Lewiston Daily Teller Archive

Lewiston, Idaho, originated as a northern mining and trading community along a steamboat route from Portland and was named Idaho's territorial capital in 1863. However, it did not hold that distinction for very long. By 1864, Lewiston began to decline, while the new southern settlement of Boise, located at the junction of the Oregon Trail and key mining routes, began to thrive. In the December 1864 legislative session, Idaho's Governor Caleb Lyon signed a capital relocation bill. In response, the citizens of Lewiston threatened to detain Lyon in Lewiston as well as confiscate the territorial archives and seal. The governor, fearing for his life, abandoned his position, and the archives and state seal were seized and delivered to Boise with armed escort. An 1866 Territorial Supreme Court split decision officially settled the capital question in Boise's favor.

The citizens of Lewiston continued to harbor feelings of ill will towards southern Idaho, and Boise in particular. A newspaper editor and former legislator named Alonzo Leland was a leading voice among the citizens of northern Idaho. Leland had worked to secure the capital for Lewiston in the legislative session of 1863. In 1865, he edited a paper entitled the North Idaho Radiator, which lasted under one year but vehemently supported creating a new territory for northern Idaho and eastern Washington and encouraged Lewiston residents to reclaim the capital by means of a lawsuit.

Alonzo Leland and his son, Henry, started the Teller on October 21, 1876. It favored annexation of northern Idaho to Washington. Leland also worked to emphasize the agricultural and ranching potential of the north and to report on resources beyond mining. The Teller began as a "tiny" four-page, four-column publication, expanded to six columns, and adopted a new name, the Lewiston Teller, in 1878. The Teller began a long feud with southern Idaho newspapers, especially the Idaho Tri-Weekly Statesman. Although they seldom gave it proper credit, southern papers relied on the Teller's telegraph reports for information on developments in northern Idaho, especially during the Nez Perce Indian uprising of 1877.

In the spring of 1890, Leland sold the Lewiston Teller to Carl A. Foresman, who started running the paper as a semiweekly, printed on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 1899 to 1900. The paper became the Lewiston Evening Teller in August 1900 and began daily publication except on Sundays. Keeping the same publication schedule but changing the name, the Lewiston Daily Teller ran from October 1900 to January 1901. The name then reverted back to the Lewiston Teller, which ran as a weekly, and then as a semiweekly, on Tuesdays and Fridays, from October 1902 to April 1905. The Lewiston Evening Teller, an eight-page journal published daily except Sundays, was added to the Teller's publication schedule in October 1903, thanks to a new Mergenthaler linotype machine. The Evening Teller continued daily publication until 1911, while in 1905 its semiweekly counterpart, the Lewiston Teller, changed its masthead to the Lewiston Inter-State News, which under its new management ran until 1906.