Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/375

Rh under Washington. The family removed to Ohio, near Cincinnati, in 1818. Thomas stayed there until 1825, when he returned to New York and remained until 1841. During the next seven years he had a mail contract, shipped beef to New Orleans, and had an interest in a steam laundry in Cincinnati, each in turn, the latter being about the only industry that he found profitable. In 1848 he went to California to mine for gold, but incidentally became connected with the Courier, before mentioned, as a reporter, where he was found as previously stated. Mr. Dryer was a whig, and an aggressive and spirited writer, with a dash of audacity and fearlessness which were well suited to pioneer journalism, besides being a born controversialist and an attractive public speaker. His attacks on democracy by pen and voice were bold, persistent, and denunciatory to a marked degree. The democratic journals, particularly the Statesman, replied in kind, and thus considerable excitement was created throughout the territory among the partisans of the respective journals when they made their appearance from week to week. The new plant of The Oregonian, before referred to, arrived early in April and the printed page of the paper was enlarged from fourteen and three eighths by nineteen inches to fifteen and one quarter by twenty and three quarter inches. The new Washington hand press superseded the Ramage, and that machine, with the old plant of The Oregonian, was bought in 1852 by T. F. McElroy and J. W. Wiley, and taken around on the schooner Mary Taylor to Olympia and used in printing the Columbian, the first newspaper north of the Columbia River, and was issued at "Olympia, Puget's Sound, O. T., Saturday, September 11, 1852."

The editor, in making an appeal for subscribers, says:

The Olympian—the pioneer newspaper west of the mountains between the daddy of Oregon waters and Kamchatka (we don't expect any subscribers there, however, as they don't "cumtux" our "wau-