For all the fanfare that would soon come, his arrival was a quiet one.

Like many small-town newspapers across the country, visitors or new residents were often mentioned in a column.

“Walter Johnson of Los Angeles was among city arrivals yesterday,” the Weiser Signal read in its May 19, 1906 edition.

A little more than a year later, Johnson left a legend—the likes of which the town on the Idaho-Oregon border has not seen since—and Weiser still carries reminders of the launch of a Hall of Famer.

Johnson is regarded to this day as one of baseball’s greatest pitchers, still No. 1 in history in shutouts, No. 2 in wins, and the holder of the career strikeout record for 64 years.

Though he was born in Kansas and raised in Southern California, he got his start in the still-wild West in a long-gone league that boasted intense rivalries and some unique characters.

Pitching for the Weiser “Kids” in the Southern Idaho League/Idaho State League, Johnson’s opponents included the Payette Melon Chewers, Boise Senators, Nampa Sugar Beeters, Caldwell Countyseaters, Emmett Prune Pickers, and Mountain Home Dudes.

Still 18 when he arrived in Weiser, Johnson worked for the Bell Telephone Company while playing for the town baseball team—a high school teammate had arranged it all.

“A big-hearted, hard-fisted town,” Johnson once said of Weiser, adding that, “It was wild country in those days. Whenever I go to the movies and see a picture showing so-called ‘hard-boiled westerners,’ I just think of Idaho back in 1906 and wish some of those Hollywood directors had been with me up there.”

The town was baseball-mad, and the fever grew with Johnson’s six-foot-one, 200-pound frame fireballing strikes past outclassed hitters. Two days after arriving, he gave up just four hits in a 17-1 win against Boise. A week later, he gave up one hit and struck out 12 in a 12-0 win over Payette.

But despite the incredible start, he wasn’t the only star—his catcher was, too. A 53-year-old, 250-pound Weiser resident named Corenlius Uhl, incredibly nicknamed “Foxy Grandpa.” Uhl was credited not just as a strong hitter, but as a guiding force for the talented pitcher who could have been, well, his grandson.

Weiser’s roster also included the sheriff and deputy sheriff, who were both arrested after a fight against Caldwell that year. A band would play as Johnson would wind up, trying to distract him, and a local hotel owner yelled that Weiser was full of “toughs, hoodlums, and prize fighters.”

Becoming a local celebrity, Johnson’s 1907 was even better than his semi-pro debut. That season, which proved to be his last before going onto the majors, he averaged nearly 14 strikeouts per game, gave up less than a run per game, and had an incredible 77-inning shutout streak.

Johnson even became a bit of a hired gun, pitching for Nampa in a game against Mountain Home, which included a $1,000 purse and big wins for those wagering on Johnson’s team. 

“In all the World Series games I have pitched, I never saw more enthusiasm than on that Monday afternoon,” he later said.

Many people, Johnson said, came up to him after games claiming to have a connection with a major league team back east, but nothing materialized. He wasn’t even sure if he was ready. On June 17, 1907, a telegram arrived asking him to join the Washington Senators, one of the 16 major league teams. He declined, wanting to finish the season with Weiser.

“… this boy throws so fast you can’t see ’em … and he knows where he is throwing the ball, because if he didn’t, there would be dead bodies strewn all over Idaho,” said a telegram that had allegedly been sent to the team’s manager.

Two weeks later, after a visit from Washington’s injured catcher Cliff Blankenship, Johnson agreed to come. But he kept his word and threw a few more times for Weiser, including a July 4 game that drew 5,000 in Boise and back-to-back shutouts in Mountain Home in his final games.

On July 22, a large crowd gathered to see Johnson off to Washington. He made his debut 11 days later, the first of 666 starts in a career that ended in 1927. In 1936, he was one of the first five inductees into the inaugural Baseball Hall of Fame class. Johnson died of a brain tumor on December 10, 1946.

The train station where he was given a grand sendoff still stands, as do a handful of other buildings he frequented as a resident. The local preservation committee recently met to determine if a still-standing house in town was the one in which he lived. The baseball field at Memorial Park is named Walter Johnson Field, used by the Weiser High School team, and the road on the hill above is Walter Johnson Drive. In 2016, a postcard featuring Johnson in his Weiser uniform mailed in 1907 sold for $12,000 at auction.

There is one more connection to the area with a Johnson twist. In his final six seasons, he had a teammate, a solid-hitting third baseman named Ossie Bluege. It’s unknown if they talked much about Idaho’s Snake River Valley, but in 1954, Bluege paid a visit about 15 miles south of Weiser to the town of Payette.

Bluege was then Washington’s minor league director. The team’s owner was told by an actual senator, Idaho’s Herman Welker—a Weiser High graduate—about a burly 17-year-old crushing home runs for Payette High. Bluege signed the kid, who made his major league debut six days before he turned 18. That kid? Harmon Killebrew, who wound up with 573 career home runs and induction in the Hall of Fame 30 years later.

Two legends who both went straight from small-town Idaho to the big leagues.