Book Description

Excerpt from Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana, Vol. 1: With Its Transactions, Act of Incorporation, Constitution, Ordinances, Officers and Members The Historical Society of Montana was incorporated by an act of the Legislative Assembly, approved February 2, 1865. To it was confided the trust of accumulating information illustrative of the early history of the region of country embraced in what is now the Territory of Montana. The trust seemed, at first, a barren and thankless one. There is not, probably, in the United States a region of equal area about which so little information can be gleaned as that parallelogram along their northern border which contains the springs of the Columbia and the Missouri. In the discharge of the trust thus confided to the Society, it has sought to gather from this barren field such information as books would afford, and to acquire from the adventurers and early pioneers whatever of interest their memories had preserved. The Territory seems to have been just between the two lines of early travel across the continent. To the north, the fur-traders from Montreal, passing through Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, and thence up the Saskatchewan, across the Rocky Mountains, to the Flatbow river, proceeded down the Columbia. At a later day, but early in the present century, adventurous traders from St. Louis and New York, passing up the Platte and through the South Pass, crossed Green river to the Lewis Fork of the Columbia, and passed by Fort Hall down toward Astoria. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.