Template:Wp-Lewiston, Idaho-History

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The Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) have inhabited the area for thousands of years. The first people of European ancestry to visit the Lewiston area were members of the David Thompson expedition of 1803. Thompson was looking to establish fur trading posts for the Hudson's Bay Company of British North America (now Canada). Thompson established the first white settlement in Idaho, MacKenzie's Post. But it soon failed as the local Nez Perce tribe's men considered beaver trapping to be women's work, the tribe was migratory and apparently women thought they already had enough to do. This was followed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition in October 1805. At the future townsite, they encountered settlements of the native Nez Perce, and they returned to the valley on their eastward trip from the Pacific in the spring of 1806.

The town is believed to have been named after Meriwether Lewis and after Victor Trevitt's hometown of Lewiston, Maine, but people do not know that was the reason Trevitt shouted the idea out. He simply stated the "Journal of Lewis and Clark" talked about being in the valley. The town was founded in 1861, in the wake of a gold rush which began the previous year near Pierce, northeast of Lewiston leading to the Nez Perce War and the removal of Nez Perce. The first newspaper in present-day Idaho, The Golden Age, began publication in the city of Lewiston, Washington Territory in 1862, and was joined by the present (and only) newspaper, the Lewiston Morning Tribune in September 1892. In March 1863 Lewiston became the capital of the newly created Idaho Territory. Thomas J. Beall, one of the first three white settlers in Lewiston, wrote many of the Lewiston Tribunes first articles, and continued to do so until his death at the age of 89.

The city's stint as a seat of the new territory's government was short-lived. As the gold rush quieted in northern Idaho, it heated up in a new mineral rush in southwestern Idaho, centered in Idaho City, which became the largest city in the Northwest in the mid-1860s. A resolution in late 1864 to have the capital moved from Lewiston to Boise was passed by the Idaho Territorial Legislature on December 7, six weeks before the territorial legislature's session legally began, and after litigation, on a split decision decided by one vote on the territorial supreme court on geographic lines.

Boise became the capital in 1866; the move was very unpopular in northern Idaho and in violation of a court order. So, the territorial governor, Caleb Lyon and the territorial secretary, secretly took the territorial seal, archives, and treasury, and fled from Lewiston. Lyon went down river to Portland, Oregon, a trip marked by the alleged theft of the treasury from his steamship cabin. The territorial secretary departed southward for Boise to avoid the public outrage that was sure to erupt.

North Idahoans were somewhat placated in 1889 when the University of Idaho was awarded to nearby Moscow, north, and began instruction in 1892. Lewiston State Normal School, now Lewis-Clark State College, was established in 1893, as was another normal school or teacher education college, now defunct, in the south at Albion. These were the state's first three institutions of higher education. Lewiston was the site of the first public school in Idaho, in 1862. In December 1880, the district was the first to be chartered by the Legislature and thus carries the designation of Lewiston Independent School District #1. (Boise was second, opening school doors in 1865.)