Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/384

374 on the arrival of the weekly mail. The Eliza Anderson, then the crack steamer of Puget Sound waters, made weekly trips, leaving Olympia early on Monday morning, arriving at Seattle about 4, and at Victoria early Tuesday morning. The paper at once became very popular and gained an immense circulation for those days.

Early in the fourth volume its name was changed to the Pacific Tribune. Randall H. Hewitt, now living in Los Angeles, owned and published it for a time, when Charles Prosch acquired it and continued its publication at Olympia until 1873. By this time his son, Thomas W. Prosch, had manifested much newspaper ability and had become the owner of the paper. He moved it to Tacoma, the new railroad town, that year and continued there until the almost total death of the place forced another move and he came to Seattle with it. In 1878 Thaddeus Hanford bought it and merged it with the Post-Intelligencer. With but one change of name it had lived about seventeen years, or longer than any other of the early Washington papers, with one exception.

This exception was and is the Washington Standard of Olympia, the most notable instance of newspaper longevity, with the exception of the Oregonian, in old Oregon. Its first number was largely written, set up and printed by its founder, John Miller Murphy, and now, almost forty-three years later, it is his proud boast that it has never missed an issue, has never changed its name and that not a single one of its weekly issues has failed to have more or less editorial matter from his pen. It was "Union" in sentiment during the war of the rebellion, but espoused the cause of Andrew Johnson in his contest with a Republican Congress, and since then has always been consistently Democratic. Mr. Murphy has always been too proud of his independence to subordinate his will or the expressions of his journal to the control