History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century/4/James H. Sanders
JAMES H. SANDERS was born on the 9th of October, 1834, in Union County, Ohio. He received a liberal education in the schools and academies of that section and in 1852 came with his father to Keokuk County, Iowa. The son was an active Republican and was elected county clerk. In 1860 he came to Des Moines at the assembling of the Legislature and secured the position of Secretary of the Senate. He was a good writer on agricultural topics and in 1869 established The Western Stock Journal, the first publication of the kind in the United States. It was conducted with ability and grew into a wide circulation. Seeing the advantages of having the Journal issued from a large city, he removed it to Chicago where it attained a national circulation. As the live stock interests of the west developed he saw an opening for a weekly publication devoted to the growing branch of farming and selling his interest in the monthly Journal, established the Weekly Breeders' Gazette in 1881. This proved to be a profitable enterprise and grew into a valuable property, circulating over the entire country where stock raising was carried on extensively. Mr. Sanders was a member of the United States Treasury Cattle Commission and a special agent of the Department of Agriculture in Europe in 1885 and was the author of several publications relating to stock. He died on the 22d of December, 1899, at the age of sixty-seven.