Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/105

96 published at Tualatin Plains, the third paper published in early Oregon.

Crossing the plains in 1853, Mr. Lyons settled near what is now Drain, moving to Scottsburg the next year. There, with the help of his wife, he managed the hotel owned by Capt. Levi Scott, founder of the town.

The initiative in starting the Gazette really came from Scott, who wished to exploit his new town. He bought a second-hand plant in San Francisco and hired Lyons as editor. The new editor's eyesight was now so bad that he was compelled to dictate his editorial notes, which were then written out by his wife.

In his opening editorial Lyons promised to keep his columns free "from the stains of political acrimony or sectional abuse." He called "particularly on the farmers to put their shoulders to the wheel as the men who, in all civilized nations, make up the bone and sinew of society, and by their products furnish the nucleus, not only to the manufacturer, but to the commercial interests of all lands."

A poem on the first page of the opening number supposed to have been written by Mrs. Lyons, then about 24, was meant to call attention to the uselessness of the young women of her day when compared with those of a few years back.

Mr. Lyons gave up the editorship after a year and was succeeded in April, 1855, by G. D. R. Boyd, with W. J. Beggs continuing as prınter

Mr. Lyons died in Marshfield in 1895 at the age of 69. His widow survived until 1907, aged 78.

Somewhere along the line an interest in the paper appears to have passed to Alex Blakely, for a paper filed in the Jackson county courthouse records the transfer of a half interest in the plant from him to William Brainard for $100. The date of the filing was October 16, 1855, about a month after the suspension. The plant was moved to Jacksonville, where a new firm, Taylor, Blakely & T'Vault (W. G.), used it to print the Table Rock Sentinel, a much more ambitious and important paper than the old Gazette. The first number of the Sentinel appeared November 14, 1855.

The statement in Walling's history that Roseburg had an Umpqua Gazette in 1860 as a campaign paper, devoted to the interests of Breckenridge and Lane, apparently is erroneous. There seems some probability that Walling could have meant the Roseburg Express, published for a few weeks in 1859 or 1860 by one L. E. V. Coon, a recent arrival from California, who soon hooked up with John Miller Murphy and started a paper in Vancouver, Wash. They separated before long, and Murphy went on to Olympia, where he established (1860) the Washington Standard. This Express could have been the Breckenridge and Lane organ Walling was thinking about when he called it the Umpqua Gazette.