subscriptions; other employees were Rude Edwards, who fed the press and delivered papers, and his wife, Gertrude, a hand compositor.
The little paper cut a wide swath politically. Dunbar had a genius for picking out the popular side of any controversy. He was a stunter, too. At the end of some particularly sensational yarn, which had the readers gripping their chairs, he would sometimes use the old James Gordon Bennett trick—a weasel phrase, "Of course, this is not so, but it might happen any time."
The weak spot in the Guide's armor was the health of the editor. He became afflicted with dropsy, and for months, though he remained doggedly on the job, the end was obvious. He died in 1904. Drake sold his interest and went to work for E. P. Dodd on the Tribune, later going back to the E. O., on which, together with its allied Astorian-Budget, he has spent more than 30 years.
Pendleton's biggest news-covering job was on something that didn't happen in the town at all. This was the Heppner flood catastrophe of June, 1903. First news of the cloudburst reached Pendleton June 15, and the East Oregonian came out that day with 3 1/2 columns of detail on the disaster, seventy miles away, under a four-column display head. The next ten days the paper carried more than 30 columns of news on the catastrophe, which cost hundreds of lives, and the relief work, with editorials urging help for the sufferers. By-lines were not in style in the newspapers of those days, and some excellent news reporting went to the reader anonymously.
E. P. Dodd, then editor of the Tribune, was among the news men who went to the scene. "About 11 a. m.," he said recently, "I was told of the flood and asked to join a party going to Heppner. We secured an engine and a box-car to Echo. Before leaving Pendleton I telephoned ahead for a saddle horse, and one was ready for me. We sauntered along across the desert during a hot June day, until the sweat was well up on the saddler, and then he took a gallop, and the next 15 miles of the 50 he took on the dead run, reaching Heppner with me at about dusk. I left him in a feed barn and gathered the story. In two hours I had over 200 names of the drowned, all the facts and some of the incidents, a bit to eat and was again astride of the faithful sorrel down the washed-out road way for lone, the nearest telegraph office left operating by the ravages of the torrents. Believe it or not, that animal never broke a gallop through that 18 miles and we reached lone by 2 a. m. The Oregonian staff correspondent was there with piles of interviews and hearsay, and would not give me the wires, until I told him what I had. He cleared the ways and sent the story to the morning paper (Tribune) and the Oregonian and A. P., in time for morning editions. I have forgotten who the Oregonian man was and never saw him afterwards. My paper was advertising by bulletins that would
