press on the journalism of Baker county. The Tribune, started in 1882 as a semi-weekly edited and published by G. W. Plumley, was changed to a Friday weekly in 1888 and disappeared soon afterward when Plumley sold it to the Oregon Blade Publishing Co., which issued a daily and a weekly (Thursday). E. G. Hurst, editor, announced the Blade politics as independent. By 1894 the paper had become Republican. A. C. McClelland became editor soon afterward. The paper was dead in three years.
The Sage Brush, started as a morning daily in 1883 by J. M. Shepherd, and announced as an independent paper in the 1885 Ayer's, was listed in 1886 as edited and published by the Bedrock Democrat Publishing Co. Active in charge were Edward M. Mack, now of Portland, and George B. Small. Shepherd's name was back at the masthead the next year, and in 1888 the Sage Brush had withered from the hillside.
The Herald was preceded as an evening daily by the Evening Republican, founded in 1896 by B. F. Alley. This Republican paper ran along until 1902. E. E. Young was the last listed editor and publisher, taking hold in 1901.
An independent weekly which appeared every Saturday for four years was the Maverick, founded in 1905 by J. W. Connella and L. Bush Livermore, who had been friends and associates in Everett, Wash., in the 90's, when Connella was a fighting editor of the News, then a weekly, and Livermore was cutting his eye teeth as a cub reporter with an interest in sports. They came to Baker from the Evening Miner at Sumpter, where Livermore had been working for Connella.
Whitney, a little Baker county town, had two Saturday weekly papers during this heyday of the county following the turn of the century. The News, published by Coolidge & Jackson, ran for four years following its establishment in 1901. The Whitney Pointer, launched in April 1903 and published by the Business Men's League under the auspices of the town council, survived for even a shorter period in spite of its municipal sponsorship.
The Baker Record-Courier, published weekly on Thursday by C. M. Brinton & Sons, is a consolidation of three weeklies—the North Powder News (1901), the Haines Record (1903), and the Huntington Courier (1930). Mr. Brinton is now one of the oldest publishers, in point of newspaper ownership, in eastern Oregon.
The Eastern Oregon News was started in Baker as a weekly in April, 1931, and is still in operation in 1939. Owners and publishers are Ryder Brothers. H. E. Hendryx, formerly of the Herald, is editor; Gilman M. Ryder assistant editor and advertising manager, and William H. Ryder circulation manager.
Sumpter.—This town in Baker County, Oregon, with no surviving newspaper, may, journalistically, have no hope of posterity, but
