arranged to receive one regular mail a week from Portland, less than 30 miles away, with additional service whenever foreign "intelligence" appeared in the river. News of the death of John Quincy Adams on February 23, 1848, reached the Columbia river via the Sandwich islands (Hawaii) four months later, in time to be told in the American and Unionist June 31. The news of the boundary treaty of 1846, incidentally, also came by way of Hawaii. The treaty dated June 15, was news to Dr. W. F. Tolmie of the Hudson's Bay Company at Nisqually, conveyed to him in a letter from Peter Skene Ogden and James Douglas, dated November 4, 1846.[1]
So the little American and Unionist said, in its first number, under the heading "Mails," "Probably the greatest embarrassment to the successful operation of the presses in Oregon is the want of mails."
The American's press, while not used for newspaper purposes until after the Spectator's machine, really was an older press. The press was used by the Spalding mission at Lapwai, near Lewiston, Idaho, and was sent from the Hawaiian Islands by the American Board of Foreign Missions, for use in printing hymns and getting out an edition of the Bible translated into the Indian tongues. On one occasion the press was lost overboard into the Columbia river but was salvaged and used in the publication of Rev. John S. Griffin's paper at Tualatin Plains.
Lot Whitcomb, founder of the town of Milwaukie, bitter rival of Portland in pioneer days, was the founder of Oregon's fourth paper, the Western Star, dedicated to the promotion of the interests in Milwaukie as a possible metropolis of the Oregon country. This paper was more interesting, longer-lived, and more influential in the life of early Oregon than any of the previous periodicals. It was a weekly of four six-column pages with columns 14 ems (2⅓ inches) wide. With John Orvis Waterman and William Davis Carter in charge of publications, the little Star carried on its first issue the date November 21, 1850, giving it two weeks priority over the Weekly Oregonian. Portland, young rival of Milwaukie, had as yet no newspaper.
The Spectator of December 11, 1850, credited the paper with thoroughgoing Democracy, saying: "The paper comes out flat-footed Democratic. It said, 'In politics we are Democratic and shall be governed by the principles of Jeffersonian Democracy, advocating measures, not men.'" The new paper took an active part in the political campaign of 1851. In that spring the Star published the correspondence of McLoughlin, Wyeth, and Thurston.
Whitcomb was to learn what many a publisher, before and since, has found to his grief—that a losing newspaper has few equals as a means of sucking the promoter's money into a bottomless pit. Things went so badly for Whitcomb that he soon had to turn
- ↑ C. B. Bagley, O. H. Q., December, 1912.
