Page:The Columbian - Washington Territory's First Newspaper.djvu/4

 cial backers of the paper had founded the paper on this premise, though Dryer may have had profit more in mind than patriotism. This battle really had been won before it started, for Oregon's representative in Congress, Joseph Lane, worked on a bill for territorial status for northern Oregon just weeks after The Columbian began publication. He introduced the bill in Congress on December 6, 1852, and considering it took from five to eight weeks to get mails from the coast he must have received his first copies of The Columbian, with its editorial demands for a territory, a few weeks or days before he introduced his bill. But if the newspaper had virtually been talking to itself and its approximately 350 subscribers, it took full credit for the new territory on April 23, 1853.

The major struggle over, The Columbian went out of its way to prove it planned "to act with decorum towards our contemporaries." Down in Portland Dryer pulled out all of the editorial stops in his war against the Democrats, while in Olympia his other paper remained wonderfully neutral through all its owner's political gyrations. To be sure, The Columbian did complain about the poor mail service and had more than passing comments about need for a wagon road across the Cascades to Walla Walla, but if Dryer blasted away at Lane, The Columbian simply ignored him entirely.

A professed Democrat, Wiley restrained himself up to the middle of March, 1853, when he left the editor's chair for a partnership in the law firm of G. N. McConaha. Remarkably adept at saying what the occasion demanded, Wiley observed in the last editorial he wrote in the Olympia newspaper that he had "not sought to trail the columns of The Columbian in the slime of party warfare" and repeated again the paper's unquestioned neutrality. Some months later he returned, this time as owner, and ignoring earlier statements proclaimed "the end of whig influence and interest" in the