The Territorial Enterprise newspaper arrived on the Comstock during the summer of 1860, and the first issue bearing a Virginia City dateline was in November of that same year.
Unfortunately, no files of this edition survive. The newspaper files up to that time all perished in the great fire of 1875. After the fire, back issues of the Enterprise are fairly complete in various institutions such as the Storey County Courthouse, Yale Library, Bancroft Library and the Nevada Historical Archives.
The first issue of the paper printed in Virginia City was published from the corner of A street and Sutton Avenue, then the heart of the booming business district. For three years it was printed under fairly primitive conditions on a hand operated press from hand-set type. In 1878, however, the paper was sufficiently prosperous to occupy the Territorial Enterprise Building on C Street. The first steam operated press in Nevada operated there.
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In the very shadow of the High Sierra, in a drafty shack through whose chinks the December snowfall filtered to form miniature drifts along floor and windowsill, two bearded men assisted by an apprentice boy wrestled with a secondhand Washington printing press.
The patent furniture of the primeval instrument was cold. So were the chases holding the long columns of agate and brevier in at least an approximation of true alignment. The ink on the hand-activated inking roller had forgotten that it was ever fluid. Everything was gelid to the touch and the breath of the two frock-coated men turned white as they panted over their task. The cannon-ball stove in the corner, for all it glowed red with a fire of cottonwood logs, hardly made a dent in the Antarctic cold that enveloped the entire Territory of Western Utah.
The two men made frequent reference to a handy black bottle containing a sovereign remedy of the countryside, called valley tan; and the apprentice boy made mental notes to explore some day for himself its possibilities.
The two ancients also cursed with fearful and ornate profanity, drawing upon resources of the literary antiquities both Biblical and profane, upon the classical humanities, upon the Book of Mormon, and upon a surprising knowledge of anatomic possibilities both animal and human. They cursed Nevada by sections and quarter sections. And most of all they made special reservations in the permanent residential areas of hell for Richard M. Hoe, in far-off New York, who had devised the infernal contrivance with which they were contesting, and his brother Robert Hoe, who merchandised the artifact.
The accursed brothers Hoe conducted a well-established and highly profitable business in downtown Manhattan at the comer of Broom and Sheriff streets where they offered for sale all sorts of ingenious aids to printing: hand presses of the Washington plan, proofing machines, stitching and binding devices, type cases and such. But only hell itself, the two printers of Mormon Station were in accord, could have outshopped such a desperate devising as the one at hand; and back to the foundries and machine shops of hell they consigned the Hoes and all their works.
The elder and more proficient blasphemer, did he but know it, was merely getting in practice for an exercise in cursing some twenty years later which would become legendary throughout the entire West and elevate the technique of execration to realms of supernal artistry.
In desperation, the thwarted molders of the public mind poured Niagaras of valley tan into themselves and over the running parts of the machinery as a lubricant. Wasn’t it an accepted fact that whisky was in the ink of the pioneer press both metaphorically and factually? And at length the machinery creaked into a reasonable facsimile of action, and the more sober partner was able to snatch from its inner economy the six column one sheet the first copy of the first newspaper ever to be printed in the howling wilderness of Nevada.
The logotype read, The Territorial Enterprise. Thus, in a mist both blasphemous and alcoholic, prophetic of things to come, was born the paper that was shortly to be the pattern and glass of frontier journalism everywhere, and eventually was to achieve immortality as one of the romantic properties of the Old American West.
Lacking the crystal ball of Mrs. Sandy Bowers, a seeress even at that moment headed for the same place as The Enterprise, thirty miles distant on the slopes of Mount Davidson, W.L.. Jernegan and Alfred James were unable to see the promise of things to come in their so perilously delivered child. The partners buttoned their frock coats across their chests against the elements and ran through the snow to the Stockade Bar to show the first copy of the paper to Isaac Roop, who happened to be in town from Susanville.
Other than the indomitable hanker of the frontier to set itself up in the pattern of the good life the pioneers had known back home, it is difficult at this remove to understand what motivated the seedy itinerants Jernegan and James to ferry Nevada’s first newspaper bodily overland from Salt Lake by ox team and hang out their shingle in Mormon Station. The community, which was later to change its name to Genoa, as it remains to this day, numbered something fewer than two hundred permanent residents. It was a freighting station on the emigrant route to California, a staging depot where teamsters and draymen changed horses and oxen for the ascent of the Sierra on the way to Lake Tahoe, Strawberry, Sportsman’s Hall, and, eventually, Hangtown.
Mormon Station needed a newspaper far less than it required a physician, a pharmacist, and an undertaker. It had a sufficiency of wheelwrights, farriers, and bartenders. A newspaper was at best a devising of metropolitan luxury; at worst, an economic folly. But just as every community in the land must, only a few years from now, have a railroad of its very own, so did every hamlet and crossroads in the West pant as the hart panteth for the water springs for its own newspaper. Jernegan and James were the men anointed to bring this consummation to Mormon Station on the evening of December 18, 1858.
Save by professional chroniclers of yesterday, Jernegan and James are forgotten now, but once, like the stout Cortez, they stood on a peak in Darien and a world spread itself before them. They were the prototype and archetype of the frontier printer, in soup stained frock coat and dented top hat, resolute, his breath perfumed with strong waters, type stick in one hand, the other on the stock of a belted gun, facing Indians, the wilderness, the opposition, creditors and hangover. O Pioneers!
Jernegan and James, according to Dan De Quille in later years, had been at something of a loss for a name for their paper and had written to a friend in the Mother Lode diggings of California, one Washington Wright, asking for suggestions. A return letter from Wright, brought to Mormon Station by Snowshoe Thompson, the universal postman, suggested that since the venture was a new enterprise in the then Territory of Western Utah, what could be more appropriate than The Territorial Enterprise?
Jernegan and James were delighted and invited everyone in the Stockade Bar to have something for their stomachs, and The Territorial Enterprise became the first of many papers of that name elsewhere in the land.
No self-respecting newspaper in those mannered days could come into being without a prospectus, and the partners lost no time in having one run up. It read: A JOURNAL FOR THE EASTERN SLOPE
The Undersigned very respectfully announce that they will commence on the first week of November next, 1858, at Carson City, Eagle Valley, the publication of a Weekly Independent Newspaper, entitled The Territorial Enterprise. It will industriously and earnestly be devoted to the advancement of everything pertaining to the beautiful country bounded on the West by the Sierra Nevadas and extending into and forming the Great Basin of the Continent . . .
The arrivals and departures of the Great Overland Mail and the incidents thereto will be carefully noted, and it will be the aim and Pride of the undersigned to print a Journal which will be popular with and advantageous to every resident of the Utah Valleys. They, therefore, confidently rely upon the encouragement and liberality of their fellow residents. W.L. Jernegan & Alfred James
The first issue of the Enterprise appeared neither at Carson City nor during the first week of November.
For reasons which have not survived, the proprietors decided on Mormon Station, perhaps because while all the teaming headed for the Sierra passes through there it did not all go through Carson, a deal of it deriving from Carson Valley without passing through the future capital itself. The postponement of the first issue was ascribable to mechanical breakdown.
At the last moment it was discovered that the publishers were shy of type. There were insufficient characters of a given face to piece out crossheads and display lines, and an urgent note was dispatched by Snowshoe Thompson to a Hangtown dealer in such matters, begging a shirttail of metal on loan and promising to repay in the terms of optimism customary in such cases. All the stage roads were already blockaded by snow and the drivers and teamsters securely holed up in Mormon Station for a winter of draw poker and Saturday night stabbings, so the precious type had to come back in the pack of the irreplaceable Snowshoe.
No copy of that historic first paper has survived into the present, although its front page is reproduced in the then new halftone Process in Thompson & West’s monumental history of Nevada. The mortality rate among early Western documents in an age of wooden buildings and universal conflagration was fearfully high.
The front-page date line of The Enterprise in its earliest issues read “Carson Valley, Utah Territory Published Every Saturday Morning at the Office on Mill Street, Genoa, Carson Valley.”
The copy for July 30, 1859, which reached the hands of Thompson & West and has since disappeared from human ken, was devoted in its entirety to printing the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention which had convened at Genoa twelve days earlier.
Knowing the sources of contemporary news, however, it is easy to reconstruct in the mind’s eye the early issues of the paper. Notices of jury duty were flanked by advertisements for Stoughton’s Bitters. Proclamations by Isaac Roop, by now governor, ran next to the notices of sales by Mormon farmers relinquishing reluctantly their rich farmsteads along the valleys of Western Utah to answer the recall to Deseret. There were the births and deaths of a community of two hundred pioneers, the departures of the great Overland Stages for Sacramento and Salt Lake, disquieting stories of Indians along the Humboldt and, as the year 1859 drew to a close, squibs telling with increasing frequency of the discoveries of gold along the slopes of Mount Davidson thirty-odd miles to the north.
Matters of national consequence arrived in the form of news boldly lifted without so much as by-your-leave, as was the universal custom of the time, from six-weeks old copies of the bedsheet-sized Boston Advertiser, the National Intelligencer from Washington, the weekly edition of Horace Greeley’s revered New York Tribune, and the New Orleans Picayune, the nation’s leading journals of news and opinion of the era. heroic quantities of valley tan, and resumed publication when Snowshoe Thompson came over the hill with a few precious sheers of newsprint from the dealer in Hangtown.
It was all in the accepted scheme of things for pioneer editors. So were occasional short rations. Both during its stay in Carson and Eagle valleys, as well as during its early existence on the Comstock, The Enterprise editors sometimes fell upon lean days. Hard currency was difficult to come by and credit more so. Often subscribers paid in trade goods and if half a bear, a hind quarter of venison, or a dozen sage hens arrived in payment of the delinquent subscription, the staff lived high as long as the fat of the land lasted. “Let us indulge our vanity by saying that we yield to none as a caterer to the inner man,” wrote Jernegan at the time, “whatever our shortcomings in regard to intellectual pabulum.”
The Territorial Enterprise, destined to occupy many premises in the next ninety-five years of existence, first published, so far as can be ascertained, from a still standing, one-story wooden shack on the northern outskirts of Mormon Station, but shortly thereafter occupied quarters in Singleton’s Hall, the Nevada Hotel, “a room discriminately used by preachers, debating clubs, and secret societies.” Mormon Station had no jail at the time and, on one eventful occasion, a prisoner awaiting trial was chained to the Washington hand press with a logging chain for three days but all through the terrible winter of ’59, destiny was hovering uncertainly above the snowdrifts of Gold Canyon, which led up a five-mile-long ravine from Carson Water at Dayton to a point halfway up the precipitous side of Mount Davidson overlooking the old Emigrant Trail to California and, in the distance, the Sink of Carson and the blue mountains of the Reese River.
For a full decade, ever since the first overland covered wagons had passed along Carson Water on the way to El Dorado in the Mother Lode, pocket gold had been turned up on the slopes of Washoe hills by casual prospectors. It wasn’t much, and only a few easily discouraged pilgrims, dismayed by the prospect of one more mountain range to cross, had served down on the eastern slope of the Sierra; the little crossroads town of Dayton, where they had to make up their minds whether to stay in Utah Territory or pass over into California, was for a time and locally known as Pause -and-Ponder.
Ten-dollar bonanzas in Gold Canyon kept turning up just regularly enough to keep the Washoe prospectors in beans and whisky. The overture to the great first movement of what was shortly to be a crashing symphony of riotous riches was being played as no more than a refrain of distant woodwinds and muted French horns half heard above the wind in the sagebrush.
Comers to the scene who had made their exit where none might follow had been the brothers Ethan and Hosea Grosch, sons of a Urica clergyman back in upper York State, who had intimatings of bonanzas to come but whose secret had perished with them in the rigors of the Nevada winter.
Part possessor of stolen knowledge of the Grosches was Henry Comstock, a windy no-gooder who had watched the comings and goings of the brothers as they worked a tenacious blue clay in their crude rockers. Neighboring no-gooder and a human wine-cellar to boot was James Finney, alias “Old Virginny,” who was on the lam from a California sheriff for a sordid and by now all but forgotten knifing up Downieville way. Farther up Gold Canyon operated a disreputable partnership of musical comedy Irishmen dressed to make an entry into history with shortstemmed clay pipes and silk top hats without brims. Peter O’Riley and Pat McLaughlin were amiable no-gooders, as honest as might be but not right bright in the head and easily imposed on when the time came round, which was to be very shortly.
Stray echoes of these things drifted down the wind and eventually became record in the columns of The Territorial Enterprise at Mormon Station.
One night Old Virginny Finney and Old Pancake Comstock became uncommonly drunk in the shack down near the head of Gold Canyon. Their footing was unsteady, their wolf calls and Dionysiac tumult frightened the wild life of Mount Davidson. Suddenly, unimaginable catastrophe struck. While attempting the mere elementary routine of smashing the neck of a whisky bottle against a rock to provide easy access to its content, Old Virginny lost his expertise and shattered the entire bottle.
Only for a moment was he paralyzed with horror, then man’s godlike capacity for rising above disaster asserted itself and Old Virginny screamed: “I christen this place Virginia City.” He had named a place for himself anyway. Neither Old Virginny Finney nor Old Pancake Comstock had any idea of the sort of place it was going to be.
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The Territorial Enterprise was one of the American West’s most important newspapers during the 1860s and 70s. William Jernegan and Alfred James founded the publication on December 18, 1858, in Genoa. Nine months later, the Enterprise moved to Carson City where Jonathan Williams eventually became its sole owner and editor. In October 1860, he moved his business to Virginia City, then barely a year old. Within a few months, Joseph Goodman and Denis McCarthy joined Williams as partners, with Goodman becoming editor-in-chief and eventually sole owner.
The Territorial Enterprise grew into a profitable daily newspaper with engaging writers reporting on the mining industry to regional, national, and international investors. In addition to its legitimate news, the paper became known for outrageous journalistic antics. Reporters William “Dan De Quille” Wright, James “Lying Jim” Townsend, and Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens perfected the art of the western tall tale with articles that became legendary for their wit.
The juxtaposition of clever writing and the financial importance of Comstock mining gave prominence to the Territorial Enterprise, which would have otherwise been an obscure publication for a mid-sized western city. Although Comstock journalism produced many rival businesses, the Enterprise rose above them all as the quintessential mining town newspaper of the West.
In 1874, Goodman sold his interest to William Sharon of the Bank of California. Before that, the Territorial Enterprise had produced opinions that effectively opposed Sharon’s first bid for the U.S. Senate. Sharon was running again and wanted the newspaper to plead his case. He hired Rollin Daggett as managing editor. The tone shifted, Sharon became a senator, and Daggett became Nevada’s congressman in 1878.
A succession of editors shepherded the Enterprise through the following years of failing mines and declining population. In 1880, the job of editor fell to Fred Hart, formally of Austin’s Reese River Reveille and a noted proponent of the tall tale. Within a few weeks, reaction to his mischievous style forced him to flee Nevada.
On January 16, 1893, the newspaper ended publication with the final note, “For sufficient reasons we stop.” Nevertheless, the Enterprise sputtered to life several times through the turn of the century. Its final issue appeared on May 30, 1916, when it merged with the Chronicle, a rival newspaper.
In 1946, Helen Crawford Dorst revived the Territorial Enterprise, which appeared irregularly for a few months. Five years later, newly-arrived eastern writers Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg acquired the moribund Virginia City News and resuscitated it as the Territorial Enterprise and Virginia City News. It premiered on May 2, 1952. Drawing on the nation’s literati, Beebe attracted renowned writers for his weekly. For eight years, the newspaper gained widespread fame and reestablished the name Territorial Enterprise as an important journalistic institution. Beebe sold his interest in 1960, after which the newspaper stumbled throughout the decade on its way to oblivion, ending production on March 28, 1969.
Suggested Reading:
Richard E. Lingenfelter and Karen Rix Gash. The Newspapers of Nevada: A History and Bibliography, 1854-1979. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984.
Jake Highton. Nevada Newspaper Days: A History of Journalism in the Silver State. Stockton: Heritage West Books, 1990.
HISTORY OF NEVADA JOURNALISM (writing)
The first newspaper in present day Nevada was apparently the Gold-Cañon Switch of Johntown, a mining community about four miles from what became Virginia City on the Comstock. The paper, founded about 1854, was handwritten. Unfortunately, no copies exist.
Speculation vanishes with the Territorial Enterprise, the first printed newspaper in Nevada. It began December 18, 1858, in Genoa. The weekly soon moved to Carson City as the rush to Washoe began. Then, when the silver fever gripped the Comstock, the Enterprise moved to Virginia City. The paper established itself in the 1860s as the best and most influential in the West.
Giants of journalism roamed the Comstock in those days: Mark Twain, Dan De Quille, Joe Goodman, Alf Doten, and Wells Drury. Twain, who gained international fame as a writer, admitted that in his Enterprise reporting he “let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news.” He once put an emigrant wagon “through an Indian fight that…has no parallel in history.” Hoaxes were perfect for mining camp journalism, and sometimes other newspapers in Nevada and beyond took them at face value.
The mining industry gave Nevada more ghost towns than live ones. Towns sprang up hastily, and died just as quickly as mining camps went from boom to bust. Mining camp newspapers followed the same pattern: bonanza to borrasca.
In rugged nineteenth century Western journalism, duels and shootouts sometimes took the place of the more sedate libel suits of today. Alf Doten, diarist who recorded much of early Nevada history, was editor of the Gold Hill newspaper. When Drury applied for a job as a reporter, Doten asked: “Can you shoot?” Drury admitted he could. Doten hired him with this admonition: “You write what you please. Nobody censors it. But you must defend yourself if anybody has a kick.”
Boosterism often marked Nevada newspapering. The Rhyolite Herald boasted in 1911 that Rhyolite was “The prettiest, coziest mining town in the great American desert.” The Bovard Booster rang true to its name with headlines in 1908 proclaiming “NEVADA’S LATEST WONDER,” and the “RICHNESS OF LATEST STRIKE.” In big cities and mining camps, newspapers often have promoted their town much as they might advertise a product.
Socialism arose in the early twentieth century with fervor for brotherhood and sisterhood, for social justice and equality. Reno had two socialist newspapers, the Voice of the People, and the Nevada Socialist. The Voice in 1910 proclaimed the dawning of the era of the common man. It did not dawn. The Socialist asked before the 1914 election: “Who will vote the capitalist party tickets? Grafters, politicians…capitalists, capitalist henchmen…?” The capitalists won.
Historically, Nevada newspapers often have reflected their communities in lacking racial sensitivity. The Nevada Daily Tribune of Carson City asked: “Is there a foreign-born gentleman in Ormsby County who would demean himself so much as to vote a ticket put up by a man who says a Chinaman is as good as any other foreigner? We think not.”
As was the case elsewhere, African Americans fared little better. Newspapers often used racist terms that no longer are acceptable. By the 1950s, segregation made Las Vegas notorious as the “Mississippi of the West.” The local Review-Journal published racist news stories and headlines. The local black community benefited greatly from the birth of the Voice, now the Sentinel-Voice, in the late 1950s. It helped promote the local civil rights movement.
In general, women did not work for Nevada newspapers in most of the nineteenth century. However, wives sometimes took over after their publisher-editor husbands died. When Henry Mighels, publisher of the Nevada Appeal in Carson City, died in 1879, his wife Nellie took over. She was no mere figurehead, becoming a journalist who covered the state legislature and the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight in Carson City in 1897. Reporters like Florence Lee Jones Cahlan of the Review-Journal and publishers like Avery Stitser of the Humboldt Star and Sue Clark-Jackson of the Reno Gazette-Journal cracked the glass ceiling, but men still predominate in editorial and executive positions.
Colorful characters peopled Nevada journalism. One of the most colorful was Jack McCloskey, editor and publisher of the Mineral County Independent and Hawthorne News, who told anecdotes of yesteryear while dispensing political commentary in his front-page column, “Jasper,” from 1931 almost up to his death in 2000. Rural editors also were active in politics, including state senators Walter Cox of Yerington’s Mason Valley News and Warren “Snowy” Monroe of the Elko Independent.
The best journalist Nevada ever produced was Frank McCulloch, a Fernley native who worked for the Reno Evening Gazette and the Nevada State News. He was a staff correspondent and chief of two bureaus for Time. In 1960, he became managing editor for the Los Angeles Times but quit after three years to cover the Vietnam War for Time. All told, McCulloch wrote 120 coveted cover stories for Time. Then he became managing editor successively of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner.
The Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in journalism, was awarded in 1977 to the Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal. The executive editor of both papers, Warren Lerude, shared the prize in editorial writing with Foster Church and Norman Cardoza. Edward Montgomery, who studied journalism under A.L. Higginbotham at the University of Nevada, won a Pulitzer in 1951 as a reporter for the Examiner. Another “Higgy” student, Howard Sheerin, won in 1956 for meritorious public service by leading, as city editor, a team of reporters for the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian in California.
Three other UNR journalism graduates claimed Pulitzers: Ron Einstoss of the Los Angeles Times in 1966 for staff local reporting, Susie Forrest in 1988 reporting for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune of Massachusetts, and Kristin Go of the Denver Post, a staff winner in 2000 for breaking news.
The one genuine giant of modern Nevada newspapering was Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun. He courageously took on demagogic Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin who throttled the nation in the early 1950s with his redbaiting and fear mongering. Greenspun’s vehicle was his page one column, “Where I Stand.” It became a must-read for Nevada editors. He founded the Sun in 1950, becoming a powerful presence in Las Vegas until he died in 1989.
The leading newspaper in Northern Nevada today is the Reno Gazette-Journal. Four of its fixtures are columnist Cory Farley, investigative reporter Frank Mullen, veteran reporter Lenita Powers, and court reporter Martha Bellisle. In Southern Nevada, the Las Vegas Review-Journal rules and features a four-times-a-week column by popular award-winning journalist and author John L. Smith, as well as longtime entertainment columnist Mike Weatherford and a vocally libertarian editorial page. The Sun continues publication as an independent section in the R-J, focusing on more feature and in-depth stories, with such veterans as political columnist Jon Ralston and longtime Sun reporters Mary Manning and Ed Koch.
One relatively recent development in Nevada journalism is the rise of alternative newspapers. They often do the in-depth reporting that the Establishment papers do not despite having far more money and staff. Las Vegas has the weekly CityLife, founded in 1992 and edited today by acerbic columnist Steve Sebelius.
His predecessor was Geoff Schumacher, who now oversees alternative, foreign-language, and rural publications for R-J owner Stephens Media, which has bought several rural Nevada weeklies. CityLife includes commentaries and reporting by Schumacher, Hugh Jackson (now a popular blogger), criminal justice professor Randall Shelden, and historian Michael Green. Some consider the publication Nevada’s best public affairs journal.
The Las Vegas Weekly is another alternative weekly, owned by the Greenspun family, which focuses more on arts and culture. The Reno News & Review was founded in 1995 by Mike Norris, Larry Henry, and Bill Martin. Today Brian Burghart is editor and Dennis Myers is the news editor. The kind of journalism the alternatives practice also is evident in internet blogs emanating from Reno and Las Vegas.
The alternative weeklies and blogs also are not alone in continuing a Nevada tradition of smaller publications standing up to the bigger ones. The Valley Times, published from 1959 to 1984, had great influence through publisher Bob Brown and reporter Ned Day for its in-depth coverage of politics and organized crime. The tiny Sparks Tribune, 6,000 circulation, founded in 1910, regularly prints columns that would never appear in any establishment newspaper. From dailies that have been muckrakers or groveled before power to weeklies that have crusaded at younger urban audiences or wielded political influence in rural Nevada, back to the days of Mark Twain, Nevada’s journalism history has been rich and varied.
Suggested Reading:
Dave Basso. A Personal History of the Territorial Enterprise. Sparks: Falcon Hill Press, 1985.
Jake Highton. Nevada Newspaper Days. Stockton, California: Heritage West Books, 1990.
Richard E. Lingenfelter, and Karen Rix Gash. The Newspapers of Nevada. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984.
Wells Drury. An Editor on the Comstock Lode. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1984.
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More about Nevada Journalism (writing)
The Territorial Enterprise and Mark Twain defined a new level of humor in journalism. He delivered commentary about the government with such sentences as: “It could probably be show by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.” While often bitingly accurate with his humor, Twain also like to make up stories, many of which appeared as news. Twain is famous for saying, “Truth is more of a stranger than fiction,” and “When in doubt, tell the truth.” While attempting to make a living at silver mining in Nevada, he found more financial success from the humorous sketches he sold to the Territorial Enterprise. The newspaper later unsuspectingly hired the young Samuel Clemens as a reporter. It was there that he took his now-famous pen name.
Looking back on his time at the Enterprise, Twain said, “When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it has happened or not.” That idea — that memoir, personal essay, and creative nonfiction have their place as news alongside reportage about current events– was taken to heart by many other journalists.
People in remote areas eagerly awaited delivery of newspapers from more settled areas back home and they pointed to the publication of a local paper as evidence that their town will be among those that survive. Competing newspapers in small towns worked out novel ways to get their exchanges ahead of the competition, thereby making the local paper appealing to those who didn’t get the papers from New York, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, or Atlanta. In these ways, newspaper served as a link between urban and rural life.
Each town type – cattle towns, mining towns, farming towns, seaports – faced different circumstances. In Rocky Mountain mining towns, for example, high prices for individual issues and pleas for patronage became necessary in camps where no one felt permanent enough to pay for a subscription. Health, sanitation, law and order were common subjects for boom town editors. Colorful editors in mining camps thrived on strident personal journalism at the very time large, metropolitan newspapers became reliant upon standardized, straight news. Newspapers of the Southwest faced the unique situation of conflicts between U.S. and Mexican cultures and governments in addition to the conflict with Native Americans found in every Western state. Cultural barriers and language differences required some newspapers to reach Spanish-speaking readers.
Editors often became local celebrities, in part, because their patrons believed the press to be necessary to the region, the party or the cause. Among those who celebrated the frontier was the West’s most famous journalist who spent about three years in Nevada. Yet Mark Twain personified the rugged individualist in the image he left behind. After heading to Nevada to avoid the Civil War and to prospect for silver and gold, Samuel Langhorne Clemens failed as a miner but acquired a job writing feature stories for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. While there he adopted the nom-de-plume Mark Twain and played the role of an archetypal frontier reporter, but his brief stint as an editor was a dismal failure. “I moralize well, but I didn’t not always practice well when i was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news.” Perhaps because of later pretensions to high society, Mark Twain revealed little about his Nevada career other the anecdotes relayed in his second book, Roughing It.
William Wright, alias Dan DeQuille, roomed with Twain for a year on the Comstock, and the two men stole material from each other. The fact that De Quille remains more obscure today – in sharp contrast to their relative reputations on the Comstock – may be attributed to the fact that DeQuille failed to collect and republish his writing.
Edgar Wilson Nye (Bill Nye) of Wyoming was a more typical, but more obscure writer than Twain, followed Twain’s lead in Western experience and on the national lecture circuit. Like Twain, Nye and others created a stereotype of frontier editors as rough-and-tumble fighters who would resort to six guns or as humorists who never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Some Western lore had its roots in newspapers. The Tombstone Epitaph, for instance, promoted the Earps in their feud with the Clanton family, whose bloody gunfight near the O.K. Corral provided heroes and fodder for pulp fiction, film, and television. By contrast, one individual, Jesse James, perpetuated his own myth through newspapers, even while remaining in hiding from the law.
Competing towns on the frontier perpetuated stories of conflict between homesteaders and the open range as the towns fought over railroads, mines, water. Like other town leaders, editors in Nevada mining and refining towns boosted town development by competing for cattle drives and railroads, but conflicts arose when society figures and some businesses wanted long-term settlement instead of rowdy miners and and cowboys. Local politicians and their respective newspapers argued over mining laws. As waves of immigrants settled in the countryside, editors changed their positions on law and order and abandoned their opposition to the banking interests.
The lure of open land and silver millions provided opportunities for urban malcontents to leave the growing cities while, at the same time, it forced employers to improve conditions for workers who would tempted to move westward. On the frontier, meanwhile, the settler sometimes became an individualist who exhibited anti-social behavior and an antipathy to political control, as the Populist movement flexed it’s muscles, strengthened by discontent as the a wealth inequality gap sped open and real wages and quality of life stagnated for most people.
Early journalism historians easily accepted some of the assumptions about social darwinism and manifest destiny because newspaper editors on the frontier often shared the beliefs of town builders, railroad tycoons, and banking interests that they were advancing the cause of civilization by promoting settlement of the entire continent.
Just as the six gun, the windmill and barbed wire were regarded as the principal tools in the conquest of the Great Plains, so the fonder newspaper may be regarded as another important instrument in the civilizing of the West. We do not have any generally accepted theories about newspaper functions, as we do about railroads, mining and stockraising, and hence nothing to challenge our understanding of a primary institution not he frontier.
Once they were established, newspaper editors often advocated the sorts of reform that would stabilize a town, such as good schools, clean water, sewage treatment, and livestock vaccination. Some editors fought desperately for their own parties to win local elections to yield lucrative printing contracts. Failing that, they move to another town.
Newspapers went with towns, of course, where enough people lived to place advertisements and purchase subscriptions. Town settlers encouraged a printer to establish a business and publish a newspaper as evidence the town could become a thriving city. To increase an editor’s stake in a town, founders would occasionally give the editor some lots to sell to support his business. Such editors often boosted their town with overly optimistic stories and encouraging subscribers to purchase copies to send to friends and relatives back East. Editors also sent their newspapers to other publications throughout the nation as “exchanges” in the hope that positive articles would be reprinted. The editor, in turn, would reprint articles from eastern papers for readers eager for news from back home.
Political patronage supported newspapers throughout the Civil War era west as new communities grew and the nation’s free state / slave state divide became a race to acquire new loyal Senators. Sometimes this dependence was the result of difficult economic circumstances. Economic conditions forced editors to seek political patronage just to keep their presses running, but some editors aligned with politicians or political parties, which often put them on even shakier ground. In several Territories, editors often depended upon federal patronage, primarily in the form of contracts for the printing of laws, journals and reports.
Editors promoted settlement, hoped for political patronage and state printing contracts, faced transportation and communication difficulties, pleaded with advertisers and subscribers to pay their bills (sometimes in kind with eggs, meat or whiskey), and engaged in vituperative debates with other editors. A few editors risked life and limb when they editorialized on some issues. For example, the target of vitriolic attacks by the editor of the Missouri Argus beat to death the proprietor of that paper. A few Minnesota editors also carried their fights into the street.
Some publications counted counted on local printing contracts. Governments printed official documents, such as notices of public auctions and land sales. Governments also required public notices to be published in the official newspaper of the county or city before some business and legal transactions could be completed. The registration of livestock brands, for example, required publication. With printing contracts at stake, rivalries often broke out between towns and among political factions within towns. Newspapers joined the fights when towns, such as those on the frontier, competed for railroad lines and train stations.
Some editors were fiercely independent. Itinerant printer Legh Freeman become involved in land speculation and town-promotion schemes. At times, Freeman’s wife and family ran the paper while he traveled and sent home columns about his stereotypical fantasy life as a frontier scout. Like the mythic mountain man Jim Bridger whom Freeman may have interviewed early in life, the editor tried to stay ahead of advancing civilization. This wanderlust was illustrated when he operated the “press on wheels,” the ‘Frontier Index’ newspaper, which jumped from town to town just ahead of the Union Pacific Railroad across Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Montana. In 1868, a mob seeking revenge for a vigilante hanging in Bear Riving City, Wyoming, went to the ‘Frontier Index’ office after burning the jail and releasing prisoners. Editor Freeman was said to have left town, as he wrote, “so fast you could have played checkers on his coattails.” Before the attack, Freeman disclaimed rumors that he was a member of the vigilantes, but he endorsed them, saying the vigilantes were so successful that “honest men can now walk our streets in safety, provided they keep sober and are armed to the teeth.”
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The Territorial Enterprise
Near this site Nov. 3, 1860 was published the first Territorial Enterprise under a Virginia City dateline. Born 1858 at Genoa the Enterprise was to become a celebrated property of the Old West whose Editors, Joe Goodman, Rollin Daggett, Mark Twain, Judge C.C. Goodwin, achieved immortality in Western legion. This marker is placed Nov. 3, 1955 to mark 95 years of Nevada letters.
Regarding The Territorial Enterprise. When the paper first located in Virginia City in 1860, it was located down the street, on the second floor of the building which today is the Silver Dollar Saloon. In early 1862, it moved to the present location. Mark Twain started working there in August of 1862. The fire in 1875 did destroy most of the upstairs, however, the basement was not harmed. Fortunately, the desk Twain used, the composing tables, and type cases were in the basement at the time of the fire. Twain wrote a lot of his articles for the paper in that basement. He enjoyed being down there with the working guys.
Rollin Dagget ● Dan DeQuille ● Wells Drury ● Joseph Goodman ● Fred Harte ● and Mark Twain
Location. 39° 18.606′ N, 119° 38.981′ W. On South C Street (Nevada Route 341), on the right when traveling north. At or near this postal address: 53 South C Street, Virginia City NV 89440, United States of America.