Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/21

16 seems, the day of fewer papers is here—with larger circulations for those maintained.

Railroad development and land settlement, naturally, went hand-in-hand through the seventies and eighties and nineties, and this brought newspaper numbers up toward the high mark of the 1920's, from which they have begun to recede somewhat.

Reasons for establishing newspapers varied. Politics was heavily at the bottom of the situation in the earlier years; and politically-minded lawyers and business men were prominent on the scene, as backers, publishers, in many cases editors. The relative dearth of trained newspaper men in pioneer days, had something to do with the kind of newspapers many of them were, though through imitation the non-journalistic editors often approached the standards of the others.

A little later more newspaper men drifted west, and we find them starting newspapers wherever there was a likely-looking com munity. If disappointed in the town, they'd shift, sometimes suddenly, as the publishers of the little Western Star of Milwaukie did in 1851. It did cost much to move the plant.

Later on with the railroads and land development came the era of land and timber notices, stimulated in the middle eighties by the hard-boiled policy of Cleveland's commissioner of the general land office, William Andrew Jackson Sparks, who, suspicious of everyone, did a lot to discourage squatting on land and informal cutting of the public timber. The West and Southwest drew many federal land inspectors, who managed to reduce land and timber evils and encourage actual filing and purchase—which required publication of notices of final proof and that sort of thing. Many of the papers were obviously installed on the basis of "mining" rather than a continuing yield; they would work the main ledge of land notices and move on, leaving later comers to try to make a living out of whatever other business there was.

County-seat fights (perhaps they can be regarded as political, though they are not party-political) were another reason for the establishment and development of newspapers in many western states and territories, including Oregon.

Besides all these, there was, of course, the occupation of news paper fields by qualified editors and publishers, who installed publications where communities seemed to need them and were likely to grow and prosper.

Despite a rather general impression that newspapers are precarious businesses, as indicated by the small number that have survived through thick and thin in Oregon since the 50's—only two, the Oregonian and (with one dubious period) the Statesman—despite this, several Oregon newspapers recently celebrating semi-centennials