the Spectator in the nine years before the old nameplate was finally laid away, in March, 1855. Lee, as already noted, soon obtained the editorship, at first denied him. T'Vault was too political-minded to suit Governor Abernethy and some of the other influential men in the publishing association. T'Vault, in his "non-partisan" salutatory in the first issue, announced himself a strong Jeffersonian, and he felt too much trammeled by article 8 of the constitution of the Oregon Printing Association. This article declared that "the press owned by or in connection with the association shall never be used by any party for the purpose of propagating sectarian principles or doctrines, nor for the discussion of exclusive party politics."
In his salutatory editorial T'Vault expressed the inspired view (rather obviously not his own) that in the state of society in Oregon it would be unwise for the Spectator to advocate partisan politics.
A large majority of the citizens of Oregon (he wrote) are immigrants from the United States. It might also be expected by a portion of the citizens that the Oregon Spectator would be a political organ; but reason and good sense argue differently.
Almost surely it was T'Vault's inability to maintain this non-partisan point of view that was soon to force him off the job.
T'Vault charged in his valedictory, April 2, 1846, that the reason assigned for his dismissal—his faulty orthography and syntax — was not the real reason. It was politics, he charged; and it is not unlikely that his editorial eulogy of Andrew Jackson may have irritated the influential Governor Abernethy, who was a Whig and a Methodist. Here we have the first journalistic clash between the New England and the Southern element among the early Oregon settlers.
T'Vault was a Kentuckian, supposedly of Scotch-Irish and French descent. He was trained for the law but was believed to have had some newspaper training in Arkansas before crossing the plains in 1845.[1]
T'Vault was politically prominent in Oregon from the start. He member of the legislature of the provisional government in 1846 and, as already noted, was prosecuting attorney and postmaster general at the time of his election to edit the Spectator. In 1851 he established an express line from Winchester, in Douglas county, to Yreka, Siskiyou county, California. In the following year he participated, with no great glory, in the Rogue River Indian war. In 1855, together with Messrs. Taylor and Blakeley, he purchased the plant of the Umpqua Gazette, of Scottsburg, and moved it to Jack sonville, changing the name to the Table Rock Sentinel. He left this paper in 1859 after its name had been changed to the Oregon Sentinel. In 1863 he issued the Jacksonville Intelligencer from the plant of the defunct Civilian. The venture was unsuccessful. He withdrew
