Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/18



THE story of Oregon journalism properly told would be an index of the story of Oregon. To the limit of their resources in money and talent the Oregon papers, from the beginning, have reflected the community. They have themselves participated in the weakness as well as the strength of the community as it found itself through the various stages of Oregon history.

Pioneer Oregon was a political Oregon; men were politically minded. The United States itself was young when Oregon was settled, and many of the old-timers could speak from personal observation of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. James Monroe and John Quincy Adams were virtually contemporaries. The nation was not far from its beginnings, and the beginnings were the work of men highly political in their thinking. The newspapers reflected this, in Boston and New York and Philadelphia. They reflected 1t along the frontier, where the backwoodsmen had made rather a better job of the War of 1812 than was done elsewhere on land. The newspapers of Oregon could not be different. The frontiersmen had moved west with their political thinking; and Oregon itself was a big political problem. Was it to be British or American or British-American?

Oregon's oldest pioneers had their big economic problem; they had to make a living out of a new country, hospitable only along the rivers. But their conversation—the talk the men liked—was pretty sure to be political; their favorite forerunner of the modern movie was a political meeting; their heroes were politicians—statesmen, in some instances, perhaps—and the soldiers who settled the politicans' quarrels with Indians and foreigners.

It must have been disappointing to the readers of Oregon's first newspaper when the governor, who controlled the paper's policies through ownership and influence, barred, or tried to bar, for political reasons, political expression from the little newspaper's editorial columns. This, with the times and people what they were, could not last, and, as most people know and this story indicates, it did not last. Newspapers were either political or religious or literary—and so listed officially in the census reports of those days. The religious and literary publications were in the great minority.

This political emphasis was to diminish in later years, but not for a long time. Those were "times that tried men's souls," their political souls in particular; no sooner were the British pushed back beyond the 49th parallel—which, in the opinion of the typical hardy self-determining frontiersman, lacked five degrees and forty minutes of being far enough to avert conflict—than the political stagehands began setting the stage for the Civil war, over slavery and states'