The paper did not continue prosperous. The Morning Oregonian came along within a few weeks, and with the Advertiser also in the small field, the competition was too keen.
It was suspended in December, 1863. Editors following Leland, who seems never to have remained long in one position, were Henry Shipley, A. S. Gould, W. N. Walter, and W. Lair Hill, the latter an editor of considerable ability.
The Times was followed up by the Daily Evening Tribune, printed in the Times' plant by Coll Van Cleve, later of Yaquina, Albany, and other Willamette valley towns, and Ward Latta for a month after its start on January 16, 1865. It was regarded as a good little paper but could not compete with the Oregonian.
Next came the Morning Oregonian, February 4, 1861. It has survived all other dailies in the field at the time of its establishment. (It is discussed elsewhere in this volume.)
The population of Portland was not such as would be expected to support many daily papers. There were fewer than three thousand persons in the new city according to the 1860 census, taken in 1859. The exact figures were 2,874, or about one-tenth of the size of Salem at this time.
A peculiar set of circumstances, political and economic, led to the establishment of Portland's sixth daily newspaper, the Daily Union, founded in January, 1864, and running until May. Amory Holbrook, then editor of the Oregonian, had incurred the displeasure of the pro-Union group, and at the same time the newly formed typographical union in Portland had come into controversy with the Oregonian over the question of piece-scale vs. day wages, the printers contending for a rate per thousand ems on newspaper composition.
The politicians and the labor group got together and backed the establishment of a rival paper to the Oregonian. H. L. Pittock, man ager of the Oregonian, describes, from the employers' point of view, Portland's first real strike—one of only two newspaper strikes in the history of typographical organization in Portland (34), and young Harrison R. Kincaid of Eugene, publisher of the new Oregon State Journal in Eugene and a stanch Union Republican, tells what it was the Union men were charging against Holbrook. Let's take up the labor end first. The men, Mr. Pittock relates, actually struck to enforce their demands on the publisher and went to work on the new paper, which had its office in the same building and on the same floor as the Oregonian—a juxtaposition not without its embarrassing features.
The Union was, as Mr. Pittock related, "notable because of the number of well-known men connected with among them Governor competitors Gibbs and W. Lair Hill. Other competitors (of the Oregonian) had meanwhile disappeared. . . Opposition did not last long. Differences arose among the printers, and the paper suspended." Among the
