CHAPTER XI
BEGINNINGS IN STATES
1783—1832
Before taking up the origin of the penny press, some notice must be paid to the pioneer printers who had established newspapers in the States and Territories not included in the thirteen original colonies. Sons and apprentices of Massachusetts printers, especially from Boston, had left their cases and, taking old hand-presses and fonts of type, had founded papers in Vermont and Maine, settlements hardly yet populated enough to support such enterprises. Others, traveling along the old Mohawk Trail, had gone westward. Adventurous printers from New York and Pennsylvania had taken the Overland Trail through Pittsburgh into the Ohio Valley. Here, putting their outfits on flatboats and into dug-outs, they had floated to Mississippi frontiers. The political plum of Printer to the Territory was shaken into the leather apron of several and the rude log cabin at various outposts served, as in the Colonial Period, equally as well for a post-office as for a print-shop. Occasionally the frontier journalists were politicians who sought to repeat old tricks in new fields. Not infrequently lawyers who found their professional services not yet needed in a country, where every man was practically a law unto himself, were drafted from the bar—take either meaning of the word—into editorial chairs. In a volume of this size mention can be made only of those printers who founded the first papers. Unembarrassed by stamp taxes and unhindered by censorship of the press, they faced other problems in transporting their plants and in getting their supply of white paper equal in every respect to the difficulties of the pioneers on the Atlantic Coast. Individual hardships are given in the accounts of some papers, not because they were unusual, but because they were typical. Without these pioneer sheets to link the Territories and later the States together,
