The paper carried a column and a half of editorial with no apparent political bias in the fourteen items. One of the most significant was one urging the direct election of senators, in place of the old legislative method.
Mr. Imus had just sold the Kalama Bulletin to Adams & Smith (134) and wanted to find another location as good as Kalama. . . . There was certainty of a railroad through Rainier to Astoria, with promising industrial sites. There was also some talk of moving the county seat to Rainier, which might have influenced his choice to some extent.
Mr. Imus was in Rainier from February until July 1895, when he was forced to return to Kalama to take back his paper, the purchasers of which had failed to keep up their payments. He left the Review in the hands of a succession of printer-publishers, one of whom, a young rustler named Brown from Texas, "supplied the town with printing for six months ahead, worked until 1 o'clock in the morning," Mr. Imus related, "and at the end of the month collected every cent and borrowed every other cent from anybody he could, and went to Portland 'to buy supplies.' He never came back." Successive editors as recalled by old-timers, or indicated in incomplete files (135) are F. B. Brown, C. W. Herman, W. M. Perry, who announced "with reluctance," after election in 1896 that "as a matter of business" the paper would be suspended (136). The paper had fallen off to a four-column eight-page paper, half home-print, with only 60 inches of advertising and a subscription price dropped to $1. Mr. Imus, however, continued the publication, with W. R. Cobb as editor and manager (137).
In 1898 J. C. Smith was in charge, and W. A. Wood was an other editor of that period.
Now comes an odd part of the story. Nobody seems to know whether the Review was in existence between 1898 and 1905, when the present Review was launched. When Miss Jerzyk of Rainier saw Mr. Imus in 1926 in his office in Kelso, where he was prosecuting attorney, he could not remember himself what he had done with the paper. "Girl," he said, "that's a long time ago, and I've been thinking about a lot of things since then." Ayer's lists the Review as running under direction of W. J. Rice in 1900.
In any event, Rainier was not without a newspaper all those years, for in November 1900 C. W. Herman, having come back to Rainier, launched the Rainier Gazette with a plant he had been using to publish the Uniontown (Wash.) Gazette. Mr. Herman sold the paper to R. H. Mitchell for $350. Mr. Mitchell after two or three years (138) moved his plant to the nearby little town of Houlton, where he established (139) the Columbia Register.
Another Rainier Review, vol. 1, No. 1, was established July 20, 1905, and it has remained through to date. The founder was W.
