Missoula County Courthouse—Circa 1885

A valuable resource for teaching Missoula History.

Linked here is Chapter 28: Missoula County – an excerpt from M. A. Leeson’s History of Montana published in 1885. The preface to this book states the following:

Many of Montana’s pioneers are in the homes of the silent, and the number remaining who can give all the details of the earliest settlement is not large. Fortunately their recollection is now preserved. A few more years, and the whole unwritten history of the Territory should remain unwritten – lost forever. Another few years, and the brilliant story of progress would have to be based on fragmentary relations – disconnected, unsatisfactory, aggravating. Local history comes forward to rescue ten thousand facts and names from oblivion, and place them where the historian of the future may grasp the whole Union and give to each of its parts a complete sketch.

There exists probably no other document that examines Missoula County’s early history as thoroughly as this does. Since it was written only a few short years after the founding of the county in 1860, many of these pioneers were still alive and could be interviewed. Their stories are priceless.

Read on and you will meet the prominent ones such as Higgins, Worden, and Woody. You will also meet those lesser known, such as Ah Yung who was hanged in the Missoula jail yard in 1883, and who “maintained his innocence” to the last. Or meet Mrs. J. Brown who, in 1854, may have been the “first white woman who honored our Territory with her presence.”

Accompanying the stories are numerous drawings that visually present many of the people and places that could not have been preserved otherwise. They too are priceless..