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FEBRUARY / MARCH 2021 • MONTANA SENIOR NEWS ALL ABOUT mONTANA PAGE 9
the earliest printed artifacts it produced are them unwieldy and hard to transport easily.
dated from 1864. (The first printing press in Montana was
Another press, under the direction of such a press, a Lowes model dating from
Francis Thompson, came up around the the 1850s).
same time, having traveled by steamboat A more substantial foot-operated treadle
up the Missouri as far as Cow Island where press capable of turning out a small news-
the boat ran aground. paper could weigh even more, from a few
Thompson described the struggle to bring hundred pounds to more than a ton.
the press from the Missouri a hundred miles Many of the earlier territorial newspaper
northeast of Helena across land all the way presses, however, were standing “hand
to Bannack, a trip that took more than three presses,” almost identical to the sort of
weeks and involved all but impassable roads. machine Benjamin Franklin used in his
At one point, Thompson had to lever out Philadelphia shop a century earlier, though
a wagon mired in mud using a 20-foot pole his would have been made of wood.
he fashioned from a nearby tree. Hand presses were massive iron
The whole tale is recounted in a mem- machines, weighing in around a ton. They
oir he wrote just before his death in 1910, were developed in the 1820s and involved a
called Tenderfoot in Montana: Reminiscences long lever that the pressman pulled across
of The Gold Rush, The Vigilantes, and the his chest to push a flat iron plate down on
Birth of Montana Territory, which was pub- top of the type, over which the newsprint
lished in 2004 by the Montana Historical was laid, one sheet at a time.
Society Press. It was nearly impossible to transport a
To compound the challenges large platen press or a hand press across
of hard traveling over land without breaking it into pieces. Even
rugged terrain, printing then, most of the pieces would be too bulky
presses in the 19th cen- and heavy to pack by horse or mule, which
tury were nothing like meant using a wagon. Wagons limited travel
the desktop laser printers to established roads for the most part, and
we all have sitting next to passable roads were few and far between in
our computers today. Idaho and Montana, even into in the 1850s
Even the simplest “cone” and 60s. mSN
presses, designed mainly for
printing field documents in
military encampments, weighed Left: an early handpress used in the West from the
1830s to 1870s. The first printing press in Montana
a couple hundred pounds. Their came over land from Colorado, arriving in Virginia
bulky, cast-iron design also made City in the late fall of 1863. © Arogant, Bigstock.com.
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