"The mines on Salmon river have become a fixed fact, and are equalled in richness by few recorded discoveries. Seeing the utter impossibility of preventing miners from going to the mines, I have refrained from taking any steps which, by certain want of success, would tend to weaken the force of the law. At the same time I as carefully avoided giving any consent to unauthorized statements, and verbally instructed the agent in charge that, while he might not be able to enforce the laws for want of means, he must give no consent to any attempt to lay out a town at the juncture of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, as he had expressed a desire of doing." Continued developments proved that Lewiston was in the centre of a region of unusual mineral wealth. The Clearwater finds were followed closely by discoveries on the Salmon River, another tributary of the Snake, a little farther south. The Boisé mines came on the heels of this boom, being followed by a rush to the Owyhee district, south of the great bend of the Snake. Into these various camps poured the usual flood of miners from the whole West. Before 1862 was over eastern Washington had outgrown the bounds of the territorial government on Puget Sound. Like the Pike's Peak diggings, and the placers of the Colorado Valley, and the Carson and Virginia City camps, these called for and received a new territorial establishment. In 1860 the territories of Washington and Nebraska had met along a common boundary at the top of the Rocky Mountains. Before Washington was divided in 1863, Nebraska had changed its shape under the pressure of a small but active population north of its seat of government. The centres of population in Nebraska north of the Platte River represented chiefly overflows from Iowa and Minnesota. Emigrating from these states farmers had by 1860 opened the country on the left bank of the Missouri, in the region of the Yankton Sioux. The Missouri traffic had developed both shores of the river past Fort Pierre and Fort Union to Fort Benton, by 1859. To meet the needs of the scattered people here Nebraska had been partitioned in 1861 along the line of the Missouri and the forty-third parallel. Dakota had been created out of the country thus cut loose and in two years more shared in the fate of eastern Washington. Idaho was established in 1863 to provide home rule for the miners of the new mineral region. It included a great rectangle, on both sides of the Rockies, reaching south to Utah and Nebraska, west to its present western boundary at Oregon and 117°, east to 104°, the present eastern line of Montana and Wyoming. Dakota and Washington were cut down for its sake.