Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/54

Rh 9, 1851, the paper carried Schnebly's name as owner; and in 1852 it was a Whig political organ. Suspended in March, 1852, it reap peared in August, 1853. Schnebly added an associate editor in the person of C. P. Culver to help get out the weekly.

Schnebly may unwittingly have changed the whole course of Oregon journalistic history by refusing a job to a young man named Henry L. Pittock, who, having crossed the plains, was eager to take up his trade as a printer. What Pittock did for the Oregonian of Portland in its wabbly financial days of '59 and '60 is history. What if it had been the Spectator rather than the Oregonian that he saved?

Schnebly, who had bought the paper back from Robert Moore of West Linn, sold it in March 1854 to C. L. Goodrich. Two score years later he was editing the Ellensburg Localizer and boasting that he was the oldest editor in this part of the country. Goodrich is remembered chiefly for having suspended the paper permanently in March, 1855. It had not been a great paper, but it stands up well in comparison with such efforts as the Californian, a one-page affair (printed on only one side of the paper), which, as already noted, was the first paper in California and the second on the Pacific Coast. Politically the Spectator was never influential. In its other phases, however, it had its helpful influence on the growth and progress of early Oregon. The hopes of the founders had been carried out only in part. The constitution of the printing association had said:

"In order to promote science, temperance, morality, and general intelligence; to establish a printing press; to publish a monthly, semi-monthly or weekly paper in Oregon—the un dersigned do hereby associate themselves together in a body, to be governed by such rules and regulations as shall from time to time be adopted. . .."

Reasonable success was achieved in these aims, and the Spectator printing plant helped still further by issuing the first spelling-book ever turned out in Oregon.

This spelling-book was printed by W. P. Hudson, who succeeded N. W. Colwell as the mechanical force of the Spectator. It was not only the first spelling-book gotten out in Oregon but the first printed in English on the Pacific Coast. The spelling-book was bound by Carlos W. Shane, who had learned his trade with the Methodist Book Concern. No full copy of this historic book has been preserved; but George H. Himes in 1894 found a fragment of 20 pages with other documents left behind by M. M. McCarver. Hudson also printed on the Spectator press a 24-page almanac for 1848 edited by Henry H. Everts. This was another first to the credit of Hudson and the Spectator press, for up to that time no almanac had been printed on the Pacific Coast. The almanac's title was quaintly expressed: