Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/293

284 Cowne & Halloran, then resumed (June 23, 1866) its former status as a weekly. The four years of daily publication covered the period of greatest activity in the Idaho mining country, for which The Dalles was one of the leading outfitting points.

Cowne & Halloran were succeeded by W. M. Hand, described as a man of great personal affability, who jollied his way along for 12 years, until his untimely death, September 19, 1881, when he was only 47. Col. T. S. Lang conducted the paper until its consolidation with The Dalles Times, August 14, 1882.

The Times had been established by R. J. Marsh and John Michell, April 27, 1880. It was a seven-column, four-page daily paper, and Republican. In their salutatory the new owners said they had lived in the country for 15 years. The consolidated paper was christened the Times-Mountaineer, and as such ran along for 18 years. This Times-Mountaineer of 1882 was one of the biggest blanket sheets in the history of Oregon. It was nine standard 13-em columns wide and of proportionate length. It was printed on one of the oldest presses on the Pacific Coast—the old Potter which had been used to print the Alta California, historic California publication. The first issue of the Times-Mountaineer was an evening paper, but it was at once changed to a morning paper. This was the second daily published in the town, and it was in marked contrast to the little four-column daily conducted by Cowne & Halloran in 1866. This little paper (the Cowne- Halloran one) had 11¼ of its 16 14-inch columns filled with advertising. The first page was as full of ads as that of the London Times. Its single half-column editorial dealt with the subject of selecting the best possible route for a good road to the Idaho mines, on which the prosperity of The Dalles was then so heavily dependent.

The old Mountaineer's news style was crisp and concise—pretty modern in comparison with what some of the other papers were doing at that time. The Mountaineer's leads were plain and direct, without the great emphasis on the chronology of detail which characterized much of the newswriting of those early days. The reporter, however, was sometimes submerged under the legal phrasing of court procedure, as in this item:

"Committed.—James Lomax (colored) was yesterday committed to jail to take his trial in the next term of the District Court on a charge of petty larceny; in this, that being employed by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company on their steamers above Celilo he did feloniously take and con vert to his own use certain knives, forks, spoons, blankets, and other articles of value, in the county of Wasco and the state of Oregon."

Among the contributors to the Times-Mountaineer were Joaquin