24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Kooskia, ID

Kooskia is a city in Idaho County, Idaho, at the confluence of the South and Middle forks of the Clearwater River, with a population of 514 at the 2020 census, down from 607 in 2010.

The town's name is likely a contraction of the Nez Perce word "koos-koos-kia," a diminutive referring to the Clearwater River, the lesser of the two large rivers nearby, the other being the Snake.

The town was first named Stuart, after James Stuart, a Nez Perce surveyor and merchant, but the railroad, arriving in 1899, named its station Kooskia because another station named Stuart already existed in the state, and the town was formally renamed in 1909.

Kooskia lies within the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, which the federal government opened for white settlement in November 1895 under a proclamation signed by President Cleveland.

Chief Looking Glass lived in a village a short distance above present-day Kooskia, and a militia attack on that village just before the Nez Perce War led him to join the war.

Starting in 1903, Kooskia was the terminus of an aerial tramway from the elevated Camas Prairie that carried up to 190,000 pounds of grain per day in 30 buckets, and the tramway was discontinued in 1939 after the Camas Prairie Railroad reached Grangeville in 1909.

During the final two years of World War II, the Kooskia Internment Camp, about 30 miles northeast of town, housed interned Japanese men, most of them longtime United States residents but not citizens, and it was so remote in the western Bitterroot Mountains that fences and guard towers were unnecessary; the site is now an archaeological project near Lowell on U.S. Route 12.

The Kooskia National Fish Hatchery was established in the 1960s about 1.5 miles southeast of the city on the east bank of Clear Creek.

In the 2010 census, Kooskia had 272 households.

Kooskia sits at an elevation of 1,627 feet in the Pacific Time Zone, is served by U.S. Route 12 toward Lewiston and Missoula and State Highway 13 toward Grangeville, and its ZIP code is 83539.