Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/113

104 failed to thrive, and its plant was used to start Eugene's first news paper of any consequence, the People's Press. This paper, launched by B. J. Pengra in the fall of 1858, managed to hold on into the days of statehood. It was a Republican paper, running counter to a rather strong Democratic sentiment in the community in those pre-Civil war days. The paper had its troubles, largely political, and it was dead within three years. It lived long enough, however, to provide one of the near-tragic incidents of territorial journalism.

In those days Eugene was the seat of a small institution of higher learning known as Columbia College, whose president, a man named Ryan, was an ardent Southern sympathizer, and it was he who furnished the fireworks of the incident. He had been contributing pro-Southern editorials to Eugene's Democratic Herald, which was started in March 1859. The replies published in the People's Press were Republican enough and personal enough to upset President Ryan. So great was his anger, in fact, that he shot and wounded the publisher. It happened that Pengra, however, had not written the offending articles but that they had been contributed by young Harrison R. Kincaid, who, working in a bookstore for his brother-in-law, James Newton Gale, was then just breaking into journalism and who was later to be one of Oregon's most prominent editors and public officials. Ryan hastened to leave Eugene for some indefinite destination, ultimately joining the Confederate army in Virginia. Pengra survived, but the college languished and soon died. Kincaid moved on to bigger and very likely better things. These were the only newspapers of which this writer has been able to find any trace in the Eugene of territorial days.

Kincaid himself was a student in the college headed by the man who reacted so violently to the Republican articles. Among his fellow students were several others who achieved prominence in journalism and other fields.

The "college" was probably little more than a high school. When William (Bud) Thompson attended, he was 13 years old.

In 1859, when Oregon was admitted to the Union, the Oregonian and the Oregon Statesman, the only two Oregon publications which have survived through the years, were, as has been indicated, weekly papers, comparable in size and style. Comparison of an issue of each, in January, 1859, just before the granting of statehood to the young territory, will give an idea of their relative status. Both were standard seven-column, four-page papers.

January 18, 1859, the Statesman carried 202 separate pieces of advertising, covering 286 column-inches, and the Oregonian of January 22 contained 133 advertisements, covering 311 column-inches. The Statesman had 62 inches of editorial in four articles, as compared with the Oregonian's 20 inches in two articles. The Statesman, as was not infrequent at that time, surpassed the Portland