Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/376

366 McElroy, James N. Gale, J. R. Watson, David Higgins, Charles and Thomas W. Prosch, John F. Damon, D. C. Ireland, Francis H. Cook, S. L. Maxwell, H. C. Patrick, R. F. Radebaugh, and many of their contemporaries, as well as a host of their successors.

Nearly all these were practical printers, and most of them skillful at the case, capable of taking entire charge of the mechanical department of the early day printing offices.

This training made them accurate in their literary work. While some of them might not have been on intimate terms with the rules of grammar, they made up for any such deficiency by untiring and conscientious efforts to give their readers good newspapers, in the face of the gravest difficulties. In the matter of politics full allowance had ever to be made for the personal bias of the writer, but in the matter of news, especially that of a local character, the most absolute fidelity to the truth was ever maintained. No efforts were made for a "good story" at the expense of truth. The head of the paper always had a personal knowledge of the facts and usually prepared the account of them. If he found he had made a mistake he usually corrected it in the next issue, if it was of sufficient importance. For this reason the writer of the present day who delves among the old newspaper files of pioneer days, and even down to within twenty or twenty-five years ago, can rely upon the fairness and truthfulness of their local columns. They were all writing history but few of them realized it.

Life was too strenuous with the pioneers of the "forties" and "fifties" for them to spend much time in keeping diaries or other records of passing events. If they had done so, the unsettled conditions under which they lived, the lack of substantial buildings, the migration to new countries, and the rush to new mines, would have