Washington, Idaho & Montana Railway Company.

Around 1900 a group of Midwestern logging men who had moved west formed the Wisconsin Log and Lumber Company and developed plans to begin large scale logging in the Potlatch Basin of Idaho. In March 1903 this company merged with the Weyerhaeuser interests to form the Potlatch Lumber Company. The officers in this company were William Deary, Henry Turrish, and William Laird. There was much valuable timber near Bovill, Idaho, and in 1905 the lumber company decided to abandon its Palouse, Washington mill and construct a larger one elsewhere.

The place selected as the terminus and mill site, according to John B. Miller in his book The Trees Grew Tall, was Moscow, and the road was to be called the Moscow and Eastern. But, early in the planning, when the men learned they would have to pay inflated prices for land for a right of way, and also, as William Deary so colorfully put it, that "there isn't enough water in Moscow to baptize a bastard" (Ralph W. Hidy, et al. Timber and Men, p. 256) it was decided to move the mill eighteen miles away. The town of Potlatch was built and construction of the railway begun.

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