"What! Increase the number of copies and run them off on a Washington hand-press? I should say not!"
Harold R. Benjamin, who later became a professor of education, successively, at the University of Oregon, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Colorado, was one of the Boardman editors.
Irrigon.—It used to be a treat to hear old Addison Bennett, then an Oregonian reporter with a sort of roving commission, pronounce the name of one of the most picturesque of Oregon newspapers, which he founded and ran for several years—"the Oregon Irrigator of Irrigon, Oregon," he used to chant merrily, with the words running "trippingly on the tongue." Irrigon, though still on the map, has failed to achieve its early promise, and the Irrigator has been gone nigh unto a quarter of a century—things so mellifluously named have a way of fading out; but in its day it was something.
After an interesting career in the East and Middle West, Bennett came to Oregon to spend the last two decades of his life. In his sixtieth year, at an age when so many are beginning to contemplate retirement, he began publication of the Irrigator, in 1904. The publication, a four-page six-column folio, issued on Wednesdays, was designed to promote irrigation for his section. There Bennett built up a reputation for "jackrabbit stories" published in the Irrigator and also sent to other papers.
Bennett himself was a "card." Perhaps he will be remembered longest for a prairie ballad he wrote while he was publishing a chain of those small papers in Kansas which drew their sustenance from the publication of final proof land notices. Old-timers remember how they ran; most of the surviving early typos could still set them up from memory: "Notice is hereby given that the following-named settler has filed notice of his intention to make final proof in support of his claim." . . so they used to go. This ballad was entitled "The Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim."
Like Bret Harte| and many other apparently typical westerners, Bennett was born in the East—in Orange county, New York, January 8, 1845, and he started his newspaper career on the Wheeling, (W. Va.) Intelligencer in 1868. In 1879 he went to Kansas with a colony of 400 persons from Zanesville, Ohio.
In Meade county, Kansas, he had the telescopic optimism to start the Pearlette Call when there was only one house in that part of the state; within a few months there were 2500 homesteaders in the region. Land notices! By the next May, however, grasshoppers riding the hot winds had driven all but 96 persons out of the new county.
Dodge City, lively frontier town, was his next stopping-place. At Garden City he got rich publishing those land-claim notices; at one time he owned 17 small papers in that part of the state.
