THE PIONEER PERIOD
THE year 1846 opens an epoch in Oregon history. In that year the northern boundary question was settled by treaty with Great Britain, making Oregon a part of the United States. In that year, too, there began publication in the little wooden village at the falls of the Willamette the first newspaper in the whole great West.
It was 13 years, almost to a day, before the admission of Oregon as a state, that its journalism was born with the first issue of the Oregon Spectator, at Oregon City, February 5, 1846. From that day to the present the history of Oregon journalism has paralleled the history of the commonwealth.
It is hard for one of this generation to visualize the conditions attending the publication of that early newspaper, the first issued west of the Missouri river. Those were the days when the covered wagon drawn by "deliberate oxen" was the accepted mode of travel —days when towns grew up along the water courses because there were as yet no roads; days of log cabins and cedar shake lean-tos; when a hundred miles was a good day's journey by water or a week's journey by land. Days of hardship, of privation. But— days of pioneer hope, of courage, of forward-looking; days when interest in things educational and uplifting far outran the meagre facilities and stimulated the rugged pioneer to the cooperative effort which laid the foundations of a later culture.
To the north, the hunter and the trapper held sway under the watchful eye of the Hudson's Bay Company. To the south, California was in its last year of Mexican sovereignty. The last civilization to the east had its outposts on the banks of the Missouri. So Oregon pioneered the way on the Pacific. In those days the Oregon country was the whole vast domain north of California up to the controversial Canadian border and as far east as the Rocky mountains. The little old Spectator was started long before this vast region was cut up into a group of several sovereign states.
California was to have no newspaper until Colton & Semple issued their one-page 12½×8¾ Californian at Monterey, August 15, 1846,[1] seven months after the Spectator appeared. The first news paper in Washington was not to appear until September 11, 1852, when Wiley & McElroy established the Columbian at Olympia, largely with the aim of urging Congress to constitute that part of Oregon north of the Columbia river as the territory of Columbia.
Farther east, of course, journalism was strongly established. When the Spectator appeared as the pioneer newspaper of the West, big daily papers were flourishing in the cities of the East. The whole number of dailies was 254, published in nearly 200 cities. The whole number of newspapers, daily, weekly, semi-weekly, and tri-weekly, published in the United States, was 2,526.[2]
