Excerpt from Contributions to the Historical Society of Montana, Vol. 2: With Its Transactions, Act of Incorporation, Constitution, Ordinances It is apparent that public intertst in the events of our early history has with the increasing prosperity of the country been greatly aug mented. The organization Of the Society of Pioneers and the reminis cences of the early times which with increasing frequency appear in our newspapers, demonstrate the increasing solicitude of our people to know of this conquest of Montana from savage life to the humanities and amenities Of our present civilization. We cannot attribute the increase of this thirst for local episode solely to the greater prosperity of the country. Interest in the signal events of a people always increases as they recede. The flight of the years corrects the perspective, sets each circumstance in orderly array and relieves it of that prosaic quality which familiarity breeds. The actors in those early days did not them selves appreciate how vast a result they were achieving. They builded better than they knew. Engaged in a concrete struggle with savage life and rugged nature, their eager competitions led them away from the philosophic. The heroic, the poetic and sentimental aspects of the strife, as such struggles always do. To them it was a contention for farms, for herds, for gold, for office and for the gratification too Often of mean am bitions; but time has crystalized it all into the founding Of a State, the planting of a civilization. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.