Page:History of Oregon Newspapers.pdf/292

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
HISTORY OF OREGON NEWSPAPERS
283

is assisted by his son Leland. He is possessed of a salty wit, which he employs on occasion.

The West found it difficult to get supplies in those days of bad communication, with a bar blocking the way from the sea much of the time, and a mountain road, almost impassable, discouraging communication by land. One or two issues of the paper were printed, in part, on heliotrope paper.

The West suspended for two years during the World war 1916 to 1918, and during that hiatus Capt. Robert S. Huston, printer and Spanish-American war veteran, filled in with the Siuslaw Pilot. When the West was resumed, in 1918, Mrs. Weatherson served as associate editor, carrying out much of the editorial and mechanical work of the paper.

The successor of the West, which suspended in 1921, was the Siuslaw Region, edited by A. K. Lulay, in 1921 and 1922. The next year Ralph Moore founded the Siuslaw News, which ran in 1923 and 1924. Then came the Siuslaw Oar, the Morgan paper.



WASCO


The Dalles.—Oregon statehood was followed, within a few weeks, by the appearance, April 1, 1859, of the first newspaper in eastern Oregon. This was The Dalles Journal, a weekly paper, established by Capt. Thomas Jordan, then commandant at Fort Dalles The paper, according to an early resident, Mrs. Lord,55 "was edited by two educated soldiers." Captain Jordan's printer was a Virginian named Thomas Snyder, who later was a printer on the Oregonian and is recalled by George H. Himes56 as having participated in the production of the Oregonian's Lincoln assassination extra April 15, 1865. Snyder was new from the South.

W. H. Newell, capable newspaper man, well known also in the annals of Washington journalism a bit later, purchased the Journal April 1, 1860, and carried it on for five years, the last three as a morning daily. On taking charge he changed the name to the Mountaineer.

Newell "was an able writer but extremely deaf," commented Mrs. Lord,57 and she told of an occasion when a particularly gusty wind blew off the front of his office in the Victor Trevitt building while he was busy in the back shop. When his attention was directed to it, he said, "Well, well, I thought I heard some thing."

Newell left the paper Nov. 1, 1865, to become publisher of the Walla Walla Statesman, oldest paper in eastern Washington. The Daily Mountaineer, a six-column folio, ran for another year under