As she notes in her introduction to The Coming of the Frontier Press: How the West Was Really Won, the late Barbara Cloud had a special affinity for the early settlers who “packed all their earthly goods into a wagon … to head out to an unknown land fraught with natural and human dangers.”
But then, Cloud herself was a pioneer both in spirit and deed. A professor emerita of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies, Cloud passed away in late 2009, a year after the book’s publication.
Her husband, Stan Cloud, notes that Barbara shared the adventurous mindset of the pioneers she studied. In the late 1960s, he notes, she pressed him to choose a postdoctoral fellowship in Canberra, Australia, over those offered stateside because she “wanted to embark on an adventure.”
The two spent eight years in the Land Down Under, and it was there that she learned what it was like to long for news from home – much as the early Western pioneers hungered for news from the homes they had left behind.
So when it came time to tell the story of the frontier press, Cloud was eager to “help place both the West and its newspapers in the context of American history, where they belong.”
Cloud constructed the story of the frontier press from census data, biographies, historical accounts, other scholars’ works, and from the newspapers themselves. Her investigation focused on newspapers in areas west of the 100th meridian, produced in the period between the 1840s and the early 20th century, a period she describes as “the traditional West of cowboys and Indians, cattlemen, sheepherders and sod busters, dance-hall girls and the miner forty-niners.”
Cloud chronicles the humble beginnings of frontier newspapers in far-flung mining camps and remote settlements, noting the vital role they played for the thousands of people who came west seeking their fortunes.
“Frontier newspapers conferred legitimacy, provided a link to lives left behind, an opportunity to participate in political debate, and a sense of community in areas too remote for face-to-face congress,” Cloud writes. “The arrival of a printing press in a mining camp was often an occasion for festivities.”
Cloud effectively debunks Hollywood depictions of 19th century life in mining camps as populated solely by whiskey-swilling, whore-seeking ruffians, arguing that most of the fortune-seekers were literate; early frontier newspapers grew in response to demand for news about the world and the surrounding community. She notes that the aforementioned nefarious activities were clearly part of the picture, but they existed alongside churches, schools, and other nods to civilized life in the camps.
But life in the West was not easy for frontier newspaper publishers. Cloud vividly describes the hardships associated with securing paper, moving heavy printing presses across rugged mountain terrain, and waiting months for national and international news to arrive from the East.
To emphasize just how important paper was to western newspapers, Cloud writes that in 1859, the Territorial Enterprise relied on extreme measures to keep the presses running.
“The mountain men made their way over the mountains, carrying rolls of paper on their backs. While waiting for the paper to arrive, the Territorial printed on the back of wallpaper, cigar wrappers, or wrapping paper,” Cloud writes.
When Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862 and chartered railroads to connect the eastern and western parts of the country, frontier newspapers forged a sometimes cozy, sometimes adversarial, relationship with those building the railroads.
“Railway barons worked hard to ingratiate themselves with local newspaper editors and publishers, offering free train tickets and, occasionally, outright bribes. The newspapers were happy to oblige, as they saw the coming of a railroad as an indication that their newly established communities would survive,” she notes.
Although many frontier newspapers were independently owned, some were financed directly by mining companies, and later, railroad barons. Cloud writes that even those without financial ties were strong supporters of the railroad initially, with one going so far as “to choose for their logo the headlights of an oncoming locomotive.”
Cloud identifies Las Vegas as one such railroad town, born when Senator William Clark bought property in Southern Nevada to connect the Union Pacific line in Utah with Southern California.
“Even before Clark’s company completed a land auction in the Las Vegas valley, the future town had three weekly newspapers, the Las Vegas Times, the Advance, and the Las Vegas Age; all were started within two weeks of one another,” Cloud writes.
While newspapers thrived on the frontier, Cloud indicates that objectivity and accuracy often took a back seat to other concerns. She cites several examples of publishers establishing newspapers to espouse their own political views and of legislators paying reporters for favorable coverage; she also notes that writers such as Samuel Clemons played fast and loose with the facts to create more colorful stories and that publishers acted more like “boosters” than newspapermen. In one humorous example, Cloud recounts how the Oregon Statesman told its readers that marriage notices must be signed because, “Malicious, mischievous persons are sometimes in the habit of sending names of persons to the press who have never been married.”
Cloud disputes the idealized notion that newspaper publishers were attempting to build a better society, arguing that most merely emulated newspapers in the East and turned to newspapering when they found they couldn’t tolerate the hard work associated with mining or ranching. Indeed, Cloud asserts, business savvy was the best predictor of which newspaper would survive and which would not.
“Newspapers failed not because people didn’t read them but rather because proprietors borrowed too much money, failed to collect what was due them, or otherwise mismanaged their businesses,” Cloud writes.
But not all frontier newspapers failed. Today, many western newspapers can trace their roots back to the frontier press. Notable examples include the San Francisco Examiner, formerly the Daily Democratic Press; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, once known as the Puget Sound Weekly; the Deseret News in Salt Lake City that began as a frontier paper in 1850; and the Los Angeles Times that began with the same name in the 1880s.
However, as Cloud says in her conclusion, whether newspapers failed or thrived, they all played a pivotal role in settling and civilizing the West.
“A 20th century journalist gets credit for applying the phrase ‘first rough draft of history’ to journalism, but 19th-century journalists knew they were participating in something important, and those who did leave records understood that the West needs a repository of its history, just as the East did.”
The same could be said of Cloud herself. She leaves behind a rich collection of academic works on such subjects as early journalism in the Washington territory, the business of newspapers on the Western frontier, and media law in Nevada. She served as the editor of Journalism History and was researching the life of Charles “Pop” Squires, a Las Vegas newspaper pioneer, at the time of her passing.
