The Canyon House stood across the Boise River from this site. Arthur De Wint Foote designed and built it in 1885 with funds from the literary works of his wife, Mary Hallock Foote. As chief engineer for the Idaho Mining and Irrigation Company, Arthur was assigned to oversee the company’s equipment across the river, and while awaiting project funding he moved his family here. He built the house with lava rock walls using his own cement formula. In good weather, a boat carried the family across the river to their horses, and a swing bridge also spanned the river for precarious crossings. Mary Hallock Foote, raised in a Quaker family in New York State, was among the few women of her time able to continue her education. She studied at The Cooper Union School of Advancement for Science and Art in New York City and, as a young artist, created drawings for literary figures including Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Louisa May Alcott. After marrying Arthur D. Foote in 1876, she traveled west with him. Already known nationally for her illustrations, she began writing stories, essays, and novels that portrayed frontier life from a woman’s gentler perspective. She balanced the roles of wife, mother, novelist, illustrator, and interpreter of the American West. Arthur De Wint Foote, from a Connecticut farming family, became a self-educated civil and mining engineer whose work in the American West led to important engineering and entrepreneurial innovations. He moved his family to Idaho in 1884 and devoted himself to the Boise River Irrigation Project, later completed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1909. Beyond developing the irrigation plan for the Treasure Valley, his inventions were widely used in building irrigation systems. In 1909, State Reclamation Engineer D. W. Ross said Foote had long foreseen how water could be diverted and stored and how these lands could be settled by thousands of prosperous families.