Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/92

Rh The last Oregonian is a proud sheet! The editor's courage, like Bob Acre's, has oozed out at his fingers' ends, and his swaggering is converted into the vilest obscenity and filth, unrelieved by one particle of decency, sense or wit. He commences our name without a capital letter, and refuses to exchange papers with us; the two last resorts of puppyism and puny rage, which are branded by the fraternity everywhere as the lowest acts of contemptibility and meanness. We connot get down to the depths he has sunk to answer him, for we will not sully our columns with vulgarity and slang. When he rises, we will endeavor to pay him our respects. And, he must inevitably come up again, for it is an unvarying law that filth rises as it rots.

Here is one of Asahel Bush's little tributes in the Statesman to Thomas J. Dryer of the Oregonian:

"The Oregonian man is the most unvarying liar we have ever met with. He so seldom tells the truth, even by mistake, that we are inclined to make a special note of the fact when he does."

This was a little milder than his offering of the previous week:

"There is not a brothel in the land that would not have felt itself disgraced by the presence of the Oregonian of week before last. It was a complete tissue of gross profanity, obscenity, falsehood, and meanness. And yet it was but little below the standard of that characterless sheet."

And this next little bit of "Oregon style" comment is libelous to this day, so the name of the person mentioned is omitted; but this is what Bush said about him in the Statesman's issue of May 12, 1855:

.....has gone south to electioneer. . . He is the most unscrupulous liar in the Territory, and not one particle of reliance can be placed on anything he utters. It was him who published the cowardly slander about Gen. Lane "falling off his horse and putting his arm in a sling and pretending to have been shot in the Rogue River war," and the groveling lie that Senator Gwin stated that he had seen Lane intoxicated in Washington. There is no danger of his falsehoods finding credence unless he shall attempt to pass under an assumed name. . . For fear that he may do this, we subjoin a description of him: He is about 47 years of age, 5 feet 11 inches high; salmon complexion; hatchet face; "stoop-shoulders;" grizzly hair; uneasy manner; downcast countenance, never looking a person in the face; dishonest