Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/405

396 By 1889 he had moved on out to Oregon by way of Denver. From 1894 to 1903 he was again in the East, running a commercial printing business in New York state.

When Irrigon began to dry up he went to Portland, working for the Oregonian mostly as a traveling correspondent, to the day of his death, in 1924. His circulation on the Irrigator never exceeded 300, but he enjoyed himself immensely. The paper folded up in 1912, the year after his departure.

Here's a stanza of "The Old Sod Shanty," the ballad he wrote in Kansas:

Enterprise.—Wallowa county's first newspaper, the Wallowa Chieftain, was a going concern in Union county before Wallowa county was organızed.

The Chieftain was established at Joseph May 15, 1884, by S. A. Heckethorn, who had with him as news reporter A. W. Gowan and as compositor Myra Stanley. Miss Stanley (now Mrs. George M. Gannon) still resides in Joseph. The paper was a six-column, four-page affair, 15x22 inches, with ready-print inside. It is now a seven-column 12-em paper, which is standard for a high percentage of the country weeklies. Its regular size is eight pages.

Mr. Heckethorn, the founder, was a pioneer lawyer who left the country shortly after the paper was started (150). The name Wallowa Chieftain was derived from the nearby mountains and the Indians surrounding. Mr. Heckethorn started the paper with $500 which represented the value of the original plant.

Railroad development in the new country was the stimulus behind the establishment of the Chieftain. In 1884 the Union Pacific railroad system, pushing along the line of the Old Oregon Trail, reached La Grande, and new settlers were pouring into the country.

Heckethorn's successor was F. M. McCully, who conducted the paper for eight years. When, in 1892, the Republicans wanted to make a fight against the Populists, led by J. A. Burleigh's Aurora, then running in Enterprise as a Populist weekly, they selected E. Durseland to edit the Chieftain. In the meantime Enterprise had