Page:History of American Journalism.djvu/210

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old Buf-


falo Trail. The plant itself had been brought from Frankfort, Kentucky, down the Ohio River and up to Wabash in what was then called "piroques." The printing-office burned out in about two years, and the paper was revived on July 11, 1807, by Stout under the title, The Western Sun. Stout was the Territorial Printer and conducted the paper until 1845 when he sold out after he received the office of postmaster.

Other early Indiana papers included The Gazette, established at Corydon in 1814; The Plaindealer, established at Brookville in 1816; The Indiana Republic, established at Madison in 1815; The Indiana Register, established at Vevay in 1816; The Centinel, established at Vincennes in 1817; The Indiana Oracle, established at Lawrenceburg in 1817; The Intelligencer, established at Charleston in 1818. The first directory of Indiana papers was a gazetteer, published in 1831 by the proprietors of The Indiana Journal, and listed for 1832 twenty-nine different newspapers.

Notices similar to the following taken from The Blooming- ton Post appeared frequently in Indiana papers :

Persons expecting to pay for their papers in produce must do so soon, or the cash will be expected. Pork, flour, corn and meal will be taken at the market prices. Also, those who expect to pay us in fire- wood must do so immediately we must have our wood laid for the winter before the roads get bad.

MAIDEN ATTEMPTS IN MISSOURI

Joseph Charless, a printer who had worked on The Kentucky Gazette at Lexington, was the founder of journalism in Missouri. Securing an old Ramage press and a few fonts of type he put his plant aboard a keel-boat on the Ohio and floated down that river to find a permanent location at what is now St. Louis, but was then only a little settlement of about one thousand inhab- itants. Here, on July 12, 1808, he, with the help of Joseph Hinkle, a former printer on a Kentucky Gazette, pulled the first number of The Missouri Gazette. In this period in American his- tory Congress had divided its recently acquired province into the Territories of Orleans and Louisiana. St. Louis was in Lou- isiana Territory, so on December 7, 1809, Charless changed the title from a local to a more general one and called his paper The