JANUARY 2025 Ghost Towns and History of Montana Newsletter From The Harlem News, Dec. 27, 1935 Bannack– Part 3 The events leading to the creation of Montana as a territory are carefully recounted in “Montana: A History of Two Centuries” by Michael P. Malone, Richard R. Roeder and William L. Lang. They write: Sunlight illuminates a cabin in Bannack. (Photo by Rick and Susie Graetz) Accessed via: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ Idaho Territory was a geographic impossibility. The massive ranges of the Rocky Mountains divided the territory in half, and 1,000 miles separated Lewiston in the west from the far eastern extremities. Even in 1863, Idaho's population was shifting rapidly eastward across the Continental Divide to the mining camps on the upper Missouri. With good reason: the Bannack-Virginia City miners believed that Lewiston – hundreds of miles away over endless, snow-clogged mountain passes – could never govern them properly. Miners began agitating for the creation of a new territory to be split from Idaho along the crests of the Rockies. Fortunately for their cause, Judge Sidney Edgerton, the newly appointed chief justice of Idaho, arrived at Bannack in September 1863. Edgerton, a former Ohio congressman, was unable to proceed to Lewiston because of the approach of winter. He soon learned that the governor of Idaho had snubbed him by assigning him to the faraway judicial district lying east of the divide. Both Edgerton and his nephew, Wilbur Fisk Sanders, took up the settlers’ crusade to divide Idaho Territory. Edgerton personally knew the president and many congressmen, so the miners chose to send him to Washington, D.C., to press their case. Carrying $2,000 in gold, Edgerton
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