The first printing in Idaho--in fact, in the entire Pacific
Northwest--was done in 1839 at the Lapwai mission station, by the
Clearwater River, in what is now Nez Perce County. The printer was
Edwin Oscar Hall, originally of New York, who on orders of the
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions brought to this
wilderness site the same small press he had taken to the Hawaiian
Islands in 1835.[103]
Henry Harmon Spalding (1804-74), the missionary who had requested
this press, was the author of its first issue in Idaho, an eight-page
primer of the native language with an English title: _Nez-Perces
First Book: Designed for Children and New Beginners_. In May 1839
Hall printed 400 copies, of which no complete examples are known
to survive. An alphabet of Roman letters that Spalding utilized to
convey the Indian language proved to be impractical, and in August
the original edition was replaced by a revised 20-page edition of 500
copies with the same title.
The Library of Congress acquired this edition, then thought to be
the first Idaho book, in 1911. A few years later the bibliographer
Wilberforce Eames discovered pages of the earlier edition used as
reinforcements in the paper covers of the later one,[104] and on
February 18, 1922, another interested bibliographer, Howard M. Ballou,
wrote to the Librarian of Congress:
I have had your copy at the Library of Congress examined by
a friend who reports that she can distinguish that pages 5
and 6 are pasted in the front cover.
If you will have the covers of the Nez Perces First Book
soaked apart you will find you possess four pages of this
original Oregon book.
(By Oregon, of course, he meant the Oregon country at large rather
than the present State.) The Library did soak apart the covers and
found that it had two copies of the original leaf paged 5 and 6. One
of them, released for exchange in October 1948, subsequently joined
two other original leaves to form an almost complete copy in the Coe
Collection at Yale University.[105]
[Illustration: _A page from the original edition of the_ Nez Perces
First Book.]
The Library made its fortunate acquisition with a bid of $7.50 at a
Philadelphia auction sale conducted by Stan V. Henkels on May 23-24,
1911. The item[106] was among a group of books from the library of
Horatio E. Hale (1817-96), who served as philologist with the famed
Wilkes Expedition of 1838-42. He probably obtained his copy about
1841, the year the expedition reached Oregon.
[Footnote 103: See Roby Wentz, _Eleven Western Presses_ (Los Angeles,
1956), p. 23-26.]
[Footnote 104: See _The Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society_,
vol. 23, 1922, p. 45-46.]
[Footnote 105: See no. 73 (note) in Thomas W. Streeter's
_Americana--Beginnings_ (Morristown, N.J., 1952).]
[Footnote 106: No. 588 in the sale catalog.]