William L. Lang, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of History at Portland State University, where he taught Environmental, Public, and Pacific Northwest History. His research into African American history in Montana came as a result of his dissertation at University of Delaware—“Black Bootstraps: Abolitionist Educators’ Ideology and the Education of the Northern Free Negro, 1828-1860,” at Carroll College in Helena (1971-1978) and as editors of Montana, The Magazine of Western History (1978-1989) at the Montana Historical Society. Lang wrote “The Nearly Forgotten Blacks on Last Chance Gulch, 1900-1912,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 70 (April 1979): 50-57 and “Tempest on Clore Street: Race and Politics in Helena, Montana, 1906,” Scratchgravel Hills 3 (1981). He is also author of Confederacy of Ambition: William Winlock Miller and the Making of Washington Territory (1996), Two Centuries of Lewis and Clark (2004), Two Centuries of Lewis & Clark: Reflections on the Voyage of Discovery (2004), Explorers of the Maritime Pacific Northwest (2016), and editor of Centennial West (1991), Stories From an Open Country (1995), and Great River of the West (1999).