Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/37

30"We are well satisfied with the information received that that region of country north of the Columbia, as far as Frazier's River, will in a short time be populated with the enterprising emigrant, who anticipates and hopes to realize the advantages of a location at or near the harbor of Puget's Sound. To show that the above conclusions are well founded, we are informed, since writing the above, that five families have already located immediately on the Sound."

In these later days, of course, the foregoing would resent a virtually perfect example of how not to handle this particular item. Reporting and newswriting, to put it briefly and mildly, were different in those days.

The anonymous "respectable gentleman" was a prime favorite of the Spectator and a great comfort in those pioneer days. He was as frequent an authority for important news as the "little bird" was for the gossip of the more or less gay nineties.

He was used, for example, in an article on the situation in Texas which, under a black-type heading "Texas" started thus:

"We are informed by a respectable gentleman who has just received a letter from the United States, dated Independence, Missouri, August 12, 1845, that Texas had ac cepted the terms of annexation proposed by the congress of the United States."

Slowness in getting this news into print was no fault of the little frontier paper, for Morse's "electromagnetic telegraph," as it was then called, was an infant invention a year or so old, with only a few short local lines in the eastern states. The Pacific railroad was still a generation away, and letters came mostly by ox-drawn "express."

Passing over the disappointing diction of the first sentence, we begin to see developing a serviceable definition for the phrase "a respectable gentleman." Such a one, we gather, is any man who tells the newspaper the news. Well, what modern reporter will find fault with such a definition?

The word respectable appears pat in the first account of a public meeting ever published in the West. Like a good many meetings, before and since, that particular gathering had to do with the subject of prohibition. The chronological order of telling the story of a meeting was the vogue of those days. It was, further, the easy and usual way of writing up whatever else might find its way to the office of a pioneer paper. So that's the way the prohibition meeting of 1846 was described in the Spectator—like this:

"At a large and respectable meeting of the ladies and"