Seeds in the Sagebrush

PRINT IN A WILD LAND by John Myers Myers. 274 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Ho, on the brink of hell, we've cooked for you

This pot of dope, this mass of desert stew,

This warm collation, hot with sulphurous fumes,

And if it suits not, you know what to do.

So the Greenwater (Calif.) Chuck-Walla warned readers, and the plucky little newspaper more than lived up to its lusty pledge--at least as long as it lived. The Chuck-Walla was one of in numerable fly-by-night newspapers that flourished on the Western frontier. Their exuberant, quarrelsome editors are now a forgotten breed. But, as Author John Myers Myers (The Alamo, San Francisco's Reign of Terror) makes clear, they were as much a fixture of the 19th century Western scene as outlaws and lawmen. Some Westerners were as passionate about putting out a paper as others were about accumulating cattle or prospecting for gold.

Glorified Shacks. They could have made a better living doing almost anything else. They seldom stayed long in one place, toting their ramshackle presses from one cluster of shacks in the sagebrush to the next. In their papers, they glorified each new stopping place as the seed of a surging city, though in fact they often went bankrupt, and some of the towns themselves disappeared. Two San Francisco papers, the California Star and the Californian, folded overnight when the city was emptied by the 1848 gold rush. William J. Forbes, who published the Virginia City (Nev.) Daily Trespass, gave up in disgust. "Of 20 men," he said, "19 patronize the saloons and one the newspaper, and I am going with the crowd." He opened a saloon. But when he had built up a sufficient stake, he once again started a newspaper.

Saloons were the most reliable advertisers because they were never short of funds on the hard-drinking frontier. Editors had to coddle other advertisers by playing up their names and wares in the news columns, a practice that hardly died with the old West. Politicians advertised occasionally. "An election was harvesttime," said Harry Ellington Brook, who put out the Quijotoa, Ariz., Prospector. "There was a graduated rate, running from $10 for a Coroner to $250 for a Sheriff. The price charged included a commensurate amount of favorable mention."

Improvising Poetry. To the frontier editor, a pistol was as crucial as a composing stick. Irate readers were all too likely to reply with bullets instead of letters. Some editors were careful not to sleep twice in the same spot because so many of their colleagues had been shot at in their beds. Editors regularly attacked each other in print--and in person. James King, publisher of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, and James P. Casey, publisher of the San Francisco Times, settled their differences in a classic encounter. Casey gunned down King, and Casey, in turn, was lynched by vigilantes. Editors had to handle reporters with care. In 1884, Thomas S. Harris, a reporter for the Los Angeles Republican, became so irritated with his editor, Charles Whitehead, that he shot him dead.

When news was short, editors improvised. They resorted to poetry and Latin and printed irreverent homilies, such as this one from the Virginia City (Mont.) Weekly Republican: "Brigham Young agrees to confine himself to one woman, if every member of Congress will do the same." And they were not above publishing fiction as fact. Mark Twain got his start in just this way when he was working for the Virginia City (Nev.) Territorial Enterprise. In one grisly fabrication, he described how a man murdered his wife and nine children, inflicted a mortal wound on himself, then rode four miles on horseback to a saloon where he brandished his wife's scalp. The tipplers, reported Twain, were much amused.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.