IDAHO FALLS – Edward Dexter Holbrook stood outside his Idaho City law office on Main and Wall Streets as he came face-to-face with Charles Esquire.

It was 8 p.m. on June 18, 1870, and the two men, once friends, had parted ways earlier that year and had come to confront each other in a gunfight.

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Holbrook, a 34-year-old Ohio native from whom a community 25 miles west of Malad gets its name, had started practicing law in Ohio more than a decade earlier before eventually coming to Idaho Territory in 1865.

The Democrat became one of Idaho’s first Congressional delegates when the territorial legislature elected him to the position. This was before the passage of the 17th amendment,

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