| Description |
COLORFUL PUBLISHERS -- THEN AND NOW Before Brundage left, Freeman became interested in the dissemination of news to the soldiers and settlers and learned a bit about the business. After Brundage departed, the printing equipment remained and shortly thereafter the Civil War ended and the Union Pacific resumed construction of what would eventually become a transcontinental railroad. The far-sighted Freeman seized the opportunity it presented to edit a "newspaper on wheels" by following the track-layers. Interestingly, the Mormon migration years earlier played a part in Freeman's decision, for he noted in an 1877 article that the emigrants had "left a portion of a printing office on Wood River in the then savage plains of Nebraska. This fell into our hands, and by some necessary additions made by the whittling process ofjackknife, we began the publication of The Frontier Index in the Fort Kearny Garrison." The paper he began in 1868-69 followed the railroad in jumps of 100 miles or more, housing its equipment in a tent at most of the ten end-of-track locations, including present-day North Platte, Nebraska, Julesburg, Colorado, Laramie and Green River, Wyoming. While work was idled for the winter in Laramie, the Index erected one of the town's first buildings. A majority of the remaining "end of track" locations were comparatively temporary pauses while bridges were constructed over such streams as the Upper North Platte, the Green and the Bear Rivers. The latter point, east of present-day Evan-ston, Wyoming, marked the end of Freeman's travelling newspaper, for there on November 20, 1868, a mob destroyed the office and equipment. The publisher's outspoken editorials were no doubt responsible, though he insisted officials of the railroad's infamous Credit Mobilier paid $15,000 to leaders of the rioters to level his business. Reported the publisher, "Fifteen thousand dollars was the price paid to the leaders to do the deed. Forty-odd rioters are buried around the office. . . the last of the cutthroats has died with his boots on and the ringleader had his head chopped off with an ax after he was dead." Whether the Credit Mobilier bore responsibility was never determined. But evidence that Freeman's paper was indeed 177 |
