas, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is the primary invader and, once established, becomes a perennial problem for both agriculturalists and for those interested in preserving the integrity of the Plain’s most nearly natural habitat.  Otherwise, large portions of natural sagebrush cold desert remain untouched by the surrounding drive for development.  Herds of elk and pronghorn find refuge there, and it is one of the few areas left on the Snake River Plain that has not been wholly plowed under.  In 1974, the Site was given its current name, the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, to emphasize that its mission has changed over the years to include aspects of scientific inquiry besides nuclear research and testing.  Designation of the INEEL as a National Environmental Research Park in 1975 emphasized its importance as a field laboratory for ecological research and for studying the environmental impacts of energy development.  Except for domestic grazing and the ongoing degradation of ground and surface water sources, much of the INEEL is a microcosm of the eastern Snake River Plain that existed up until 150 years ago.  It represents a unique opportunity for long-term scientific inquiry and preservation. 

¹The dam above the present town of Mackay was finally complete in 1919.

²By the 1800's, settlers had begun diverting water from the Lost Rivers and Birch Creek for irrigation.  this lowered water levels in the Sinks, but the more drastic downstream effects of irrigation were not fully realized until sprinkling was instituted.  The first "wheellines" in the Big Lost River Valley north of Arco appeared only within the last 12-15 years (H. Dorst, Mackay resident, personal communication, 1992).  The ability to irrigate more acreage more effectively increased the amount of water taken from the river and from the underlying aquifer as more and more wells were drilled.