Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/120

 say a word, and a few months later, in the spring of 1870, the town saw a second established, of which a word shall be said in its turn. The Weekly Arizonian was a great public journal, an organ of public opinion, managed by Mr. P. W. Dooner, a very able editor.

It was the custom in those days to order the acts and resolutions of Congress to be published in the press of the remoter Territories, thus enabling the settlers on the frontier to keep abreast of legislation, especially such as more immediately affected their interests. Ordinarily the management of the paper went no farther than the supervision of the publication of such acts, bills, etc.; and the amount of outside information finding an outlet in the scattered settlements of Arizona and New Mexico was extremely small, and by no means recent. With a few exceptions, all the journals of those days were printed either in Spanish alone, or half in Spanish and half in English, the exceptions being sheets like the Miner, of Prescott, Arizona, which from the outset maintained the principle that our southwestern territories should be thoroughly Americanized, and that by no surer method could this be effected than by a thoroughly American press. Mr. John H. Marion was the enunciator of this seemingly simple and common-sense proposition, and although the Miner has long since passed into other hands, he has, in the columns of the Courier, owned and edited by him, advocated and championed it to the present day.

There may have been other matter in the Weekly Arizonian besides the copies of legislative and executive documents referred to, but if so I never was fortunate enough to see it, excepting possibly once, on the occasion of my first visit to the town, when I saw announced in bold black and white that "Colonel" Bourke was paying a brief visit to his friend, Señor So-and-so. If there is one weak spot in the armor of a recently-graduated lieutenant, it is the desire to be called colonel before he dies, and here was the ambition of my youth gratified almost before the first lustre had faded from my shoulder-straps. It would serve no good purpose to tell how many hundred copies of that week's issue found their way into the earliest outgoing mail, addressed to friends back in the States. I may be pardoned for alluding to the reckless profanity of the stage-driver upon observing the great bulk of the load his poor horses were to carry. The stage