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All About Montana
PAGE 8 MONTANA SENIOR NEWS • FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021

Civilizing the West

with Printing Presses

western states to enjoy the fruits of the Coast to the Mountain West. Why did it take
BY AARON PARRETT printing press, as Marcus Whitman and the Mountain West so long to emerge from
Henry Spalding arranged for the delivery the illiterate frontier? For starters, neither
If you were to poll historians of tech- of the first press in 1839 to a mission on Idaho nor Montana have ever been easy
nology, they would all point to the printing Lapwai creek—a machine that came from places to get to—in fact, they are still
press as one of humankind’s most import- Hawaii, of all places. Only California, a difficult to travel to from anywhere else
ant inventions. coastal state, acquired the power of the in the country, as anyone ever stuck with
Some insightful wag once called printing press earlier, in 1831. Montana, by contrast, a layover in the Salt Lake City airport
“the art preservative of all arts,” which was the very last of all the states to get a can tell you.
nicely sums up how important printing is to working printing press—in 1863. Whitman and Spalding contracted with
the production and spread of information, The arrival of the printing press to the the Hudson’s Bay Company to have their
knowledge, and art. Mountain West comes especially late in his- press shipped from Hawaii, across the
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that tory when you consider that by 1539—300 Pacific to the Columbia River, where it trav-
the arrival of the first printing presses in years earlier—a printing house was estab- eled by steamboat to Wallula. At that point,
frontier territory often marked the moment lished in what is now Mexico City. Printing the press and its owners had to travel by
that the region passed into “civilization.” did not begin in any of the territories canoe across eastern Washington to their
By these measures, both Idaho and now called the United States until 1638 mission at Lapwai Creek in Idaho, about
Montana, as western states, were late to when the famous Mrs. Glover founded 30 miles east of where Lewiston lies today.
the game: none of the western states had what became the Harvard press in the The first press in Montana came from
printing presses until the mid-19th century. Massachusetts Bay colony. the opposite direction, the east, traveling
Thanks to some dedicated missionar- That means it took 200 years for the overland from Colorado and arriving in
ies, Idaho was among the very first of the power of printing to spread from the East Virginia City in the late fall of 1863—though

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