en-track railroad from Junction City to the Horton district about 15 miles away.
He was president of the Oregon Press Conference in 1932.
Eugene.—The year of the establishment of the Eugene Guard is definite at 1867; the month, however, is uncertain. A researcher46 who worked in the archives of the Oregon Historical Society at Port land places the date at March, 1867. Volume 2, No. 5, however, the oldest issue on file in the University of Oregon library, is dated November 21, 1868, indicating October 24, 1867, as the date of the first issue. This would not, though, be entirely conclusive, since regularity and continuity of publication was not so heavily emphasized in those early days as later, and a hiatus is not impossible.
The founder was J. B. Alexander, whose grandson, George L. Alexander, was for many years publisher of the Lebanon Express, retiring not long ago at an advanced age. The founder did not re main long, and the issue of November 21, 1868, found J. W. Skaggs in charge, as, apparently, he had been for several months.
The next week there appeared at the masthead the firm name Thompson & Victor as publishers of the young Democratic weekly. William Victor, who, in the words of his partner, "was a halfbreed Cherokee Indian,"47 left no great impression on Oregon journalism; but Thompson, his fellow-printer turned publisher, was a militant and picturesque figure, known for many years up and down the Pacific Coast as "Bud" Thompson.
Thompson had broken into journalism under Joaquin Miller on the old Eugene Herald, taking a job as printer in 1862 instead of obeying his father's wishes and going to school. He had been a student at the old Columbia College in Eugene in 1859. An older student was Cincinnatus Hiner (Joaquin) Miller, for whom Thompson already had developed great admiration. Miller, Thompson, W. H. Byars (later a newspaper man in Salem and surveyor general of the state), Finley Watson, Miller's brother George Melvin, and George Ogle "bached" in a shack 12×14 feet in size on the out skirts of Eugene. The president of the little college was a Professor Ryan, referred to elsewhere in this volume as the man who indulged in a bit of extra-curricular gunplay. He shot and wounded B. J. Pengra, publisher of the People's Press, for pro-union, anti-secession articles he believed Pengra had written but which really were the work of young Harrison R. Kincaid, who also was a Columbia College student.
The Democratic Herald had been founded in 1859, but failed to make the grade, suspending in 1860. It was soon revived by Anthony Noltner with Joaquin Miller as editor. Miller, as Thompson recalled, espoused the cause of the confederacy as the under dog, and the paper was one of several Willamette Valley papers suspended in the early years of the Civil war. After its resumption the govern-
