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CHAPTER NINE Colorful Publishers - Then And Now The journalists whose minds conceived the earliest papers were often fit topics for interesting biographical articles. Unfortunately, that seldom happened. Instead their lives can be pieced together only from the newspapers they edited and the descriptions of them written by other newsmen. Dr. Willard Richards, for example, was Massachusetts-born, converted to the Latter-day Saints religion at age 33 and cut his journalistic teeth on the Millenial Star in England and Times and Seasons in Nauvoo. A member of the original company which reached the Salt Lake valley on July 24, 1847, he was called upon by church authorities three years later to begin the Deseret News and did so with distinction. Journalism was but one of his talents -- he was also both a dentist and a "Doctor of Herbs," as that medical skill was then known. Joe Johnson, who introduced Our Dixie Times, left interesting footprints on newspaper annals. A Mormon who'd been married by the prophet Joseph Smith to each of his three wives, he had travelled to and from Salt Lake City in 1850, then located near Winter Quarters along the Missouri River. He bought the Bugle in Kanesville, (now Council Bluffs) Iowa in 1852 and was responsible in the summer of 1854 for what was either the first or second newspaper in Nebraska, the Omaha Arrow. Johnson contended it was the first; Daniel Reed argued that his Nebraska Palladium in Bellevue preceded the Arrow. No one is certain since start-up files of neither paper exist. Johnson's publication was produced on the east side of the Missouri in what was actually Iowa, but had a Nebraska dateline. Perhaps to help support his 27 children, he also operated a blacksmith shop, practiced law, sold insurance and managed a general store. He began the Crescent City Oracle in 1857 and 173 |
