The early American newspapers were filled with long extracts from English newspapers because the American colonists were especially interested in what England and the Continent were doing. In the same way the early papers on the Pacific Coast contained column after column of reprint from the Eastern papers for its settlers who wanted the news from home. A most distinctive characteristic of the early Pacific press was its catholicity of taste in printing cosmopolitan news.
Pacific Coast journalism passed through the same vicious personal era as that found in the East. Quarrels between editors became frequent, and newspapers were not considered inter- esting unless they were lambasting some one. Often these edi- torial battles led to others on the field of honor, where the number of editors killed was undoubtedly larger because the Westerners shot straighter. The author of the "Annuals of San Francisco," in speaking of the editors of the era, remarked: "They were particularly exposed not merely to the literary rak- ing fire of antagonists, but to their literal fire as well." Demands for satisfaction continued to come not only from other editors, but also from subscribers, until "The Irrepressible Conflict" in which Seward forecast the War of the States turned the edi- torial page from a discussion of local personalities to a broader treatment of an approaching national crisis.
MEDILL AND HIS PAPER
While the people of the village of Chicago read their first newspaper on the morning of November 26, 1833, when John Calhoun brought out the first number of The Chicago Democrat, the journalism of that city really dates from the birth of The Tribune on June 10, 1847, when an edition of four hundred copies was worked off on a hand-press by Joseph Kelley and John Wheeler. The immediate source of The Tribune was an earlier paper published under the bucolic title of The Gem of the Prairie, and it later absorbed The Chicago Democrat. The Tribune, there- fore, is entitled to be considered the oldest paper in Chicago (though, strictly speaking, The Chicago Daily Journal has been published from 1844), and no one will deny it a first place, not only among the newspapers of that city, but also among the
