James Gordon Bennett the elder was at the helm of his New York Herald, established eleven years before with $500 capital and dedicated to the policy that news is more important than editorial opinion, scandal and gossip more interesting than even politics, and conducted with a journalistic enterprise that blazed the way to achievement.
Horace Greeley's New York Tribune was five years old, and its great editor was swinging into the stride that made him one of the immortals of journalism. Henry J. Raymond and George Jones were soon to found the New York Times, a newspaper with an aim different from either Bennett's or Greeley's, placing "the news that's fit to print"—a slogan adopted many years later—ahead of either scandal or gossip or political opinion.
The Oregon Spectator was not the creature of some early journalist looking for a location; it was rather the project of a distinguished group of pioneers who saw the need for official publication of the corporate acts of the new American territory which was to take the place of the jointly occupied Oregon country, in which both British and American citizenship had been recognized.
This group organized, late in 1845, the Oregon Printing Association, for the purpose of establishing the Spectator. The association, in turn, was more or less the outgrowth of the Pioneer Lyceum and Literary Club formed in Oregon City in 1843. Officers of the company, which included several of the leading men of the new commonwealth, were W. G. T'Vault, president; J. W. Nesmith, vice-president; John P. Brooks, secretary; George Abernethy, treasurer; and Robert Newell, John E. Long, and John H. Couch, directors. T'Vault, who was made editor, was postmaster general of Oregon (the size of which job, important as it was, at that time can be judged from the fact that the legislature appropriated $50 to carry on the work for a year. Strangely, this huge appropriation was exhausted before the end of the 12 months.) Nesmith became United States senator from Oregon and father-in-law of Levi Ankeny of Walla Walla, who about sixty years later became a United States senator from Washington, a great state of which no man in the forties had dreamed. Nesmith was also an ancestor of the Nesmiths, McArthurs, and other families prominent in later Oregon. Aber nethy was the first governor of Oregon; and John E. Long, the first secretary of the commonwealth. Couch was soon to become treasurer of the young government. Other members of the association were F. W. Pettygrove, first owner of the site of Portland, who gave the city its name, and A. L. Lovejoy, mayor, successively, of Oregon City and Portland—the two men who flipped a coin to see whether to call their new town Boston or Portland; H. A. G. Lee, of the Virginia Lees, leader of a punitive column against the Indians after
