P. Ely, who, like the other Rainier journalistic pioneers, came across the river from Cowlitz county, Washington, where he continued to conduct the Cowlitz Valley Journal of Kelso. The new paper's salutatory, signed by W. P. Ely and G. E. Kellogg (Mr. Kellogg probably was the resident editor), said:
We do not come with a brass band nor street parade, nor make any great promises; that is not our style; but we will endeavor in a painstaking manner to publish a live, newsy, up-to-date paper that will merit your liberal patronage. The paper will be four pages in size for the present, but it is the intention to increase to six or eight pages as soon as business will justify it. . .
Display advertising was 50 cents an inch a month, with a double rate for transient matter. Cost accounting systems were not in general use in those days to guide those incurable optimists who expected to conduct a newspaper on rates such as those. A. P. Bettersworth's name was at the masthead as editor for a few issues in 1906. George H. Umbaugh, lately of the Lincoln County Leader, was a later editor.
An anti-saloon paper named the Advance, printed in the Houlton Register office, made its first appearance Saturday, April 14, 1906, Its editor was H. G. Kemp, a Methodist minister, who at the time was editor of the Register, and W. F. Ficher, a Rainier attorney, assistant editor. It pledged itself to an open warfare on the saloons. The Advance was a four-column paper of eight pages, four of them home-printed. In later years the Review itself supported prohibition.
Ayer's records indicate that Mr. Kemp was running the Register as a twice-a-week in Rainier in 1906. Within two years the Review had the field to itself. This was the last competition faced by the Review until 1927, when for a few months a bit of local factional fighting resulted in the publication of the weekly News by F. J. Robertson. It suspended the following January. For a time, in 1907, E. H. Flagg, Oregon newspaper veteran, publisher of several news papers, was editor of the Review. Walter C. Fry, who like Mr. Kemp, was a Methodist minister, was editor for a time after Mr. Flagg, remaining until March 1911, when he was succeeded by P. G Garrison. Charles A. Nutt became editor March 14, 1912, and publisher November 7 of the same year.
Up to this time the Review had been handset. Mr. Nutt in stalled a linotype in November 1912 and increased the size of the paper from six to seven columns, some of which, however, was plate matter.
Another Washington newspaper man, A. E. Veatch, a former teacher, farmer, and lawyer, who had lately sold his Washington Call at Montesano, took charge of the Review in September 1919
