Reading Room · the territorial press
Frontier Newspapers and the Making of the Record
The conquest of the West was fought in the open country and finished on the page. Much of what survives about frontier violence in Oregon and California was set down in newspapers, and the newspapers were run by the men who wanted that violence to happen and needed it to read a certain way.
When we talk about the record of the frontier, we are talking in large part about print. The letters, the memoirs, and the official reports matter, but the newspaper was the machine that reached the most people fastest and told them what an event had been before they had any other way to know. On a coast where the people being written about left few documents of their own, the paper often had the first word and the last. The Renegade Enos is a novel about who holds that pen, and the territorial press is where a great deal of the pen was held.
The press arrives with the settlers
The newspaper came to the far West almost as soon as the settlers did, and it came as part of the same project. The first American newspaper published west of the Rocky Mountains was the Oregon Spectator, whose first issue appeared at Oregon City on February 5, 1846. It was put out by the Oregon Printing Association, a company of prominent settlers, and its first editor was William G. T'Vault. Its motto ran across the top of the page: "Westward the Star of Empire takes its way." California's first papers followed within months, and within a few years San Francisco had a crowded press that included the Alta California and the San Francisco Herald.
A press was expensive and heavy, and hauling one across the plains or around Cape Horn was a serious undertaking. Nobody carried a printing press into a raw territory to keep a neutral chronicle. The paper arrived because a settlement wanted a voice, a place to argue its claims, advertise its lots, and speak to the government back East in language the government would read. From its first issue, the frontier newspaper was an instrument of settlement, and it never pretended otherwise.
What the papers were for
A territorial newspaper did several jobs at once, and reporting the news was only one of them. It was a booster, talking up the country to draw more settlers and more money. It was a commercial notice board, carrying the prices, the shipping, the land claims, and the mail. It was a political weapon in the hands of whoever owned it, since an editor could make or break a candidate and drive a faction's line week after week. Above all it was a bridge to the East, the way a distant settlement made its case to Congress, to investors, and to the readers whose opinions would eventually decide how much protection and money the territory received.
That motto about the star of empire stated the paper's actual purpose plainly. The country the settlers were moving into already had people in it, and the newspaper existed to help complete the transfer of that country into settler hands. When such a paper reported on the people already living there, it reported as an interested party. The land the paper wanted opened was the land those people held, so the paper had a stake in how their resistance was understood and a reason to frame it in the way that best served removal.
Manufacturing the atrocity narrative
The clearest place to watch the frontier press do its work is in how it handled violence. A killing on the road or a fight at a river mouth arrived to most readers already shaped, sorted into innocence and savagery before anyone could ask a question. The paper supplied the word for the event, and the word did a great deal of the reasoning. An attack by Native people defending their own ground became a "massacre" or an "outrage," a term that fixed guilt on one side and cast the settlers as victims answering a crime. A killing of Native people by settlers or soldiers became an "engagement," a "chastisement," or a matter of protecting the road.
These narratives did real work. A named atrocity in print was the raw material for a call to arms, and the call to arms brought the militia companies, the volunteer campaigns, the dragoons, and the gunboats. The story a settlement told about its own violence tended to justify the next round of it, because that was the shape the telling was built for. The southern Oregon coast in these years ran on exactly this cycle, the one the histories gather under the Rogue River Wars. The reports of the fighting near Port Orford and on the Coquille traveled outward in print, and what traveled was the settlers' version, printed by settlers, for a public that would act on it.
William G. T'Vault, editor and expedition leader
The man who edited that first Oregon paper is a useful figure for seeing how close the pen sat to the campaign. William G. T'Vault came to Oregon in 1845, took the editor's chair at the Oregon Spectator, and was dismissed after thirteen issues over quarrels within the printing association. He stayed in the trade. He moved south, and in the mid-1850s he was publishing in Jacksonville, first the Table Rock Sentinel and later the Oregon Sentinel, in the middle of the very country and the very years the Rogue River fighting was tearing apart.
T'Vault worked both sides of the record. He wrote about the frontier and he acted on it, and then he helped set down the account. In September 1851 he led the exploring party out of Port Orford that went looking for a pack route inland, the venture that ended in the killing at the mouth of the Coquille River. His own published account of that fight became one of the sources the settler record leaned on, and it is quoted in the pieces on Who Was Enos and on Battle Rock. Here is a single man who led an expedition, survived a disaster, wrote it up, and spent his career running newspapers in the country the disaster was used to conquer. The person who made the record and the person who made the events were often the same person, or friends who drank together, and that closeness is the thing to keep in view.
Whose dead got a name
Read the frontier press for long and a pattern shows itself in the counting of the dead. The settlers and soldiers who died were named. Their deaths were written up with the man's name, his origin, sometimes his family, and a line of grief. The Native people who died were counted. They entered the same columns as a figure, a number of "savages" or "hostiles" or "Indians" killed, without names, without the questions that attach to a named person, without any way for a later reader to ask who they had been or whether they had done anything at all.
That asymmetry is a deliberate decision about who counts as a person in the record, made at the moment of writing and repeated in issue after issue. It runs straight through the events these essays cover. It is the difference between the three named men Frémont's expedition lost near Klamath Lake and the village of Dokdokwas that entered the record only as enemy dead. It is the settlers' arithmetic of Quatomah killed at Battle Rock, offered by the side that fired the cannon. It is the seventeen affidavits gathered to swear that a head in a jar belonged to a wanted man, in the story of how California invented a bandit. The press is where this sorting happened in public and hardened into the version the country would keep.
The record and the witness
This is the ground the novel stands on. The whole book turns on a plain fact about the conquest, that its violence was committed in the field and then settled on paper, and that the paper was in the hands of the people who had the most reason to shade it. When almost all of the surviving account of an event comes from the very people who wanted the event to happen, the account carries the aims of its makers. It is a made thing, built to serve the men who built it, and reading it honestly means reading it against its own purpose.
Enos is placed exactly where that machinery can be seen and cannot be answered. He is a man the record used while he was useful and discarded when he was not, a mobile, multilingual go-between the conquest ran on and then hanged at Port Orford. He belonged to no side that owned a press. There was no paper on that coast that would carry his version of any of it, and there was no name he could safely give if he tried, because the name the settlers had fixed on him was already the name of a wanted man. The territorial newspaper is the instrument that makes his silence complete. It could name a settler killed on a road and turn a man like Enos into a figure in a column, and there was no counter-record he was allowed to enter.
To read these papers well is to keep asking the questions they were built to close. Who wrote this, and what did he want. Whose death got a name here, and whose got a number. Which word chose the guilt before any fact arrived. The novel does that reading in the presence of a witness who watched the events the papers describe and had no way to correct them. Enos stands where the record would rather have had no one standing, and what he saw is exactly what the record was built to lose.
The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel. Get launch news →
Sources & further reading
- "William Green T'Vault (1806–1869)," The Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon Historical Society. oregonencyclopedia.org
- "Oregon Spectator," The Oregon Encyclopedia, Oregon Historical Society. oregonencyclopedia.org
- Historic Oregon Newspapers, University of Oregon Libraries (digitized territorial and pioneer press). oregonnews.uoregon.edu
- George S. Turnbull, History of Oregon Newspapers (Binfords & Mort, 1939).
- Gray H. Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859 (University of North Carolina Press, 2010).