next day, with such military honors as we were able to dis play, were conveyed to his family homestead.
The paper had only 13 bits of advertising, including an advertisement for Mr. Curry himself as a manufacturing jeweler. The ads were all written in the usual "card" form.
Five years after suspending the Free Press, Curry was appointed secretary of the interior and in November, 1854 was made governor, being the last chief executive of Oregon territory. He was one of the youngest governors in Oregon history, being only 34 when appointed.
On January 1, 1861, he joined S. J. McCormick in the publication of the Portland Daily Advertiser, Oregon's second daily paper, started just a month and two days before the Morning Oregonian. The paper suspended in 1863, and this terminated Curry's journalistic ventures. He died, aged 58, July 28, 1878.
Oregon's third periodical publication, the Oregon American and Evangelical Unionist, printed on the old Whitman-Spalding mission press originally sent to the Hawaiian islands by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1821, has no particular significance aside from its historical associations. This paper, like the Spectator, was usually printed twice a month. Edited by Rev. John S. Griffin with Charles F. Putnam, printer, the paper was issued from the home of Mr. Griffin on Tualatin plains near Hillsboro. The first number appeared June 7, 1848. The first woman compositor on the Pacific coast learned the trade on this publication. She was the wife of Mr. Putnam, who taught her to set type. Putnam came to Oregon in 1846, and his bride, the first woman typesetter, was Rozelle Applegate, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Applegate, noted Oregon pioneers. Eight issues were published before the Unionist, which was about as much of a magazine as a newspaper, was suspended in October.
Griffin was charging $4 a year in currency (wheat was legal tender at that time) or $3 in real money.
Publication was irregular. The editor announced in the first issue, that "We will not declare our days of issuing until the next number, hoping some mail opportunity will be secured, and if so will issue that day most favorable for immediate circulation." The mail service continued poor, and it was not possible to issue regularly.
Subscribers who disliked Griffin's policies are said to have brought about the demise of his paper by bribing his printer to quit.[1] This can hardly be proved, however, in view of the strong pull from the California gold fields, which carried the printers away from other newspapers too.
The little paper at Tualatin Plains suffered as all the other pioneer papers in the West from the idiosyncrasies of the mail service. Use of the word service is probably an extravagance. The paper
- ↑ George W. Fuller, A History of the Pacific Northwest, 289.
