Published in 1934 by Idaho educator and regional historian Annie Laurie Bird, Boise, the Peace Valley is a localized civic history charting the evolution of the Boise River basin from a prominent fur-trade waypoint into the urban and agricultural epicenter of the state. Drawing upon early explorer journals, pioneer diaries, and territorial records, Bird chronicles the expeditions of Wilson Price Hunt, the establishment of the original Hudson's Bay Company Fort Boise, the massive migrations along the Oregon Trail, and the eventual 1862 gold rush that catalyzed permanent American settlement. The narrative leans heavily into the romantic motif of the valley as an idyllic, timbered sanctuary—an essential oasis of respite for weary overland emigrants navigating the punishing, arid expanses of the Snake River Plain. Operating as a classic regional monument, the book is designed to immortalize the pioneer endurance and capitalist enterprise that transformed an untamed geographic resting stop into a prosperous, irrigated metropolis.

A keen insight drawn from the work is how the strategic branding of the region as a "peace valley" functions to fundamentally depoliticize a fiercely contested landscape. By defining the basin primarily as an innate, natural sanctuary destined by geography to nurture and shelter Anglo-American travelers, Bird’s narrative effectively recharacterizes a vital Indigenous homeland—traditionally managed and defended by the Shoshone, Bannock, and Northern Paiute peoples—as a passive, welcoming haven awaiting colonial occupancy. This historiographical maneuver subtly sanitizes the violent realities of the era, notably the 1863 establishment of a United States military fort specifically designed to crush Native resistance and enforce territorial enclosure. By framing the landscape as inherently cooperative to pioneer settlement, the text allows readers to view the subsequent systemic displacement of Indigenous populations not as a hostile military invasion, but as the peaceful, inevitable inheritance of a valley practically begging for American cultivation.