It is a pleasure to make grateful acknowledgment here of the valuable and ready help so courteously given in the compilation of this history by the heads of the various United States departments at Washington, the officials of the Oregon Short Line, the city and county officers and the many private persons whose personal knowledge or study of the early days of Bannock county made their assistance indispensable. The list is too long to reproduce, but in most instances the authority has been cited in the text, although in several cases names have been omitted at personal request. Of course, what we call Bannock county today has existed since the time of Adam. And so--not to begin in the middle of the story--the first chapter is devoted to a rapid sketch of the territory comprising Bannock county, before the county was created. THE HISTORY OF BANNOCK COUNTY CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARY HISTORY The territory now comprising Bannock county first entered the pages of history when, in 1662, the French Sieur de la Salle planted his country’s flag in what he called “Louisiana,” after his sovereign, Louis XIV, of France. In order to prevent England from gaining it, and hoping at the same time to win an ally, Louis XV ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762. Napoleon traded it back from Carlos IV of Spain, but later sold it. This was the territory purchased for the United States by Thomas Jefferson in 1803 and for which the country paid $15,000,000. It included the greater part if not all, of the present state of Idaho, and certainly all of Bannock county. The northwestern section of this purchase became known as the Northwest Territory and included all land west of the summit of the Rocky Mountain range, between the forty-ninth and forty-second parallels of latitude. This was later called the Oregon territory, and contained not only the present state of Oregon, but also Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. In 1789, Captains Robert Gray and John Kendricks skirted the coast of this territory and traded for furs with the Indians, and three years later Captain Gray discovered the Columbia river, up which he sailed several miles. The Lewis and Clark expedition, which left St. Louis in May, 1804, headed by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, gave such encouraging accounts of the resources of the Northwest Territory that many of the more adventurous people in the states were induced to undertake settling it. For a time Spain, Russia and Great Britain, as well as the United States, claimed the northwest, there being some dispute between the latter two countries as to the boundary line between Canada and the northern limits of the Louisiana purchase.