Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/399

Rh As a matter of fact, it has been the West and not the East that, since the Civil War, has generated the power back of those reforms and those progressive measures that have developed and strengthened the democracy of the country. A racy people will always be nearer to the springs of government, and, being near the source, will carry out the ideas more vehemently and spontaneously, than a people steeped in tradition and custom. Attrition wears away impulse sometimes with curious results. In the last decade or two we find growing up in the East the feeling that the Federalist party was not, after all, the party of error that for over a hundred years we have assumed it to be. Such a sentiment could never, during the last fifty years, have found any encouragement west of the Mississippi.

The spirit of that country, developed with the printing press as well as with the pick and the spade, would be a separate study in itself; we have been able only to hint at this spirit, in the story of the settlement of the western reserve. When we come to the bloody settlement of Kansas, we find that the printing press anticipated even the pick and the spade.

There were, among the Mormons, many printers, at least enough to be conspicuous as a class, and these men, as the new sect pushed itself westward, identified frontier life with the printing press. A group of New York and New England Mormons, led by a printer named Samuel Brannan, who had already printed a Mormon paper in New York, established a colony on the bay of San Francisco in September, 1846. Brannan had brought out with him printing press, type, paper, etc., and within four months after the founding of this colony he printed the first issue of the California Star. A few weeks before, on August 15, 1846, the first newspaper in the Territory