the Governor's home. The petition was granted, and in two weeks and three days from the time he was jailed my father was freed. The brass band came to the jail. My mother, father, and myself were driven through the city, and my father was presented with a beautiful watch . . . for his fearlessness."
This fighting editor did not hesitate to criticise the courts — which was the root of much of his trouble. On one occasion he contrasted the treatment given a rich saloonkeeper, who got off with a year for a killing, with that of another man, an obscure fisherman, who drew a three-year sentence for stealing two salmon. Frequency of "shanghai-ing" also came in for scathing comment by the editor.
The Alaska gold rush was on in 1897, when the adventurous editor sold out to his partner, John E. Gratke, and left for the north. He reached Skagway September 12, 1897, set up a printing plant in a ramshackle old shed, and less than two months after the little old steamer Portland had started all the gold excitement by bringing its famous "ton of gold" into Seattle harbor, Dunbar launched the Alaskan, the first daily newspaper in the great northern territory. Dunbar's "silent partner" in the enterprise, as noted elsewhere, was John S. Dellinger, later publisher of the Astorian.
It is a great temptation to wander off here and tell the story of Oscar Dunbar's encounters with Jefferson R. ("Soapy") Smith, the murderous gambler-boss of Skagway, who ruled the town with a gang of terrorists until Marshal Frank H. Reid, formerly of Whatcom, Wash., shot him to death in a duel on the old wharf, giving his own life for the safety of his people. Suffice it to say that Smith's offer to give Dunbar $50 an issue for keeping his name out of the paper was scorned, with all the theatricals which the fighting editor liked so well, and Dunbar never did give in to the gang, though on one occasion it took a melodramatic last-minute rush by a band of citizens to save him from Soapy and his gang. (83).
The daughter, incidentally, then a young girl, became the first woman newspaper reporter in Alaska. Selling the Alaskan, Dunbar conducted two other publications (the Skagway Budget and the Alaska Travelers' Guide). He went to Pendleton in 1902 and died there March 18, 1904. (84).
In a brief account of Astoria's journalism, written a short time before his death in 1936, John E. Gratke mentions the Eagle as one of a number of newspapers "born at intervals in Astoria that now slumber in the graveyard of the Fourth Estate."
Some of the others:
There was the Transcript, a Saturday weekly started by Snyder Bros, in 1881 and conducted for a few years.
The Independent, launched in 1883, ran as an evening daily for nearly three years.
The Astoria Gateway-Herald, weekly, was conducted from 1885
