his brother-in-law, who had purchased the old Mountain Sentinel from McComas, moved it back from Union after 10 years, setting it up in the new part of the town, a mile nearer the railroad than the old town had been. They changed the name to the Journal and made the politics Democratic as the paper had been when founded.
Soon afterward the old Gazette, Republican paper, was moved by Snodgrass and associates from "old town" and housed in a fine new brick building of its own in the growing new business section. The original townsite was now without a paper. Under the Snodgrass ownership W. F. Snodgrass, a son of the founder, was editor for a time. Other editors were Mr. Stevenson, C. T. McDaniel, who later went into the banking business at Wallowa.
Meanwhile the Journal passed from Kuhn and Owen to a group of Democrats headed by Henry Rinehart. Rinehart's editors included G. W. Post and Bert Huffman, the Blue Mountain poet, who occasionally sends a poem from his Alberta home to newspapers in his native country. Huffman, born in Union county in 1870[1] was a man of varied occupations. Lula R. Lorenz, writing of him, said: "He is an editorial writer of recognized force and virility, is a loco motive engineer, has farmed, raised stock, operated sawmills, trailed horses across the plains, mountaineered and roughed it in every phase of western life." More versatile than most, yet he is not untypical of the men who edited and published so many of the early Oregon papers. His poem, "The Lament of the Umatilla," has the honor, according to N. J. Levinson, then Sunday editor of the Oregonian, of being the first original poem that had been paid for in half a century of their publication by the Oregonian.[2] He was managing editor of the East Oregonian, Pendleton, when his book of poems was published, by that newspaper, in 1907.
The era of the daily was approaching. Patterson and Scott, two newspaper men from South Dakota, purchased the Journal in 1888. Patterson was sharp of tongue and pen, and his editorials and speeches built Democratic prestige for the paper. To this firm belongs the credit of attempting the first daily in La Grande. The Daily Journal appeared in November 1889; it was a small letter-press folder carrying under its masthead the slogan "Little Acorns Make Big Trees." This watchword gave the paper the nickname "The Little Acorn." The final issue, No. 72, appeared January 31, 1890, with four 6×9-inch pages, each made up of two 13-em columns. The valedictory blisteringly consigned to Hades all non-supporters of the Little Acorn.
Publisher Glenn of Weiser, Idaho, who followed Patterson and Scott in charge of the weekly Journal, changed the name for a time to the La Grande Post.
Stimulated by the piping political times, the eighteen-nineties saw three brand-new papers springing up in La Grande—the Grande Ronde Chronicle, the Observer, and the Union County Farmer. Two
