Prominent Newspapers of the Pacific Coast
IV. The Spokesman-Review
By N. W. Durham
FEW journals anywhere, none in the Pacific Northwest, have a
field of more varied interest and resource than that filled by the
Spokesman-Review. This newspaper had a sworn average circulation
in February, 1903, (Daily and Twice-a-Week) of 43,583 copies, a list that will have grown to 45,000 ere the Pacific
Monthly containing this article is laid before its readers. These figures are given to convey quickly and clearly an idea of the scope and influence of this paper and the city of its publication.
No easy field this in which to edit and publish a daily journal. Having a commanding circulation in Washington, Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Western-Montana and Southern British Columbia, the Spokesman-Review must necessarily print the news and discuss the interests of four states and one foreign country. It must, for example, print the legislative news of all these various governments. It must deal constantly with agriculture, mining, fruit-growing, lumbering, stock-raising, fishing and irrigation, not to speak of scores of minor interests which ramify these chief industries.
This would be exacting work in the older communities of the Union. In this newer land, where the village of today may be the aspiring city of another decade, and where a single year may change lonely prairie regions and primeval solitudes into populous communities, the need of constant study of changing conditions is imperative.
In this complicated field the Spokesman-Review has grown apace with the fine country around it. Year by year its daily message has been borne afar by railroad trains and steamboats, by stage coach and pack train, by canoe and cayuse, and by resolute mountain carriers on snowshoes.
This article would be misleading if it conveyed an impression that the present attainment came with easy effort or lack of long anxiety and severe financial losses. There were years of ruinous competition, and other years of profound depression, when it seemed that effort to establish here a large and successful morning newspaper had been conceived in false judgment. Other men, possessed of ability and means, had tried and given up the task in despair, and many a time it seemed that the effort was to end in grievous disappointment.
The history of every successful newspaper has interest, and that of the Spokesman-Review bears out the rule. As the name implies, the paper is the result of a combination of two competing journals. The Review was the older paper. It was founded as a weekly by Frank Dallam, now residing at Loomis, Washington, in May, 1883. Spokane was a little frontier town, and as facilites were lacking here, Mr. Dallam was under necessity of carting the forms of the first numbers to Cheney, where they were printed on the old Sentinel press.
The winter of 1883–4 brought the stampede to the Coeur d'Alene mining district, and the outside world began to hear of Spokane. The town put on a bold front and grew ambitious. Mr. Dallam caught the fever and in June, 1884, began publication of a little evening daily. He nursed this along until the autumn of 1886, when he changed to a morning paper and began to print a "pony" telegraphic report from Portland. And all the while the little daily was put to press on the primitive hand
