Customer Reviews

Red Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am late getting to this book on my "to-read" pile (© 1998) but 2009 is auspicious and poignant. The Seattle and Denver papers, long widely respected windows into fly-over country, have gone out of the newspaper business. They came from dramatic roots; this is the story of the many editors who took on the Wild West and what a marvelous tale it is.

There are the rough-and-tough anecdotes of life during a gold rush--the drama of the West of Wild Bill Hickok. There are the stories of how towns like Denver and San Francisco came to be the metropolis they are, thanks to editors' civilizing influence. You get a unique view into How the West Was Won. I loved the anecdotes; they don't write stories like that anymore.

Editorial disputes and competitions were settled with guns "Anderson left but returned with a revolver and entered the office without knocking. He shot Bonfils in the neck and chest and Tammen in the shoulder and chest as both men ducked under Polly Pry's full skirt. Anderson was waiting to use the last bullet in his revolver when Bonfils raised Polly's skirt to see what was happening. When Anderson saw Bonfils shaking like a leaf and perspiring heavily, he started laughing and put the gun away. Bonfils and Tammen survived."

There are the ads: for those planning ahead, one merchant advertised asbestos coffins: "No fear of the hereafter, as I guarantee to see a corpse through without singeing a hair."

"The average length of a farmer's life is sixty-five years, while that of a printer is thirty-three, hence the necessity of paying for your paper promptly"--Vermillion Dakota Republican, 1886

Dary includes the first dispatches from the Alamo and the Battle of Little Big Horn; you must read them for yourself.

I loved the development of the papers; blogs don't have this glamour and background. Horace Greeley (of Go West, Young Man) was the first editor to separate opinion from news and was soon imitated. He was also the first to do an interview and publish it in Q-and-A format; his subject was Brigham Young. One editor was so disliked that, lacking tar and feathers, he was covered with molasses and sandburs, ridden around town on a rail and sent on his way. Joseph Charless, founder of the Missouri Gazette in 1808, was one of the first editors west of the Mississippi and frequently packed a pistol, Susan B. Anthony's brother, Colonel Dan Anthony was a anti-slavery newspaper editor in the Kansas Territory and packed two pistols.

"When Anne H. Martin became editor of the Carson News, a Democratic afternoon paper in Nevada, she was untrained in journalism and struggled merely to edit the news. She did not write editorials. But a man named Daily, a tall, courtly gentlemen who was editor of the rival Nevada Tribune, a Republican paper, frequently walked down the street from his office to the Carson News, entered the office, bowed to Anne Martin, walked quietly to her desk, and wrote a vituperative editorial in answer to the abusive attack he had written for his own paper that morning."

Amazing news that historians missed: Ansel Nash Kellogg edited the paper in Baraboo Wisconsin. When his assistant joined the Civil War effort, he discovered he couldn't set four pages of type himself. He arranged to get half-sheet supplements from The Wisconsin State Journal and added them to his own work. This developed into the purchase of full sheets, printed on one side, to which he added local news. At one point, 50 Wisconsin weeklies were doing this. Sensing an opportunity, he founded A.N. Kellogg Newspaper Company, the first syndicate, a pre-wire wire service, and sold these one-sided sheets across the West. He standardized column size, issued guidelines for writing a good story and let editors trade in their old fonts for ones that matched his. "Kellogg soon exercised enormous influence on what Americans read, especially those in the West, where the cost of books was out of most people's reach, and most homes had only a Bible and perhaps an English novel and a medical self-help book." Kellogg later stopped shipping the paper itself and sent stereotypes, ready for casting and printing. Lord, I remember using those in the 1960s and 1970s; it was standard in the ad biz. The impact of this homogenized news (in 3,000 out of 8,500 weeklies) cannot be overstated. I see several PhD theses in this fact alone.

Dary, retired director of the School of Journalism at Oklahoma and author of several prize-winning books tells a wonderful story well, integrating the research with tales of his grandfathers, both frontier editors.

"Generally, academic historians studying the American West have failed to use newspapers as historical sources perhaps because they viewed them as inaccurate, partisan and dishonest. Yet historians readily use personal letters and other documents that display similar defects. ... The people who produced them reported daily events without knowledge of the end. Even when the content is colored by honest or dishonest partisanship, historians could place such material in perspective by checking it against other historical evidence."

Fantastic! Dary combines readable prose with great research without propogating a lot of the myth of the Trans-Mississippi West. Even the typography is spot on! Three helpful appendices in the hardcover edition, I don't have a paperback to compare it to. The appendices include presses used (some illustrated), glossary of printers' terms (slang), and Early Newspapers in States and Territories West of the Mississippi.