How Pocatello earned the score

Pocatello grew up as a place you pass through, and old habits are hard to break.

Most beloved small towns start their tourism story with a collapse, a closed mill or a vanished railroad that forced a reinvention. Pocatello’s problem is the opposite. The trains never really left, and the town never had to ask itself the hard question of why a stranger would choose to stop here. For most of its life it has been a junction, a place defined by what passes through it.

The geography wrote the script early. A few miles northeast of the modern city, the Boston ice merchant Nathaniel Wyeth built Fort Hall in 1834, a fur-trading post that soon became one of the most important resupply stops on the Oregon and California trails. Tens of thousands of overland emigrants rolled past this spot in the 1840s and 1850s. Then the rails arrived, and the wagon ruts gave way to a switching yard. Pocatello was founded in 1889 and earned the nickname the Gate City for being the gateway to Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. The Union Pacific repair shops here grew into the largest between Omaha and Portland, and for decades the town’s entire economy ran on the railroad and the freight it serviced.

That railroad money built something that still pays dividends. Between 1892 and 1946, the downtown filled with handsome brick and stone commercial blocks, and that streetscape survived. Pocatello’s historic downtown district covers all or part of fourteen city blocks and is one of the best-preserved old-town fabrics in Idaho. The bones of a great visitor destination are already standing. What the Gate City has lacked is a reason for the people speeding by on Interstate 15 to pull off and walk those blocks.

The job was never to build an attraction. It was to claim an identity.

Plenty of towns have a pretty Main Street, a nearby university, and a pioneer-trail footnote. None of those, on their own, makes a person reroute a road trip. The strategic task for a place like Pocatello is to find the single ownable idea that no other town in the country can credibly claim, and then to put that idea on everything.

Pocatello’s answer was hiding in a dusty law book, and it is close to perfect. The hook is warm, it is funny, it is family-friendly, and it is impossible to confuse with anywhere else. It even comes with a built-in invitation to the visitor: come be happy here. The challenge, and the reason this story is still unfinished, is that a slogan is not yet an experience. A great brand gets you noticed. It does not, by itself, fill a hotel.

A throwaway joke from a hard winter became a civic identity the city now defends on purpose.

The origin story is the kind of thing a marketing team would kill to invent, except Pocatello got it for free. In 1948, after a brutal winter had soured the mood of city employees and citizens alike, Mayor George Phillips passed a tongue-in-cheek ordinance that made it illegal not to smile in Pocatello. It was a gag, but nobody ever bothered to repeal it, so technically it stayed on the books for decades.

The accidental crowning

In 1987 a city staffer and a reporter for the Idaho State Journal rediscovered the forgotten law and wrote it up. The American Bankers Association, then campaigning to modernize outdated U.S. banking statutes, seized on the story as the perfect example of a silly law still technically in force. On December 10, 1987, association representatives traveled to Pocatello and officially declared it the U.S. Smile Capital. The stunt generated a wave of national and international press, and Pocatello, to its enormous credit, decided to keep the title rather than laugh it off.

Real anchors behind the slogan

The smile gives Pocatello its voice, but the town has substance to back it. In the 1960s, local civic groups rebuilt the long-gone trading post as the Fort Hall Replica in Upper Ross Park, a full-scale wooden stockade that sits beside Zoo Idaho and the Bannock County Historical Museum and lets families walk straight into the Oregon Trail story. A short drive away, Idaho State University, founded in 1901 as the Academy of Idaho, anchors the city with roughly 13,933 students as of fall 2025, a health-sciences reputation, Bengals football in the indoor Holt Arena, and the L.E. and Thelma E. Stephens Performing Arts Center.

Downtown, the civic muscle shows. The city formalized a Downtown Business Improvement District by ordinance in 1991 and stood up a Historic Preservation Commission, and today more than 200 small businesses fill the historic blocks with antiques, bookstores, bakeries, galleries and restaurants. Threading through it all is the Portneuf Greenway, a growing network of riverside walking and biking trails that gives the smile a place to take a stroll.

The name travels further than the visitors do, and that gap is the whole opportunity.

Tourism is now Idaho’s third-largest industry, behind agriculture and technology, and the wider region is not small. In 2023, the seven-county Southeast Idaho region that includes Pocatello generated about $340.2 million in travel spending and supported roughly 4,140 jobs, around four percent of regional employment. As the largest city and the university hub of that region, Pocatello captures a meaningful slice of it through ISU events, conferences, youth sports, and travelers breaking the long drive between Salt Lake City and Yellowstone.

But that is largely pass-through and obligation travel, not destination travel. The U.S. Smile Capital is a brand that, by rights, should be a national curiosity stop on the order of other one-of-one identity towns, and it is not there yet. The slogan lives on the city website and in a once-a-year celebration. It does not yet greet you on the interstate, anchor a photogenic downtown moment, or come with a signature event big enough to put a Pocatello weekend on a stranger’s calendar. The brand is the asset. The conversion is the unfinished work.

Pocatello does not need a new identity. It needs to spend the one it already has.

This is the rare town that has already solved the hardest problem in destination marketing. It has a true, ownable, instantly memorable identity that no competitor can take, and a real bed of anchors, history, a university, a rebuilt fort, a preserved Main Street, to support it. The biggest opportunity is conversion: turning the U.S. Smile Capital from a charming slogan into a year-round, photographable, bookable experience that gives the millions of people driving I-15 a concrete reason to exit. A signature smile landmark people line up to photograph, a marquee Smile festival promoted regionally, and a downtown dressed in the brand every day rather than one week a year would move Pocatello off the pass-through list and onto the destination list. The story is already great. Pocatello just has to let visitors in on it.