This general and rather vague appeal brought, in the course of a few weeks (a short time, in the pioneer tempo) an exhaustive article, more than a column long, signed M. M. M. This apparently was from the pen of Morton Matthew McCarver, a real pioneer, who, before coming to Oregon in 1843 had been a founder of Burlington, Iowa, and who was soon to move on and help Peter H. Burnett start Linnton, later to participate in the founding of other important cities, such as Sacramento and Tacoma.
In examining the Spectator and, more or less, reflecting on its enterprise and news judgment, let us not lose sight of the time as well as the geographical and social setting. It had been a scant 31 years since the great London Times, at that time probably a "monarch of the dailies," had made some reference to a battle fought in Belgium which was not without significance for the future of England and Europe. The first reference to this battle of Waterloo appeared near the bottom of a column on an inside page of the "Thunderer," and here's how it started: "We have met a gentleman who has just returned from the Low Countries." From that scarcely hair-raising be ginning the Times reporter meandered along a sluggish, winding river of rhetoric, finally arriving at the statement that a rather important battle had been won from Napoleon by the English and Prussians.
Metropolitan newswriting in America in the forties was substantially what it had been, both in America and in England, at the time of Waterloo, more than a quarter of a century before. Excerpts from the New York Tribune of July 31, 1843, and from the Albany (N. Y.) Journal of November 10, 1843, for which there is no room here, show the rather naive, uncritical, unemphatic, leisurely chronological style that characterized the newswriting of that period. A robbery story that received 200 words of space in a metropolitan paper (Albany in 1843 had a larger population than all of Oregon) began at the beginning of the action and ambled on from there.
The leisurely approach was common in the forties and even much later. It was the Spectator's regular method. Take, for instance, this important story of development north of the Columbia[1] which appeared in the only paper published in the whole West:
We are informed by a respectable gentleman who has just returned from exploring the north side of the Columbia river and Puget's Sound, that the exploring party are highly pleased with the country. North of the Columbia, particularly in the vicinity of Puget's Sound, the country, susceptible of settlement, is much more extensive, and the soil much better, than before represented. . . Hitherto the country has been unexplored by emigrants wishing to settle.
- ↑ Spectator, February 19, 1846.
