Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 18.djvu/172

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144
Geo. H. Himes

brothers, a brother-in-law and family to return with him. Mr. Barnes resumed his business, that of merchandising, soon after his second arrival, and Mr. Murphy, although a boy, became an efficient salesman. Mr. Barnes was a member of the first city council of Portland, having been elected April 7, 1851.

In the spring of 1852 the entire Barnes connection removed to Olympia by sea, and Mr. Barnes opened a store, Mr. Murphy still being employed as a clerk. In 1854 he became a pupil of Bernard Cornelius, A. M., a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and a member of the College of Preceptors, London, England, with more than twenty years of experience as a teacher before beginning his "select" school May 8, 1854. It was during the year and a half while he was a pupil of this man that Mr. Mur^^y laid the foundation for his future excellent use of virile English.

In 1857 Mr. Murphy returned to Portland and became an apprentice in the office of the Oregon Weekly Times. He worked in the same capacity in the office of the Democratic Standard, also in Portland, and in the Oregon Argus office, Oregon City, altogether a little over three years. Then he formed a partnership with L. E. V. Coon, a newspaper man from California, and issued the Vancouver (W. T.) Chronicle, the first paper in that city. Three months later, finding association with Mr. Coon—better known as "Alphabetical Coon" —decidedly uncongenial, he chose Olympia as the seat of his life work, and on Nov. 17, 1860, he issued the first number of the Washington Standard, and at the time his connection with it was severed on August 1, 1912, he had edited every edition of the paper and was its sole owner for fifty-two years—an unusual record for any part of the United States and the only one of the kind west of the Rocky mountains.

Temperamentally, Mr. Murphy was a Democrat; but at the time he established the Standard—only eleven days after the momentous presidential campaign of 1860 had ended, and before the result of the election was known in this part of the country (there was no telegraph line to the Pacific North-