In west’s first newspaper, each copy was handmade

By Finn J.D. John
December 1, 2024

IT’S WIDELY KNOWN that the first newspaper west of the Mississippi River was the short-lived Oregon Spectator, which published its first issue on Feb. 5, 1846.

But that’s only true if you define “newspaper” very narrowly. In truth, there was an earlier publication that met every definition of a newspaper but one ... specifically, it was “printed” by hand, every copy, with pen and ink — longhand. No printing press was involved.

This early newspaper was called the Flumgudgeon Gazette and Bumble Bee Budget, and it first appeared in the spring of 1844 just in time for the first legislative council of the Oregon Provisional Government. Its editor identified himself only as “The Curl-Tail Coon,” and it’s not entirely clear if that was just for fun, or for protection from revenge by those whose feathers he ruffled in its pages.

It was a tri-weekly, with a press run of roughly 12 copies (written out longhand, remember, and with original art depicting its author hand-drawn individually on the front page of each by a friend of the editor, a German artist named Springer).

Now, “Flumgudgeon Gazette and Bumble Bee Budget” is a very long name, so to save time we are going to refer to it by a shortened version, in the spirit of Windy City residents who call their daily “The Trib” instead of “The Chicago Tribune” or Stumptowners calling theirs “The Big O” instead of — well, “The Oregonian,” of course ...  In the present case, we’re going with “The Gudge.”

The Gudge was a mercilessly satirical publication. Its motto, printed prominently on the front page of every copy beneath the flag, read “A Newspaper of the Salamagundi Order and Devoted to Scratching and Stinging the Follies of the Age.” Above that appeared a drawing, by Herr Springer, of the Curltail Coon himself, with the caption “Don’t stroke us backwards! There is enough of villainy going on to raise our bristles without that!”

If the editor was pseudonymous, so were the legislators he lampooned — which makes it a bit hard to dope out who was who in the little bit of surviving text we have from the Aug. 20, 1845, issue. Historian Lawrence Powell suggests that “The Big Brass Gun” may have been Jesse Applegate’s nickname, but confesses himself baffled as to who “The Blueback Terrapin” was.

The editor also makes liberal use of the old “an elderly Chinese gentleman stopped by the newspaper office last week, and here are some of the super unflattering things he had to say about various politicians” wheeze that was commonly used to humorously cloak editorial comments with an air of newsiness back in the day. In The Gudge, though, the strange plain-talking visitor is “a savage Tillicum” who boils down the news of the day into Chinuk (Chinook Jargon) with results that were occasionally hilarious, but more often just confusing (sometimes both) due to Curltail Coon’s general lack of competence in Chinuk. Reading one of these columns is a bit like reading something a non-English speaker has fed into Google Translate. Here’s a short example:

“ ‘But,’ says he, ‘you told me they come to mamuk pehpah (write laws, literally “work paper”), why do they mamuk so much hyas wawa (big talk)?’

“‘That’s Buncombe wawa,’ says we.

‘Iktah okook (what’s that)?’ — Now as an explanation of this would have been unintelligible to our friend from Clackamas City, as they have no such thing known in their legislative proceedings, we concluded to say Klahowya sikhs, alta nika klatowa kopa theater (Ciao, old friend, I’m off to catch the show; literally, Salutations male-friend, now I travel to theater).”

(By “theater,” he almost certainly meant the latest session of the Territorial Legislature. In The Gudge, he always refers to its meetings as “Flumgudgeon theater.”)

Other characters, though unnamed, aren’t so hard to figure out. Disparaging references to “Mr. Vancouver” are, most likely, Dr. John McLoughlin, then still the chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. There are also lots of snide references to “the Indian agent,” Elijah White — more on whom in just a bit.

Historian Frederic Hudson writes that this sarcastic little scandal-sheet was taken very seriously and kept the lawmakers on their toes. Essentially forgotten today, it was hugely influential on frontier Oregon journalism before the Civil War, and really established the feisty, sarcastic, muckraking tone that would be known later as the “Oregon style.”

SO, WHO WAS this “Curltail Coon?”

It was historian Powell, writing in 1940, who figured that out and broke the news.

Powell had been working on a biography of a bellicose, colorful transplanted Southerner, a Virginian named Charles Edward Pickett, who moved from Oregon City to Sacramento near the end of the Mexican War and hit the political stage there like a wrecking ball. While researching Pickett’s contributions to a California newspaper, Powell came across a letter to the editor in which Pickett spills the tea: The Coon had been Pickett himself.

Pickett’s nickname was “Philosopher Pickett,” which makes him sound like a harmless enough guy. This was emphatically not the case, though, particularly when he was young. And yes, he was related to George Pickett, the Confederate general famous for Pickett’s Charge; the two were cousins. The whole clan was known, back home in Virginia, as “The Fighting Picketts.”

Philosopher Pickett was a prickly, aristocratic Virginian of the type that usually adopted “Colonel” as a nickname later in life, and maybe he would have done so if he hadn’t already had one. He left Virginia in 1842 when he was 22 years old, lured by the opportunity to “win” the Oregon country away from Perfidious Albion. He ended up joining one of the earliest wagon trains to Oregon, in company with Peter Burnett and Jesse Applegate.

Upon arriving, he found that the Methodist missionaries had staked enormous claims to the best portions of the Willamette Valley. This offended his sense of fairness, so he waded into the fray, staking his 640-acre claim in the middle of the Methodists’ reserve, at the confluence of the Clackamas and Willamette rivers in what is now Gladstone.

“The church was unsuccessful in ousting him,” Powell reports, “even though it went so far as to incite the Indians to attempt to murder him. The monopoly was broken, and the land-hungry settlers poured in after him.”

Pickett also feuded with the territory’s Indian agent, Dr. Elijah White, and actually managed to get White fired from his job. The gig was then offered to him, but by the time the offer came through he’d moved to California.

As for the “Philosopher” part of his name, well, Pickett was one of the founders of the Pioneer Lyceum and Literary Club, and served as its secretary.

The Lyceum was the organization that launched The Oregon Spectator in 1846, and Pickett had hoped to be tapped as the paper’s editor. In fact, his decision to publish The Gudge may have been intended to demonstrate his suitability for the editor’s chair; when Pickett launched The Gudge, the printing press that the Lyceum had purchased to print the Spectator was already on its way “around the horn.”

If that’s the case, it didn’t work. The Methodists, who were furious with him for breaking up their giant land claim, pulled some strings and got him taken off the short list, and the job went to William G. T’Vault instead.

This snub may have been what prompted Pickett to leave Oregon. He was in the first issue of the Spectator with Oregon’s first real-estate ad, for townsite lots in what is now Gladstone — he’d carved up his claim and was selling it off. A few months later, he quit the territory and moved to Sacramento.

In California, Pickett got into a fight over a property line that culminated in him blasting his neighbor with a shotgun as the neighbor charged him with a pickaxe. He was prosecuted for murder, but found innocent. The following year he was elected as a delegate to the first California constitutional convention.

Later attempts to get elected to public office in California did not pan out for Pickett, so he continued publishing his ante-bellum Jacksonian populist screeds and working his land there. He may have wished he’d stuck around Oregon with its “flumgudgeon theater,” as apparently he found California’s legislature to be even worse.

During the Cayuse War that followed the Whitman massacre, Pickett returned to Oregon to try and lend a hand in rounding up a militia company to attack the tribe. He also lent his pen to a series of unsuccessful but colorful attempts a decade later to keep Oregon slavery-friendly and to block the rise of Edward Baker as Oregon’s senator. But his life was in California now, and for the most part he stayed there.

Shortly after the Civil War Pickett had one more brush with fame when, during a trial before the California State Supreme Court, he assaulted one of the judges, seizing him and dragging him off the bench for an epic pounding. A pounding did indeed ensue, but it wasn’t the judge who took the brunt of it; and it was followed by a sensational contempt-of-court trial that resulted in Pickett spending eight months in jail. He later sued the court for $100,000 for this affront, but lost.

Pickett died fairly young, at the age of 62, in Mariposa in 1882.

Like poor James Marshall, the ex-Oregon farmer who touched off the California Gold Rush, Pickett really should have stayed in Oregon. On the other hand, given his pugnacious support for the Confederacy in general and slavery in particular, it’s probably just as well that he did not.

(Sources: “Flumgudgeon Gazette in 1845 Antedated the Spectator,” an article by Lawrence Clark Powell published in the June 1940 issue of Oregon Historical Quarterly; “Charles Edward Pickett,” an article by William L. Lang published May 11, 2022, on oregonencyclopedia.org; Journalism in the United States from 1690-1872, a book by Frederic Hudson published in 1873 by Harper)

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