Papers' feuding editors
settled dispute with gunfire
by David Loftus
[first published in the Roseburg, Oregon
News-Review, February 21, 1988]
There wasn't much you couldn't get away with in print in the 19th century. Libel law was in its infancy, and readers expected a lot of excitement from the newspaper.
In the little town of Roseburg, however, population about 900 in 1871, editors not only drummed up excitement, they made it -- by settling their differences in a gunfight downtown.
As the Roseburg Ensign observed on May 20, 1871, "Editors ... lead so nervous and exciting an intellectual life that it is likely they really have more contradiction, whimsicalities and oddities than men in other walks of life."
Interior of the Plaindealer's offices, Roseburg, Oregon
All photos courtesy of the Douglas County Museum
The article noted that editors elsewhere had described their competitors with words like "A Walking Nihility," "Ante-Mortem Dead-Beat," "An Old Sausage Cover," "Jackassitiveness," and "A Word About Live Carrion."
It was only three weeks later that the two editors of the Ensign met their nemesis from the Plaindealer in a battle on Roseburg streets that left all the players badly wounded.
The disagreement had been a long time brewing.
Two brothers, Thomas and Henry Gale, started Roseburg's first newspaper, a weekly called the Ensign, in May 1867. The Umpqua Gazette had been published in Scottsburg during the mid 1850s, and several sources suggest there was even a paper called the Roseburg Express in the late 50s and early 60s, but no copies have survived.
Henry Gale had been a printer in the Oregon State Journal office in Eugene for two years when he inaugurated the Ensign, which enabled him to steal all the Douglas County advertising and notices that previously had been printed in the Journal. (There were no other newspapers between Eugene and Jacksonville.) Not long after, the Gales returned to Eugene and a man named Webster took over the editor's chair at the Ensign.
In March 1870, a rival paper called the Plaindealer hit the streets. Its editor and publisher, William Thompson, known as "Bill" or "Bud" and later a colonel in the Modoc Indian War, was Missouri-born and like the Gales had been raised near Eugene. He had gained typesetting and editing experience on the Eugene Herald-Register-Review during the Civil War and published the Eugene Guard for two years thereafter, selling his interest in 1868 for $1,200.
Newspapers were fiercely partisan in those days. It was imperative to state where one stood on political controversies, and papers constantly attacked adversarial publications elsewhere in the state and in the nation.
The Ensign was a Republican organ, or as it was styled in those days, "Radical." It revered Lincoln and anyone perceived as following in his tracks, such as President Grant. The Plaindealer was a Democratic publication.
Webster was fairly kind to the rival newcomer. His notice in the April 2 Ensign said the new paper "will do to rank among the few respectable journals of that party," although "it is destined to labor in a bad and hopeless cause."
Less than a month after his first issue, Thompson chided "our neighbor the Ensign" for a mistake, "typographical no doubt," in reporting the bail of a prisoner as $50 instead of the correct $250.
On May 6, 1870, Thompson referred to a Republican lecturer named Jasper Johnson as "J-ass-per Johnson," and called him "a political hermaphrodite, or rather a political nonentity." The Ensign had printed posters to publicize Johnson's visit.
During the summer, the Gale brothers returned from Eugene to take charge of their Ensign, which was losing ground to its competitor. Thompson made much of the fact that they had law offices. "To own a newspaper is as convenient to a defeated and wrathy lawyer as a kennel is to a whipped dog -- he can rush into it and howl," he wrote on Aug. 12, 1870.
Remarks continued in this vein for the remaining year. The Ensign attacked a "lengthy but flimsy article" in the other paper doling out "a pack of nonsense and maudlin sophistry." The Plaindealer said the proprietor of the Ensign had indulged in "a bare faced falsehood, and the alligator knew it -- scaly, Alligator, scaly."
The Ensign made reference to "the 'ripe scholar and gallant gentleman,' who stands -- when sober enough to stand at all -- behind the Plaindealer chair...." Thompson countered by impudently decorating his masthead each week with "The Official Paper of Douglas and Coos Counties." The Gales suggested that the Plaindealer "get somebody with brains enough to incorporate at least one idea in each article, to write up the thing," and told their rival: "You are a sardine among codfish."
All three men were surprisingly young. Both Thompson and Thomas Gale were 22 years old, and Henry Gale could not have been much older.
It is unclear what may have precipitated the final battle. Years later in his memoirs, Thompson said the Gales were bitter because of the phenomenal success of his paper. He claimed to have acquired 1,200 subscriptions -- quite a feat in a town of 900 men, women, and children, if true. "They soon saw their business slipping away and sought to regain it by indulging in abuse of the coarsest character," he wrote.
Several contemporary reports, however, suggest that Thompson had become fed up with the attacks printed in the Ensign, and perhaps was especially incensed by remarks made in the June 10, 1871 issue, which came out the day before the gunfight.