Back in 1984 I spent a day traveling across Idaho with a group of people from New York and Pennsylvania. I was a newspaper reporter at the time, and they were telephone workers assigned by their company to handle communication duties for the caravan of vehicles traveling with the Olympic torch to Los Angeles for the summer games. It was the first time that any of them had been to Idaho or even west of the Mississippi River. I was interested in the comments they made about the state. One person said he felt as if he were in a cowboy movie all the time. One said he had noticed that lightning here goes straight down from the cloud to the ground. He said in upstate New York, lightning travels more horizontally. To this day, I’ve never heard another person say that, but that was his observation. Another said he believed the west was truly “God’s country”. He said he loved the wide-open spaces and the desert and big sky, and that he’d grown up in a boring place covered with forests and lakes. I remember thinking, “To each his own”.
I wasn’t surprised when all of them acknowledged they really didn’t know a thing about Idaho before making the trip. But I was surprised when none of them seemed to have ever heard of Boise. But they had all heard of Pocatello. They weren’t sure why, but they agreed with my suggestion that they might know it from the song “I’ve Been Everywhere”, which was a number-one country hit for Canadian Hank Snow in 1962. It’s a song that’s been covered a lot of times, and most of it is just a long list of places in North America. It was actually written by an artist named Geoff Mack in 1959 and originally contained only the names of places in Australia. In the North American version, Pocatello is mentioned in the first verse, Idaho in the third verse and Rexburg in the fourth verse.
One of the workers asked me if I could tell him what the word Pocatello means. I said no, unless it meant to jab your finger into something called a “tello”. I told him I had studied Idaho History in fourth grade, but I didn’t remember ever learning the meaning of Pocatello. I told him Boise meant trees, Coeur d’Alene meant heart of a lion, and that Twin Falls was literal and Mountain Home was probably ironic. But I couldn’t help him with Pocatello. And since there was no public Internet in 1984 where we could look up everything, we both simply added the question to the very, very long list entitled “stuff I don’t know”.
31 years later, I now know that Pocatello was named for Chief Pocatello of the Shoshoni, in honor of the fact that he gave Union Pacific permission to build a railroad right through the Fort Hall Indian Reservation. Interestingly, although Pocatello was the chief’s given name, he never used it. The chief preferred to be called “Tondza-osha”, which in Shoshoni means buffalo robe. The chief’s daughter even said during an interview later in life that she didn’t believe the word Pocatello meant anything at all. I did a search of the Internet, and the only definition I found for Pocatello said “a university town in southeastern Idaho”. That part we knew, and Idaho State University, which is located in Pocatello, is the opponent in tonight’s game against Boise State.
I’ve been to Pocatello at least a half-dozen times in my life, once for a concert, twice for sports and three times for different state conventions. But I didn’t know this: in Pocatello, it’s against the law not to be smiling. In 1948, Mayor George Phillips noticed that city workers and citizens on the street were very down after a harsh winter. So he drafted an ordinance making it illegal in Pocatello not to smile. It was sort of meant as a joke, but the city council passed it, and to this day the ordinance has never been repealed. In honor of that ordinance, the city calls itself the “smile capital of America”, and every year they hold an event called “Smile Days”. There’s a best smile contest, and non-smilers are actually arrested, but only for charity.
Of course I don’t know the outcome of tonight’s game yet, and I don’t know how much the ISU Bengals normally smile, but unless things go horribly wrong on this end, there’s no reason the team should be smiling when they leave Boise, unless they’re just happy that it’s over.
