Mrs. L. S. Amy received a dispatch yesterday announcing the death of her son-in-law, Captain A.J. Smith. He died at Bannock City, Montana Territory, last Friday, the 19th Instant, aged 46 years. He came to Council Bluffs from Pennsylvania in 1853 and the next year settled at Florence, Nebraska.

He took a prominent part in the affairs of the new Territory, and was a member of the House in the first Legislature, which held its session in Omaha in the winter of 1854-5. The crash of 1857 left him stranded on the shoals of bankruptcy-as it did all the others in this section-and in the fall of 1858 he started to see if his fortunes could be mended at "Pike's Peak." Of his adventures in that region that winter and during the stampede of the next summer, the old files of The Nonpareil tell a thrilling story.

Time has proved that his first reports, recounting the great mineral wealth of Colorado, were not exaggerations, but stubborn facts. And yet they came near costing him his life for the stampeding gold seekers could hardly be persuaded to refrain from hanging him for the accounts he had given. The Captain escaped, however, and for two or three years was engaged in freighting across the plains.

In 1862, we believe, he pushed still farther west, and after a few months prospecting finally located at Bannock City where he has since resided. Here, as elsewhere, he at once took a prominent rank among the founders of empire, and was sent to the Legislature, where he acquitted himself to the entire satisfaction of his constituents.

He was a man of genial temper and social habits and popular with all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance. One by one, the pioneers whom we found here in 1854 are dropping out of the ranks-and in a few years the record of the dead will be much longer than the record of the living. So passes man away. Farewell to A.J. Smith.