Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/122

Rh nineties that she had predicted the great Seattle fire of 1889—when Seattle was a wooden town with rather rudimentary fire protection.

All this advertising was run in the centered long-and-short line style, and set in a wide variety of clashing type faces. Newspaper "art" was, of course, still in its infancy. Most of the cuts were those little type-metal affairs, running about half the width of the column and used to decorate the upper left corners of the ads. There was, of course, an occasional full-width cut, such as that of the Indian already mentioned and of St. George slaying the dragon all over again to direct attention to the qualities of a particular bitters' whose peculiarly stimulating contents helped it maintain popularity right down into the "dry" days when a poor old contemporary, Jockey Club Gin, more frankly alcoholic, was barred out of print.

The intent, however, is not to criticise a most respectable pioneer newspaper, which in the same issue that contained this sort of thing, had about 150 individual advertisements, all of them reflecting the life and spirit of pioneer times and none of them, not even the liquor and medicine announcements, violating the ethical standards of the newspapers or the public of that day.

Two other advertisements attracted the attention particularly. They were the only ads in the paper enclosed within borders, which later were to become virtually universal (they had black rule around them), and they screamed broadcast a bit of the financial history of the times, indicating, furthermore, that both the advertiser and the publisher knew the weakness of the libel laws. And so the reader was informed, in advertisement No. 1 under the outspoken heading "Black List," that three men, their names prominently displayed, one of them from Walla Walla and the other two from Corvallis, had paid, respectively, $599, $1,105, and $603 in legal tenders at par for goods purchased at Gold Prices; they had, in other words, taken full advantage of a currency inflation after having agreed, tacitly or otherwise, to pay in gold. This statement, signed by C. N. Humiston, ran for several months without a comeback "peep" from the three men mentioned. The other advertisement of this nature, in a 1-col. 3-inch space on page 4, headed "The Same Old Greenback Case," told the public every week for months that the undersigned (G. W. Vaughn) was "still compelled to accept of legal tender notes at Par (and have been since December 17, 1862) for the rent of my handsome brick store, corner of Morrison and Front streets."

Mr. Vaughn gives the name of the renter in bold-face 8-point (brevier) capitals centered; says that the terms were to have been cash, and that depreciated currency was received regularly under pro test ("making two-fifths of the real amount he was to pay.") "I make this statement," concluded the outraged landlord, "to inform the public what kind of a man he must be to take such undue ad-