Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/298

Rh  Horn was a Harper's and Pulitzer prize-winner and a best seller in 1935, boasted a weekly paper as early as 1892. The Herald was launched, for the first time, July 22 of that year, by E. M. Shutt. It was to be slid off the ways again before its final trip to the journalistic boneyard.

When Shutt went to Heppner to assume his duties as sheriff of the county in 1897, he sold the paper to M. E. Miller, who took charge October 29. At that time Ayer's directory credited the town with a population of 60 and the paper with a circulation of 400. Wasco county, however, had 12,000 population, making the 400 not so highly imaginative if the matter of "net paid" were not too much emphasized. The asked price was $2 a year for this four-page paper, 15×22.

In the summer of 1898 Antelope was visited by a fire which seriously damaged the little business district. Shortly after this, Max Lueddemann took over the paper, the business of which had been hard hit by fire and depression. September 20 of the next year Mr. Lueddemann associated E. L. Goodwin with him, and in November of the next year Mr. Goodwin retired from the partnership. In the spring of 1905 H. G. Kibbee purchased the paper from Lueddemann, who in the meantime had established a little paper in the infant town of Bend. Both town and paper were to expand far beyond the hopes of the founders. B. F. Ames was editing the Herald in 1909, and the Herald's first suspension came the next year.

Mr. Lueddemann was at Antelope during one of the most serious outbreaks between cattlemen and the encroaching sheepmen; and when he got a by-line on his story about it in the Oregonian he wasn't sure he liked it, for both sides were more than touchy. When the town's population was 200, there was a liquor saloon every 200 feet, and sheepmen who had been out with their flocks for several months would come and, laying their $200 or so of accumulated wages on the bar would say to the bartender, "Just tell me when it's all gone, Bill." In few days Bill, who almost universally was honest, would pass the word across the bar, and it would be "back to the sheep" for another stretch.

This, however, is far from the "whole picture" of these central Oregon towns, for Mr. Luddemann found such places as Antelope full of interesting, intelligent people, whose social affairs were pleasant for the young college man from the South who had come to run their paper, and there were many suits of evening clothes in the town.

Bill Kemp was city marshal and printer for Lueddemann at the same time, and the publisher himself was city recorder.

Small as was this little town of 200-odd souls, had all the advantages of newspaper competition right after the turn of the century. In July 1900 A. M. Kircheiner started the Antelope Re-