Established February 28, 1917, with its county seat at Payette. Payette was originally settled as a railroad camp in the 1860s and called Boomerang for the log boom on the Payette River. The site, and the community which grew around it, was later named in honor of the area's first white settler, Francois Payette, a Canadian fur trapper and explorer with the North West Company who arrived in 1818.