Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/156

Rh The third daily to offer itself to the Portland reading public was the Times, which under the name Western Star had been started by Lot Whitcomb in Portland's whilom rival Milwaukie in 1850. It seems to have been almost impossible to get a daily paper started in Portland in those days without the editorial services of Alonzo Leland, who already had served on the News and the Advertiser. So when volume 1, number 1 of the Daily Times appeared, December 19, 1860, published by R. D. Austin & Co., Leland's name was in the masthead as editor. Like the Advertiser and most of the other early dailies, the Times was a little tabloid, with four five-column pages. A moderate policy was promised by Leland in his salutatory, in which he announced:

"We do not always expect to be brilliant and abounding in thought which will awaken the best energy of our readers.—But we promise to treat all questions discussed with candor and fairness, and to strive to be equal in interest to the temperature of the public mind."

Striking features of its first issue were the great volume of advertising— fifteen columns of the total twenty—and a grisly little item on which the Times made an anti-war comment:

"A vessel recently arrived in England from Sebastopol (in the recent Crimean War zone) with a cargo of two hundred and thirty-seven tons of human bones to be used for manure. They are remnants of soldiers in a reduced state. What a lesson for those who seek for glory!"

Ye men who think of dissolving this Union (commented the Times), just consider the "two hundred and thirty-seven tons of human bones to be used for manure!"

Nearly half of the three-quarters of a column of news space, February 6, 1861, was devoted to a detailed account of the peculiar error of a man who had crawled into a house, the home of Colonel Farrar, supposing it to be unoccupied, and gone to bed. Interrupted by the owner, who had him arrested, the man (not named in the story) pleaded drunkenness and Farrar would not appear against him. The last paragraph is awkwardly typical of the editorial latitude allowed news-writers in those days:

"These pleas of ignorance and stupidity should be received with some mistrust. The entering of a dwelling house a window requires a little more than drunken through ignorance, or, at any rate, such acts render a perpetrator liable to run against a piece of cold lead from the chamber of one of Colt's revolvers. It were better to make one's bed in open air than for a man to make similar attempts to occupy the bed chambers of our citizens."