The Frontier (journal)/Volume 11/Some of Oregon's Early Newspapers

by George Stanley Turnbull

HISTORICAL SECTION

Each issue will carry some authentic account, diary or journal or reminiscence, preferably of early days in this region of the country.

SOME OF OREGON’S EARLY NEWSPAPERS

By George Turnbull

Note: We intend to publish in this section only source material, but just before this issue went to press a change in plans had to be made. We are happy to be able to offer this account of early Oregon journalism by Professor George Turnbull, of the School of Journalism of the University of Oregon.

The Editors.

---

Foreword: This article is not a complete history of the journalism of early Oregon. The intent, rather, is to give some idea of what Oregon’s first papers were like. What historical chronology appears in the early part of the article is merely a selection of what seemed the most interesting, as a background for the glimpses of the newspapers themselves that follow. Anything like completeness, naturally would require vastly more space than is here available. Sources cited in the notes give the reader hints of the opportunity to go as deeply into an y of the phases of Oregon journalism as he likes. What follows here is a selection from the fruits of considerable browsing among early files of representative papers of early Oregon. G. T.

---

It was a distinguished pioneer group that formed, late in 1845, the Oregon Printing Association, which was to issue, February 5, 1846, the first edition of the first newspaper west of the Missouri River. Officers were W. G. T’Vault, lawyer and journalist, later attorney general under the provisional government; J. W. Nesmith, later United States senator from Oregon and father-in-law of Levi Ankeny, who sixty years afterward became a United States senator from the state of Washington, a commonwealth of which no man of the forties had dreamed; John P. Brooks, less well remembered; George Abernethy, leading Oregon City business man and governor of Oregon for the period of the provisional government, 1845-49; Robert Newell; John B. Long, secretary of the provisional government, and John H. Couch. T’Vault was president of the organization ; Nesmith, vice-president; Brooks, secretary, Abernethy, treasurer; the three others were members of the board of directors.^[1] The headquarters was Oregon City, “founded by John McLoughlin”—“McLoughlin of old Oregon.”

This was the absolute beginning of journalism on the Pacific Coast. The Alta California, California’s first newspaper, was not to be issued for six months.^[2] We have, therefore, the Oregon Spectator as the trail-finder of western journalism. T’Vault was chosen editor. The records show that H. A. G. Lee, another member of the organization, a former speaker of the house in Oregon’s provisional legislature, was first choice for the position, but he let it go to T’Vault for half of the $600 a year Lee wanted for his work.^[3] For his $300 salary T’Vault was to attend to just about everything but the printing of the little paper. J. Fleming’s name was carried as the printer.

The volumes of the old Spectator are light and flat, for the publication was not only small (11½×17 inches over all, four columns wide) but of infrequent issue, coming out twice a month. Journalistically the Spectator was nothing startling, and it seems fair to say that if it had been twentieth instead of first in point of time it would not be well remembered today. We should not forget, however, that it was published in a little wooden village In the farthest West, two thousand miles from the civilization of “the states.” We should bear In mind, too, that journalism of that day was not twentieth-century journalism, even in New York or other eastern centers.

The plant on which the first paper was to be printed was obtained in New York through the instrumentality of Mr. Abernethy. Ten months after the start, the

Spectator carried a resolution passed by the printing association thanking Francis Hall, Esq., of New York, publisher of the New York Commercial Advertiser, for “his kindness in forwarding the press, &c. for this association, and for his generosity in giving his valuable time in selecting the articles without making any charge for his services.”^[4]

The most interesting part of the equipment and, so far as this writer knows, the only surviving bit of the original plant, is an old Washington hand-press, manufactured by R. Hoe & Company, world-famous press-builders. In those days this was a remarkable piece of machinery, in advance of many of the presses of its day. Fast workers could turn out 150 to 200 impressions an hour, making it a matter of two or three hours to run off the Spectator's whole list at the height of its popularity.^[5] To get an idea of its efficiency today, this writer has just set down a few figures which indicate that it would take the Spectator's press about two years, at the prevailing eight-hour day, to run off one issue of a Portland newspaper. Three shifts would cut the time down to eight months; but if the subscribers were to get fussy and want the color work they get to day in Sunday issues, the old press couldn’t do the job at all. This press, carried by mules across the isthmus of Panama 85 years ago, is still used occasionally to print proofs in the plant of the University Press at the University of Oregon, Eugene, where it is preserved, with an inscription signed by George H. Himes, venerable curator of the Oregon State Historical Society museum in Portland, affirming that it is the first news paper press on the Pacific Coast. The press used by Spalding and other missionaries is several years older, but it had not been used for newspaper purposes when the Spectator made its bow.

T’Vault did not remain long as editor. With naive frankness he took all of us into his confidence as to why he left the paper. Politics, he said in effect; he was too much of a Jeffersonian for the owners. He accused his employers, however, of blaming his faulty orthography and syntax for his dismissal. H. A. G. Lee, his successor, was soon succeeded in turn by George L. Curry, a well-qualified young newspaper man who had come over the trail out of the East only a few months before. Curry himself was to leave in less than two years, for political reasons. The Spectator languished and was not among those present when the census men went round after the data for the 1860 statistics. The paper had done its part in encouraging the development of its home town and of old Oregon. It managed to attract a considerable number of correspondents, who strengthened a rather weak spot on its editorial page. One of these was M. M. M. (probably Gen. Morton Matthew McCarver, pioneer of Iowa and Oregon and Washington), who wrote well and constructively on economic questions uppermost in the Oregon of the late forties. The little paper did its best for Oregon.

We have noted that George L. Curry, later to be governor of the territory, left the Spectator for political reasons. The constitution of the printing association contained a clause forbidding partisan political discussions in its columns, and this proved an irritation to editors who had ideas and political principles. So in 1848, seeking greater political freedom, Mr. Curry started a second newspaper in Oregon City, the Oregon Free Press.^[6] The most persistent fact in connection with the Free Press is, that after running from May to October, it had to be suspended because the available printers had all joined the vanguard of the California gold rush.^[7] The paper did not resume, and we shall meet Mr. Curry again on another of the pioneer publications, on which as editor he was free to vent his dyed-in-the-wool Democratic sentiments. The Tualatin Plains, a few miles south west of Portland, not far from Newberg and Forest Grove, was the scene of the next journalistic effort in old Oregon. Eight numbers of the Oregon American and Evangelical Unionist, announced as a semi monthly, were issued between June 7, 1848, and May 23, 1849. The name Whitman is inextricably woven into this venture. The

publication was printed on the old Whitman mission press, and its early death was attributed editorially to dissatisfaction with the handling of articles on the Whitman massacre.8 The publisher, C. F. Putnam, and the editor, Rev. J. S. Griffin, accused their opponents of hiring their printer to break his contract and go off to the mines after seven issues had been printed. By May a new printer was on the job, and one more issue was got out. This was not, perhaps, in the strict sense of the word, a newspaper, but more or less resembled a magazine.

We have now reached 1850 and the rivalry between Milwaukie and Portland, four or five miles apart. Milwaukie was the larger place, and through such leading citizens as Lot Whitcomb making a struggle to remain in the lead. November 12 of that year saw the rise of the Western Star, a weekly paper published by Mr. Whitcomb. Portland rapidly forged ahead, however, and the Star went down the river to Portland, where it continued under another name—the Oregon Weekly Times.9

This brings us to the Oregonian, started as a weekly in Portland December 4, 1850. C. B. Bagley, newspaper man and historian, in the course of his article in the Washington Historical Quarterly on “Pioneer Papers of Puget Sound,” tells us that the Oregonian is the only paper started in the Oregon country—and that includes Washington—before 1860 which has remained in existence to the present without suspension or loss of identity. W. W. Chapman and Stephen Coffin, who started the paper, brought T. J. Dryer, an experienced newspaper man, up from California to be editor.10 From the beginning the Oregonian was intelligent and influential. More will be said about its policies later in this article. It is impossible to resist the temptation to stop here and say that the old Ramage press, purchased from the Alta California, which ran the first few issues of the Oregonian,11 established a reputation as a real pioneer among presses; it was sent north to run the first newspaper north of the Columbia river in Oregon, then ran the

• Ludington, op. cit., 260.

'ibid., 250.

10 idem.

u Lockley, op. cit., 303.

13 H. W. Scott, Oregon Country, v. 94.

first newspaper in Seattle, the first one in Walla Walla and what is now eastern Washington, also the first in what is now the state of Idaho. As Edmond S. Meany, professor of history in the University of Washington, said the other day, “It may not be the first newspaper press in the Northwest, but it has enough firsts to its credit to justify its honored place in the museum on the University of Washington campus.” These early presses, though, are another story.

The Oregonian was soon to have a local competitor. The old Western Star machinery had been sent in the whole five miles from the rival town of Milwaukie and used. May, 1851, to help start the Oregon Weekly Times. John O. Waterman and William D. Carter were the publishers. The paper was Democratic, in opposition to the Whig Oregonian. In 1857 E. C. Hibben came in as editor. A daily issue was started December 18, 1860, with Alonzo Leland as editor. The next week the Oregonian was announced to have become the property of Henry L. Pittock, a young man who had joined the paper as a printer seven years before, and the new owner was putting out a daily by the first of the year. Publisher Dryer was so far in arrears on young Pittock’s salary that it seemed simpler just to hand the paper over to him than to attempt to pay up.12 Mr. Dryer, anyhow, was assured of a diplomatic post as envoy to the King of the Sandwich Islands under the Lincoln administration which he had done his part to place in power. Mr. Pittock lived for nearly sixty more years, carrying the Oregonian down through the period of the fairly recent World War. Mean while the Oregonian had achieved a value, financially as well as otherwise, that would tempt one mathematically inclined to figure how many thousand years Mr. Pittock would have had to work as a printer on the wages that ate up the early Oregonian to earn the paper as it was when he died, within recent memory.

Now we come to the Oregon Statesman and Asahel Bush. Here we come in touch with the interesting figure of S. R. Thurston, dele-

gate to Congress from Oregon. Elected in June, 1849, he was the then incongruous combination of Methodist and Democrat, and he felt the need of newspaper support to re elect him to his post.18 He died on his way home from the national capital before the next election rolled around, but not before making contact with the young Bush in Washington, D. C., and arranging with him to edit the new paper in Oregon City, home of the Spectator. The Oregon Statesman has been a Salem institution for so many years that it is easy to overlook the fact that it was not always so. It started, indeed, in Oregon City when Salem was still unknown to fame. A letter from Delegate Thurston to Bush, dated January 27, 1851, less than three months before his death, gives a line on the delegate’s attitude toward the paper and his ideas on journalistic ethics. This letter, reproduced in the Jubilee number of the Statesman, seventy-five years after its first issue came from the press, follows in part:

“. . . . The Statesm an will go ahead; you see I have warm fighting friends. In your first number, in a dignified manner, state that I have no control or influence whatever over the paper and that I will be no further respected nor supported than any other good Democrat .................. That Thornton is a snake in the grass. Treat him as all my enemies, with respect and courtesy, as I alone am competent to attend to their cases. I desire you to be entangled in nothing further, think the case is made by the interest of the party. Be extremely careful to have your paper dignified with chaste and gentle manly language . . ,”14

Mr. Thurston died within two weeks after the appearance of the first issue without having seen a copy and thus was spared the shock that some of the virile Bush’s picturesque outbursts must have caused him. There is some question as to just the date when Mr. Bush began his editorial work on the Statesman; Mr. Bagley, previously mentioned, insists that the first editor was Joseph S. Smith, and Bagley was a youngster in knee breeches in Oregon at the time. Flora Belle Ludington, however, names Mr. Bush as the editor. This is substantiated by the name on Vol. 1, No. 1, of the paper. Miss Ludington quotes a letter written by Mr. Bush from Oregon City, April 17, 1851, saying, “I get very little patronage at Oregon City.” This patronage was to grow. The paper, under the militant editing of the young easterner, became the “Bible of the Oregon Democracy” and the lusty opponent of Dryer and the Oregonian in everything on which it was in any way possible to quarrel. Bush headed the very successful group of politicians that became known as the “Salem clique”, which directed things Democratic—which virtually meant all things political—in early Oregon for years.15 When the capital was moved to Salem, the politic ally minded Statesm an moved with it, in June, 1853. Two years later, when the legislature met at the newly-chosen capital, Corvallis, Bush followed along with the Statesman, explaining that since he was state printer it was necessary that he be at the seat of government. When the legislature itself passed a resolution to take the territorial government back to Salem the States man went along with it (1854), and has been there ever since.

Chronologically the next point of interest in Oregon journalism of that early day is the establishment of the first newspaper in Oregon north of the Columbia river, in what is now Washington. This was the eighth publication in order of its establishment in the Northwest. The Columbian, a 4-page 6-column weekly paper, larger than the old Spectator and comparing favorably with the Statesman in appearance, made its bow to northern Oregon readers September 11, 1852.16 The Oregonian’s old Ramage press had been sent north to start another news paper on its career. The publishers were James W. Wiley and Thornton F. McElroy, with Wiley as editor. The Columbian, as Professor Meany points out in his article on early Washington newspapers, in the Washington University State Historical Quarterly, had as one of its reasons for its being the promotion of sentiment for a new territory

“ Oregon Statesman, an niversary edition, Ja n u a ry 27, 1926 “ ibid. 10 Ludington, op. cit., 257. “ Columbian, v. 1, No. 1.

north of the Columbia river. The Columbian did its best, gave up plenty of space for news and editorials promoting division of the ter ritory ; but, by the irony of events, it had, as Professor Meany indicates, nothing to do with the actual achievement, which was based on the old Cowlitz convention, held the year before the Columbian was started, and was put through by the friendly efforts of General Joe Lane, Oregon delegate to Con gress. The news of the convention, played up in the Oregonian and Spectator, was found in Lane's papers. Incidentally, this writer went rather care fully through the whole first volume of the Columbian, and if there was any editorial recognition of the friendly part Lane and Oregon played in obtaining separation for north Oregon it was not displayed in a way to be read by a runner of any great speed. The paper was stopped permanently on the outbreak of a greater war, in the spring of 1861. The Democratic party had “slipped” in both Washington and Oregon. Chronologically we appear to have reached the establishment of the Umpqua Gazette at Scottsburg, Oregon, April 28, 1854, and the Pacific Christian Advocate, started in Portland in the same year.17 The Advocate, which is still alive as a religious paper, was in its early years a journal of general circulation, resembling the other papers and drawing the fire of its contemporaries for political utterances. Bev. Thomas H. Pearne was perhaps its best remembered editor. He was prominent in politics as well as in journalism. The Scottsburg paper, edited by Daniel Jackson Lyons, suspended in September, 1855.18 Its place in history is due entirely to its time order as the first news paper in Oregon south of Salem. The plant was used to start a new paper at Jacksonville called the Table Rock Sentinel, after a prominent feature of the landscape in that part of Oregon. W. G. T’Vault, formerly of the Spectator, was the editor.19 Editorially T’Vault claimed to be independent in all things; but when hard-shelled Democrats accused him of having abolitionist leanings

17 Ludington, op. cit., 253. u ibid., 259. “ idem. 20 Ludington, op. cit., 240. 21 ibid., 242.

he challenged them to duel, at the same time promising the great surgical feat of “cutting out” any drop of abolitionist blood he might unhappily have in his veins. After eight more or less rip-roaring Democratic years the paper fell into Republican hands, and we find it an uncompromising Union paper under the editorship of Orange Jacobs, later a well-known resident of Seattle. The name had been changed to the Oregon Sentinel by T'Vault and a partner, W. G. Robinson, in 1858.20

The first real red Republican newspaper in Oregon is the distinction accorded the Oregon City Argus, started with W. L. Adams as editor, April 21, 1855.21 The Spectator was now dead, and its plant was used to print the Argus. Adams was a minister of the Christian denomination. He and Asahel Bush of the Statesman kept the air frequently full of journalistic fur. Neither was in the habit of “pulling” his editorial punches, and it was the “Air-goose” on the one side and “Ass-of-Hell” Bush on the other. Dryer of the Oregonian was another who use to meet Bush more or less in his own way, and drew editorial shrapnel from the Statesman by referring to its editor as “the bush”, with a small b.

It would probably be libelous to this day to print many of the little exchanges indulged in by Bush, Dryer and Adams; and others of this early group were not far be hind these three in vitriolic vehemence. In quoting from the old files of one of them such things as these it will be as well to omit names, but the excerpts are copied verbatim :

“There is not a brothel in the land that would not have felt itself disgraced by the presence of the . . . . of week before last. It was a complete tissue of gross profanity, obscenity, falsehood and meanness. And yet it was but little below the standard of that characterless sheet.”

“The . . . . man is the most unvarying liar we have ever met with. He so seldom tells the truth , even by mistake, that we are inclined to make a special note of the fact when he does . . . .”

“ .................. says he has returned from California with ‘his vision improving.’ He, however, judging from his last number, comes back as crazy as ever. He had better return and take quarters at the lunatic asylum .”

On one occasion a reporter on one of the

papers was convicted of burglary—under taken, apparently, as an avocation and not as part of his regular duties. The rival editor, however, with customary courtesy, explained that the man’s confession had not “as yet” involved his editor. Volumes could be compiled of this sort of personal warfare. There was the time when one of the editors went to southern Oregon on a political speechmaking tour. The contemporary news paper (all names omitted to avoid libel) gave him the following enthusiastic send-off, here given as a final example of the journalistic amenities of the furious fiftie s: “LOOK OUT FOR LIES! " . . . has gone south to electioneer for . . . . and the . . . . party. He is the most unscrupulous liar In the territory, and not one particle of reliance can be placed on anything he utters. It w as him (sic) who published the cowardly slander about General Lane . . . . There is no danger of his falsehoods finding credence unless he shall attempt to pass under an assumed name . . . . For fear that he may do this we subjoin a description of him : . . . . hatchet face, ’stoop shoulders’, grizzly hair, uneasy manner, downcast countenance, never looking a person in the face, dis honest expression, and had on when he left a white wool stovepipe hat and buff vest He preaches temperance and moral reform sometimes, but is fond of whiskey and tobacco, and swears profusely.”22

A well-known old-time newspaper man, David W. Craig, was proprietor of the Argus for four years, until 1863, with Adams as editor. One of the treasures occasionally shown by Mr. Himes at the historical museum In Portland to visitors is the chair occupied by the Argus editor. This was presented by Mr. Craig to Mr. Himes after he had consolidated the Argus with the State Republican, of Eugene. This chair, in passing, is not to be visioned as the comfortable, cushioned swivel affair in which so many present-day editors do their work. Rather, it is a small, angular-looking piece of the kitchen-furniture variety—not a sleep-inducer. The Oregon Statesman soon took over the combined paper and published the whole combination as the Statesman. Meantime, the Statesman had swung over to strong support of the Lincoln administration. Bush’s split with Joe Lane had been over the question of secession, and on December 5, 1862, he declared in the Statesman that as for him he was for the Union first and the Union only.28

22 ibid., 267. 23 ibid., 258.

• • ibid., 237.

The directors of the combined Ar^u* and Statesman, including both radical Republic ans and Douglas Democrats, were J. W. P. Huntington, Rufus Mallory, D. W. Craig, C. P. Crandall, and C. W. Terry. Loyalty to the Union was emphasized. In 1866 the paper was sold again, one of the owners this time being Samuel Simpson, the poet, author of “Beautiful Willamette.” He was associated with his father, Benjamin Simpson, and Sylvester, his brother. Its next owners, who followed soon afterward, were, successively, William McPherson, who dropped the name Statesman on merging the paper with the Unionist. The name Statesman was soon revived, under the ownership of Samuel Clarke. This brief disappearance of the name is the basis for the assertion of C. B. Bagley, previously quoted, that the Oregonian is the only paper of the early pioneer group which has maintained its identity unbroken throughout the years.

One is tempted to mention numbers of papers which poked their heads hopefully over the journalistic horizon in these early days only to fall into premature graves after a brief and fevered career. These, however, must here be omitted except where there is some appealing significance. We might say a word of the Democratic Herald, which carries interest from two points of view. This paper, started by Alexander Blakely in March, 1859, was carried on after a year by Anthony Noltner, noted early Oregon journalist, for two years. One of its claims to remembrance is, that under its later name of Democratic Register it got itself suppressed in September, 1862, for its strong Southern views.24 The other is, that it was edited from March to September by one Cincinnatus Heine Miller, who, under his more euphonious name, Joaquin Miller, became the picturesque poet of the Sierra. Miller’s younger brother, George Melvin Miller, it might be observed in passing, is still a resident of Eugene. The suppressed Register became the Democratic Review, starting out in November with a promise to be politically neutral, but soon, in January, hoisting a defiant Democratic banner. Joaquin Miller edited this paper also for Noltner, resigning in February of 1863 to be succeeded by James O’Meara.28

One of the early advocates of slavery, among Oregon papers, was the Jacksonville Herald, published by William J. Beggs and B. J. Burns in 1857,28 in a town which threw away its future by guessing wrong about the value of a railroad and allowing it to build into a little village named Medford and nurse it along into a thriving city. B. J. Pengra was running the People’s Press, a Republican paper, in Eugene in 1858. Old-timers there still remember the time when articles which had been written by Harrison R. Kincaid, then a budding journalist, in the People’s Press, aroused the anger of President Riley of the old Columbia College, in Eugene, a slavery advocate, and caused him to shoot Mr. Pengra, thinking him the author. This gunplay made it necessary for Mr. Riley to leave suddenly for somewhere else. The fireworks failed to help the college, which was soon just as dead as the Peoples Press itself. Pengra survived his wounds.

Another warm old Democratic advocate of those days was the Oregon Democrat, published at Albany by the gifted Delazon Smith. Smith was one of the first two United States senators elected from Oregon when the territory became a state, on Valentine’s Day, 1859. Smith died seventeen days after his election, and his brother-in-law, Jesse M. Shepherd, continued the paper.27 It still lives, as a daily newspaper, combined in 1925 with the Albany Herald, which was established in 1879. The Democrat fought the dominance of Bush and Joe Lane in Oregon Democratic politics. A war time editor of the Democrat was James O’Meara, with experience in other Oregon towns and many years later a spirited rival of Harvey W. Scott, the great editor of the Oregonian.

They had some odd newspaper names in those early days. It was before the day of the hyphenated handles that spring from consolidations. So there were no Intelli-

• idem.

22 Ludington, op. cit., 239. 21 Ludington, op. cit., 233. 28 ibid., 235. 22 Carey, op. cit., 526. Ludington, op. cit.; Carey, op. cit., 664; H.

gencer-Advertisers in those days; but they managed to have some odd names, such as the Occidental Messenger, started by J. C. Avery in Corvallis in 1857, a slavery advo cate, the name of which was changed to the Democratic Crisis.2*

The papers of those early days were, in most cases, not conspicuously strong editorially. Even so, there were a number of editors who had definite programs, political and economic, and exerted considerable force to put them through. The stand of the principal papers on the issues which raged during the fifties and sixties has been worked out by several writers, notably by W. C. Woodward in his history of political parties in Oregon. In this territory, the question of statehood was one of the principal issues during the fifties, with the Democratic papers, in general, favoring statehood and, in the earlier years, the. Oregonian and other non-Democratic publications opposing. The favorable vote of the people on statehood was not achieved until the Oregonian changed its stand. Statehood in those days of the fifties was bound up with the question of slavery; and the anti-slavery Oregonian finally became afraid that if Oregon did not soon become a sovereign state the pro-slavery President Buchanan would contrive to fasten slavery on the territory.20

In the late fifties and sixties the Democratic papers were, for the most part, pro slavery. In the early days of the Civil War, several of them were barred from the mails or suppressed altogether for their pro-secession attitude. Herewith is given a list (which may not be quite complete) of those suppressed :s0

Albany Inquirer, P. J. Malone, editor, suppressed 1862.

Corvallis Union, suppressed 1363. Democratic Herald, Eugene, Anthony Noltner, publisher, barred from mails, 1862.

Democratic Register, Eugene, successor to Herald, suppressed in September, 1862, to become the Review in November. (Joaquin Miller w as associated with Noltner in editing the Herald.)

Southern Oregon Gazette, Jacksonville, James O’Meara, editor, refused privilege of mails in 1861 and soon died. Daily Advertiser, Portland, George L. Curry, editor, suppressed 1862.

H. Bancroft, History of Oregon II, 492 and note.

The pro-slavery attitude of many Oregon newspapers is, perhaps, attributable to the fact that, much more than Washington Territory, Oregon was settled by Missourians and other southerners, and they brought southern ideas with them. In the main they did not carry their southern sentiment to the point of advocating secession, although there are the stories of efforts to raise troops in Oregon for the Confederate States.

Liquor laws and their enforcement were then, as now, a stirring question.31 Newspaper influence, for the most part, was “dry” in those days. An occasional heavy editorial would proclaim the dangers and evils of intemperance, while the long stories of temperance meetings retained the anti-alcohol note placed there by the secretaries who were instructed to see that the meeting was noticed in the papers. Many of the merchants, however, were allowed to carry liquor ads on the same terms as other advertising. This is another story and is not to be taken as reflecting the editorial attitude. The caveat emptor theory prevailed. Newspaper ethics were developing, rather than developed, as the presence of abominable “medicine ads” by the column eloquently testified.

One of the biggest campaigns conducted by a newspaper in the early Oregon country was the battle of the old weekly Columbian at Olympian, already referred to, for separation from Oregon.

The Oregonian so far distanced its early competitors that it is difficult to realize it was not the first daily newspaper established in Oregon. It was really the fourth. The first was the Metropolis Herald,32 which gets a mention in the Oregonian of August 11, 1855. It does not seem to have lasted for any length of time and is not universally recognized as first. The second—for that matter the first, according to some authorities—was the Daily News,33 Portland, not connected in any way with the newspaper of that name now running in Portland.

Alonzo Leland, whose newspaper connections were numerous, started the paper April 18, 1859, in connection with the S. A. English and W. B. Taylor Company. Before many

" Files of Statesman, Oregonian, and others,

33 Ludington, op. cit., 248.

38Lockley, op. cit., 310.

84 Ludington, op. cit., 254.

weeks the ownership was changed and the paper became an independent weekly, which soon died. The plant was moved to Salem. Mr. Leland was the publisher also of the Daily Advertiser, promoted to “crush out the Salem clique.” This pro-slavery, anti-Bush paper appeared first May 31, 1859. It ran for three years, stopping in 1862, when some other newspapers ceased for the same reason, governmental suppression.

Perhaps the first semi-weekly paper was the Portland Commercial, which ran for a time in the spring of 1853, under the editor ship of S. J. McCormick.34

The first magazine on the Pacific Coast meanwhile had been started by Mr. McCormick in January of the preceding year. He called it the Oregon Monthly Magazine, It was the forerunner of a long line of some what similar and perhaps equally worthy efforts which have littered the journalistic boneyard of the Pacific. I hope the date of its demise is not important, for I have been unable to find it. The Oregonian of March 26, 1853, reports the magazine as having had a “short though brilliant career.”

There is no attempt in this paper to give in full detail the “vital statistics” of early Oregon journalism—the births, consolidations, and deaths of the papers. This work has been rather completely done by others.

Flora Belle Ludington, of Mills College, did a master’s thesis on the subject six years ago, which was reproduced in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, September, 1925 (Vol. 26, No. 3).

Only the high spots in the history of the papers can be touched here; but it is the purpose to combine with this some glimpse of the contents of some of the more important newspapers of early Oregon territory. While the constitution of the old Oregon Printing Association, publisher of the Spectator, prohibited specifically “propagating sectarian principles or doctrine” and “the discussion of exclusive party politics,” it was announced that the news policy would be “to give foreign as well as internal news. Our means of obtaining news at present are limited (the telegraph had been invented, in 1844, passim.

but was not in use on the Pacific Coast until the next decade); but as the country improves, facilities for obtaining news will improve. Our columns will be open for the reception of literary productions, and all scientific gentlemen are invited to contribute to enable us to give as much general information as possible.”

A close inspection of the Spectator's files gives one the impression that the scientific gentlemen were too busy with their own affairs to contribute much to the enlightenment of the general reader—a situation which, it may be observed, has in general persisted to this day. There was no original reporting of anything scientific. The editor’s interest in science was indicated by frequent cuttings from the eastern papers. Much of this material was reasonably authentic science, but it was not indigenous to Oregon.

Oregon’s first newspaper and, indeed, some of those that came later, had the same trouble collecting purely local news of the town as many of the larger papers in the East had shown in a previous generation and were only just beginning to throw off, owing to the influence of such early specialists in newsgathering as James Gordon Bennett the elder. In the early Spectator there was a minimum of local news, though the comparison was not unfavorable with the later Oregonian and Statesman, in this respect. Most of the first page was taken up, for the greater part of the first year with publication of “The Organic Laws.” This was not exactly news and was not translated from the official to the news form, but it was not without interest, and its publication was one of the prime objects of the paper’s founding.

The first item of news in Vol. 1, No. 1, February 5, 1846, and therefore the first bit of news published on the Pacific Coast, was a modest little society squib mixed in among the editorial paragraphs on page 2: “We are informed by Capt. Knighton that a BALL will be given at the City Hotel on Tuesday, the 24th inst. We are well satisfied that Capt. K. and lady will be O. K. on that occasion.” Why it seemed necessary to re assure the reader on this point does not appear.

The reporting and writing ends of the old Spectator, as in the case of other pioneer newspapers, appear to be its points of great est weakness. The newspapers of those days, more than those of today, were organs and mouthpieces for the ideas, both news and editorial, of those who cared to send them in. The art of reporting events completely and objectively was not yet far developed, and the editor usually knew more about printing than he did about newsgathering.

Repeated appeals for contributions—some thing to set up in type—occur in the early numbers. For instance: “Will some of the old settlers in Oregon be kind enough to prepare an article for the Spectator, giving an account of the climate, soil and production of Oregon, particularly describing the location of the country, its extent and all other particulars that would be of interest to the citizens of the United States?”*8 This particular appeal brought, in the next issue, an exhaustive article, more than a column long, from the pen of Morton Matthew McCarver, a real pioneer, who before coming to Oregon had been a founder of Burlington, Iowa, and who after a few years moved away from the Willamette valley to become one of the founders of Tacoma, Washington, “the City of Destiny,” which, forging ahead of Steilacoom, Olympia and Seattle, for a long time was the most metropolitan of the young cities of the new Washington Territory.

It was several weeks before the news columns of the Spectator contained a single item on the activities of the city government of Oregon City. Meanwhile, we know there was a mayor and city government, for in the first issue of the paper the third editorial paragraph, under the heading “City Government,” informed the reader that “The time has arrived for a thorough and complete organization of our City Corporation. Our mayor and trustees are doing up business in the right way. Our advice to them is, first: ‘Be sure you are right, then go ahead. Gentlemen, dig up the stumps, grade the streets, tax dogs, prohibit hogs—and advertise in the Spectator.’ ”

The first real news item dealing with the affairs of the city government appeared in the third issue of the paper, and it appeared, “Spectator, v. i, No. 1 (Feb. 5, 1846).

Footnotes

1. Flora Belle Ludington, The Newspapers of Oregon 1846-1870, in Oregon Historical Quarterly v. 26, No. 3 (September, 1925).
2. Ibid., 229.
3. Fred Lockley, Oregon’s Yesterdays, 284.
4. Oregon Spectator, Oregon City, v. 1, No. 23 (December 10, 1846).
5. The Spectator In Its first year had 155 subscribers, according to Fred Lockley, op. cit. 288.
6. Charles H. Carey, History of Oregon, 517 note.
7. Ibid., 506.