Benewah, Idaho — Community Inside the County With the Same Name

Benewah is a small rural locality inside Benewah County, which creates the sort of naming problem maps tolerate considerably better than humans do.

The shared name reaches into the region's Indigenous history. Benewah County lies within the homeland of the Coeur d'Alene people, and the name entered non-Native maps and government records through that much older cultural geography.

Later settlement added timber, agriculture and transportation to the landscape, while St. Maries became the county's governmental and commercial center.

The locality of Benewah stayed small.

So “Benewah” can mean two very different scales at once: an entire Idaho county stretching across reservation, prairie and timber country, or one particular community inside it. Context has to do the rest.