to make a rousing go of it, distancing the older Express in the circulation race, 367 to 321 by sworn count, in 1905.
March 1, 1906, E. J. Murray was brought in from Portland to be editor of the Republican for Smith, beginning a career which was to last through all the stormy period of Klamath history.
Meanwhile the Fred Cronemillers were getting out a good little paper in the Evening Herald, which they started in July, 1906. It was only a five-column folio but covered the town very well, with Fred Cronemiller getting the news and advertising, Mrs. Cronemiller setting all the type by hand herself, and the three children delivering the paper, and helping out wherever they could.
Smith and Murray together purchased the Herald early in 1908. They raised it from tabloid to standard size in February, installed Klamath's first linotype in July. Murray cooperated with Smith in the management of both the daily Herald and the weekly Republican until 1911, when he left to purchase the Chronicle, a daily started the year before in the interest of the older section of the town. The Herald was promoting the Klamath Development Company's plain to shift the courthouse from the old location in the west end near the original Linkville. Taylor's Express was not very active in the fight, and there were rumors that the development company was soon to get the paper. In desperation the west-end people launched a daily paper, the Chronicle, Monday, April 4, 1910. The Chronicle made no secret of its aims and plunged at once into the thick of the court house fight. Within a year, however, the same A. C. Wrenn who the next year turned the Express into a K. D. backer, had become editor of the Chronicle and changed its policies. Murray purchased the Chronicle October 10, 1911, and sold out in the following February.
That February of 1912 is a memorable time in Klamath Falls journalism, for it marked the advent of Sam Evans' famous Northwestern. There were three dailies in the town of 6,000 when Evans arrived with $25,000 to $50,000 of his own and an indeterminate amount of backing that looked rather formidable. The dailies were A. C. Wrenn's morning Pioneer Press (the old Express), E. J. Murray's Evening Chronicle, and W. O. Smith's Evening Herald.
Launching a policy that soon had not only Klamath Falls but all of western journalism gasping in astonishment, Evans bought the Pioneer Press and the Chronicle, suspended them, and started the Klamath Falls Northwestern, a morning daily. It was a journalistic rocket, which in three years was lying burned out by the wayside, its owner missing from the scene.
Evans was an attractive young man in his late twenties when he came to Klamath Falls. The son of a Stockton (Calif.) physician, he preferred writing to practicing medicine and became capable with his pen. Sunset Magazine, promoting interest in the Klamath country
