Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/334

Rh reach the wires by morning—which the horse did. Why they took that chance I never knew, as no one knew anything except that I was on the way. However, the long chance won, and the Tribune was on the street with the names. . ."

Mr. Dodd's early experience on the range stood him in good stead in covering this most difficult story, without doubt the biggest in the history of eastern Oregon.

Second only, perhaps, to the Heppner story, so far as the Pendleton papers were concerned, was the Hickman capture of February, 1928. The reporter who broke that story was Parker E. Branin, son of Charlie Branin, veteran Associated Press wire chief, who after three years in the University of Oregon School of Journalism had gone to the E. O. and was city editor in 1924. He was on the spot when the Pendleton officers, Gurdane and Lieuallen, made the capture a few miles out of town, and he at once inter viewed the slayer (who had kidnaped and killed a grade-school girl in Los Angeles and escaped after throwing her broken body, wrapped in papers, out of an automobile in Los Angeles and escaped up the coast), giving his confession at the same time to his own paper and the Associated Press, for which he was correspondent. Branin, who was killed in an automobile accident in Idaho not long afterward, never believed his story was anything much, but unquestionably it was a remarkable story, and his telling did it justice.

Other Pendleton publications can be given brief mention. There was the weekly Home Press, an independent publication, issued Fridays by J. E. McQuary & Son, which was launched in 1884 and ran for six years.

Lee D. Drake recalls publishing the Skeptic in 1896, when he was a boy of 14. This was a three-column letter-size weekly printed in Thomas Nelson's shop and it ran until the publisher moved to a less eminent position on the staff of the E. O. Blaine Hallock was another Pendleton boy publisher.

Freewater.—The Herald, an independent farmers' journal, published Thursdays, started in 1890 by McComas & Freeman, was Freewater's first paper. The next year the paper was removed to Pendleton, where it became known as the Alliance Herald and was the organ first of the Farmers' Alliance for Umatilla county and later for the People's party (94). Among the editors were William A. Semple and Henry Price.

In 1894 William Parsons, author of the History of Umatilla County, became editor and manager. In 1896 his son, William O. Parsons, became manager and editor of the Herald.

The next year the publication date was changed from Thursday to Sunday, and it became known as the Sunday Herald. The paper ran for a time as a daily, in the interest of Populist activities; but in 1898 it died with the decline of populism.