Setting the Stage -- No Weasel Words -- Politics -- Expressing Opinion -- Town Booming -- Pistol-Packin' Editors -- Reporting the News -- Personals and Miscellaneous -- Death and Religion -- Making a Living -- Hyperbolizing -- Women and Printer's Ink -- Tramp Printers -- Printing Equipment Used in the Old West -- Early Newspapers in States and Territories West of the Mississippi
Summary:
The long, exciting, often surprising story of journalism in the Old West--from the freewheeling days of the early 1800s when all the news was an expression of the editor's opinion, to the more balanced reporting of the classic small-town weeklies and busy city newsrooms of the 1920s. Here are the printers who founded the first papers, setting up shop under trees, in tents, in barns or storefronts, moving on when the town failed, or into larger quarters if it flourished. Using many excerpts from the early papers themselves, Dary shows us the ways the early editors stretched the language, and how they sometimes had to defend their right of free speech with fists or guns. We see women working in partnership with their husbands or out on their own, and tramp printers who moved from place to place as need for their services rose and fell.--From publisher description.
