Page:History of Goodhue County, Minnesota.djvu/843

 1IISTOKY OF GOODHUE COUNT1 7 ;:;:; 3, 1849, and nine days thereafter James M. Goodhue (after whom Goodhue county was named) arrived in St. Paul with press, type, etc., to commence the publication of a newspaper. Mr. Goodhue was a graduate of Amherst College, and a lawyer by profession, and like many another a man before and since his day and gen- eration, became a newspaper editor by accident. Says .Mr. Niell: "lie had been invited to take the oversight of a press in the lead regions of Wisconsin during the temporary absence of its con- ductor, and soon discovered that he increased the interest of the readers in the paper. From that time he began to pay less at- tention to the legal profession and was soon known among the citizens of the mines as the editor of the Grant County Herald, published at Lancaster, Wis."' While residing at Lancaster he became interested in the territory of sky-tinted waters Minnesota). "In April, 1849, he found St. Paul nothing more than a frontier Indian trading settlement, known by the savages as the place where they could obtain Minne Wakan, or whiskey, and wholly unknown to the civilized world." It was Mr. Goodhue's intention to call his paper "The Epistle of St. Paul," and he had so announced in a prospectus published in February preceding. In the first isue of his paper, however, which was made on the 28th day of April, he announced a change of title, in the words following: "'The paper was to be called 'The Epistle of St. Paul.' but we found so many little saints in the territory jealous of St. Paul that we determined to call our paper 'The Minnesota Pioneer.' " ''The editor of the Pioneer," says Minnesota's historian, Neill, "was unlike other men. Every action, and every line he wrote, marked great individuality. He could imitate no man in his manners, nor in style; neither could any man imitate him. At- tempts were sometimes made, but the failure was always very great. Impetuous as the whirlwind, with perceptive powers that gave to his mind the eye of a lynx, with a vivid imagination that made the very stones of Minnesota speak her praise; with an in- tellect as vigorous and elastic as a Damascus blade, he penned edi- torials which the people of this territory can never blot out from memory. His wit, when it was chastened, caused ascetics to laugh. His sarcasm upon the foibles of society was paralyzing and unequaled by Macauley in his review of the life of Barrere. When in the heat of partisan warfare all the qualities of his mind were combined to defeat certain measures; the columns of his paper were like a terrific storm in midsummer amid the Alps. One sentence would be like the dazzling, arrowy lightning, peel- ing in a moment the mountain oak, and riving it from the top- most branch to the deepest root; the next, like a crash of awful thunder; and the next like the stunning roar of a torrent of