The officers and members of the Home for Disabled Butter and Hoary-headed Hotel Hash met at their mosque last Saturday evening, and, after the roll call, reading of the moments of the preceding meeting by the Secretary, singing of the ode and examination of all present to ascertain if they were in possession of the quarterly password, explanation and signs of distress, the Most Esteemed Toolymuckahi, having reached the order of communications and new business and good of the order, stated that the society was now ready to take action, or, at least, to discuss the feasibility of holding a series of entertainments at the rink. These entertainments had been proposed as a means of propping up the tottering finances of the society, and procuring much-needed funds for the purpose of purchasing new regalia for the Most Esteemed Duke of the Dishrag and the Most Esteemed Hired Man, each of whom had been wearing the same red calico collar and cheese-cloth sash since the organization of the society. Funds were also necessary to pay for a brother who had walked through a railroad trestle into the shoreless sea of eternity, and whose widow had a policy of $135.25 against this society on the life of her husband.
Various suggestions were made; among them was the idea advanced by the Most Highly Esteemed Inside Door-Slammer that, as the society's object was, of course, to obtain funds, would it not be well to consider, in the first place, whether it would not be as well for the Most Esteemed Toolymuckahi to appoint six brethren in good standing to arm themselves with great care, gird up their loins and muzzle the pay-car as it started out on its mission. He simply offered this as a suggestion, and, as it was a direct method of securing the coin necessary, he would move that such a committee be appointed by the Chair to wait on the pay-car and draw on it at sight.
The Most Esteemed Keeper of the Cork-screw seconded the motion, in order, as he said, to get it before the house. This brought forward very hot discussion, pending which the presiding officer could see very plainly that the motion was unpopular.
A visiting brother from Yellowstone Park Creamery No. 17, stated that in their society “an entertainment of this kind had been given for the purpose of pouring a flood of wealth into the coffers of the society, and it had been fairly successful. Among the attractions there had been nothing of an immoral or lawless nature whatever. In the first place, a kind of farewell oyster gorge had been given, with cove oysters as a basis, and $2 a couple as an after-thought. A can of cove oysters entertained thirty people and made $30 for the society. Besides, it was found after the party had broken up that, owing to the adhesive properties of the oysters, they were not eaten; but the juice, as it were, had been scooped up and the puckered and corrugated gizzards of the sea had been preserved. Acting upon this suggestion, the society had an oyster patty debauch the following evening at $2 a couple. Forty suckers came and put their means into the common fund. We didn't have enough oysters to quite go around, so some of us cut a dozen out of an old boot leg, and the entertainment was a great success. We also had other little devices for making money, which worked admirably and yielded much profit to the society. Those present also said that they had never enjoyed themselves so much before. Many little games were played, which produced great merriment and considerable coin. I could name a dozen devices for your society, if desired, by which money could be made for your treasury, without the risk or odium necessarily resulting from robbing the pay-car or a bank, and yet the profit will be nearly as great in proportion to the work done.”
Here the gavel of the Most Esteemed Toolymuckahi fell with a sickening thud, and the visiting brother was told that the time assigned to communications, new business and good of the order had expired, but that the discussion would be taken up at the next session, in one week, at which time it was the purpose of the chair to hear and note all suggestions relative to an entertainment to be given at a future date by the society for the purpose of obtaining the evanescent scad and for the successful flash of the reluctant boodle.
Personal.—Will the young woman who used to cook in our family, and who went away ten pounds of sugar and five and a half pounds of tea ahead of the game, please come back, and all will be forgiven.
If she cannot return, will she please write, stating her present address, and also give her reasons for shutting up the cat in the refrigerator when she went away?
If she will only return, we will try to forget the past, and think only of the glorious present and the bright, bright future.
Come back, Sarah, and jerk the waffle-iron for us once more.
Your manners are peculiar, but we yearn for your doughnuts, and your style of streaked cake suits us exactly.
You may keep the handkerchiefs and the collars, and we will not refer to the dead past.
We have arranged it so that when you snore it will not disturb the night police, and if you do not like our children we will send them away.
We realize that you do not like children very well, and our children especially gave you much pain, because they were not so refined as you were.
We have often wished, for your sake, that we had never had any children; but so long as they are in our family, the neighbors will rather expect us to take care of them.
Still, if you insist upon it, we will send them away. We don't want to seem overbearing with our servants.
We would be willing, also, to give you more time for mental relaxation than you had before. The intellectual strain incident to the life of one who makes gravy for a lost and undone world must be very great, and tired nature must at last succumb. We do not want you to succumb. If anyone has got to succumb, let us do it.
All we ask is that you will let us know when you are going away, and leave the crackers and cheese where we can find them.
It was rather rough on us to have you go away when we had guests in the house, but if you had not taken the key to the cooking department we could have worried along.
You ought to let us have company at the house sometimes if we will let you have company when you want to. Still, you know best, perhaps. You are older than we are, and you have seen more of the world.
We miss your gentle admonitions and your stern reproofs sadly. Come back and reprove us again. Come back and admonish us once more, at so much per admonish and groceries.
{Illustration: “WE HOPE YOU WILL DO THE SAME BY US."}
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We will agree to let you select the tender part of the steak, and such fruit as seems to strike you favorably, just as we did before. We did not like it when you were here, but that is because we were young and did not know what the custom was.
If a life-time devoted to your welfare can obliterate the injustice we have done you, we will be glad to yield it to you.
If you could suggest a good place for us to send the children, where they would be well taken care of, and where they would not interfere with some other cook who is a friend of yours, we would be glad to have you write us.
My wife says she hopes you will feel perfectly free to use the piano whenever you are lonely or sad, and when you or the bread feel depressed you will be welcome to come into the parlor and lean up against either one of us and sob.
We all know that when you were with us before we were a little reserved in our manner toward you, but if you come back it will be different.
We will introduce you to more of our friends this time, and we hope you will do the same by us. Young people are apt to get above their business, and we admit that we were wrong.
Come back and oversee our fritter bureau once more.
Take the portfolio of our interior department.
Try to forget our former coldness.
Return, oh, wanderer, return!
The following letter was written, recently, in reply to a dramatist who proposed the matter of writing a play jointly.
Hudson, Wis., Nov. 13, 1886.
Scott Marble, Esq.—Dear Sir: I have just received your favor of yesterday, in which you ask me to unite with you in the construction of a new play.
This idea has been suggested to me before, but not in such a way as to inaugurate the serious thought which your letter has stirred up in my seething mass of mind.
I would like very much to unite with you in the erection of such a dramatic structure that people would cheerfully come to this country from Europe, and board with us for months in order to see this play every night.
You will surely agree with me that someone ought to write a play. Why it has not been done long ago, I cannot understand. A well known comedian told me a year ago that he hadn't been able to look into a paper for sixteen months. He could not even read over the proof of his own press notices and criticisms, to ascertain whether the printer had set them up as he wrote them or not, simply because it took all his spare time off the stage to examine the manuscripts of plays that had been submitted to him.
But I think we could arrange it so that we might together construct something in that line which would at least attract the attention of our families.
Would you mind telling me, for instance, how you write a play? You have been in the business before, and you could tell me, of course, some of the salient points about it. Do you write it with a typewriter, or do you dictate your thoughts to someone who does not resent being dictated to?
Do you write a play and then dramatize it, or do you write the drama and then play on it? Would it not be a very good idea to secure a plot that would cost very little, and then put the kibosh on it, or would you put up the lines first, and then hang the plot or drama, or whatever it is, on the lines? Is it absolutely necessary to have a prologue? If so, what is a prologue? Is it like a catalogue?
I have a great many crude ideas, but you see I am not practical. One of my crude ideas is to introduce into the play an artist's studio. This would not cost much, for we could borrow the studio evenings and allow the artist to use it daytimes. Then we would introduce into the studio scene the artist's living model. Everybody would be horrified, but they would go. They would walk over each other to attend the drama, and we would do well. Our living model in the studio act would be made of common wax, and if it worked well, we would discharge other members of the company and substitute wax. Gradually we could get it down to where the company would be wax, with the exception of a janitor with a feather duster. Think that over.
But seriously, a play, it seems to me, should embody an idea. Am I correct in that theory or not? It ought to convey some great thought, some maxim or aphorism, or some such a thing as that. How would it do to arrange a play with the idea of impressing upon the audience that “the fool and his money are soon parted?” Are you using a hero and a heroine in your plays now? If so, would you mind writing their lines for them, while I arrange the details and remarks for the young man who is discovered asleep on a divan when the curtain rises, and who sleeps on through the play with his mouth slightly ajar till the close—the close of the play, not the close of his mouth—when it is discovered that he is dead. He then plays the cold remains in the closing tableau, and fills a new-made grave at $9 per week.
I could also write the lines, I think, for the young man who comes in wearing a light summer cane and a seersucker coat so tight that you can count his vertebrae. I could write what he would say without great mental strain, I think. I must avoid mental strain or my intellect might split down the back and I would be a mental wreck, good for nothing but to strew the shores of time with myself.
Various other crude ideas present themselves to my mind, but they need to be clothed. You will say that this is unnecessary. I know you will at once reply that, for the stage, the less you clothe an idea the more popular it will be, but I could not consent to have even a bare thought of mine make an appearance night after night before a cultivated audience.
What do you think of introducing a genuine case of small-pox on the stage? You say in your letter that what the American people clamor for is something “catchy.” That would be catchy, and it would also introduce itself.
I wish you would also tell me what kind of diet you confine yourself to while writing a play, and how you go to work to procure it. Do you live on a mixed diet, or on your relatives? Would you soak your head while writing a play, or would you soak your overcoat? I desire to know all these things, because, Mr. Marble, to tell you the truth, I am as ignorant about this matter as the babe unborn. In fact, posterity would have to get up early in the morning to know less about play-writing than I have succeeded in knowing.
If we are to make a kind of comedy, my idea would be to introduce something facetious in the middle of the comedy. No one will expect it, you see, and it will tickle the audience almost to death.
A friend of mine suggests that it would be a great hit to introduce, or rather to reproduce, the Hell Gate explosion. Many were not able to be there at the time, and would willingly go a long distance to witness the reproduction.
I wish that you would reply to this letter at an early date, telling me what you think of the schemes suggested. Feel perfectly free to express yourself fully. I am not too proud to receive your suggestions.
It would seem at this time, while so little is being said on the currency question, and especially by the men who really control the currency, that a word from me would not be out of place. Too much talking has been done by those only who have a theoretical knowledge of money and its eccentric habits. People with a mere smattering of knowledge regarding national currency have been loquacious, while those who have made the matter a study, have been kept in the background.
At this period in the history of our country, there seems to be a general stringency, and many are in the stringency business who were never that way before. Everything seems to be demonetized. The demonetization of groceries is doing as much toward the general wiggly palsy of trade as anything I know of.
But I may say, in alluding briefly to the silver dollar, that there are worse calamities than the silver dollar. Other things may occur in our lives, which, in the way of sadness and three-cornered gloom, make the large, robust dollar look like an old-fashioned half-dime.
I met a man the other day, who, two years ago, was running a small paper at Larrabie's Slough. He was then in his meridian as a journalist, and his paper was frequently quoted by such widely-read publications as theKnight of Labor at Work, a humorous semi-monthly journal. He boldly assailed the silver dollar, and with his trenchant pen he wrote such burning words of denunciation that the printer had to set them on ice before he could use the copy.
Last week I met him on a Milwaukee & St. Paul train. He was very thin in flesh, and the fire of defiance was no longer in his eye. I asked him how he came on with the paper at Larrabie's Slough. He said it was no more.
“It started out,” said he, “in a fearless way, but it was not sustained.”
He then paused in a low tone of voice, gulped, and proceeded:
“Folks told me when I began that I ought to attack almost everything. Make the paper non-partisan, but aggressive, that was their idea. Sail into everything, and the paper would soon be a power in the land. So I aggressed.
“Friends came in very kindly and told me what to attack. They would neglect their own business in order to tell me of corruption in somebody else. I went on that way for some time in a defiant mood, attacking anything that happened to suggest itself.
“Finally I thought I would attack the silver dollar. I did so. I thought that friends would come to me and praise me for my manly words, and that I could afford to lose the friendship of the dollar provided I could win friends.
“In six months I took an unexpired annual pass over our Larrabie Slough Narrow-Gauge, or Orphan Road, and with nothing else but the clothes I wore, I told the plaintiff how to jerk the old Washington press and went away. The dear old Washington press that had more than once squatted my burning words into the pure white page. The dear old towel on which I had wiped my soiled hands for years, until it had almost become a part of myself, the dark blue Gordon press with its large fly wheel and intermittent chattel mortgage, a press, to which I had contributed the first joint of my front finger; the editor's chair; the samples of large business cards printed in green with an inflamed red border, which showed that we could do colored work at Larrabie's Slough just as well as they could in the large cities; the files of our paper; the large wilted potato that Mr. Alonzo G. Pinkham of Erin Corners kindly laid on our table-all, all had to go.
“I fled out into the great, hollow, mocking world of people who had requested me to aggress. They were people who had called my attention to various things which I ought to attack. I had attacked those things. I had also attacked the Larrabie Slough Narrow-Gauge Railroad, but the manager did not see the attack, and so my pass was good.
“What could I do?
“I had attacked everything, and more especially the silver dollar, and now I was homeless. For fourteen weeks I rode up the narrow-gauge road one day and back the next, subsisting solely on the sample of nice pecan meat that the newsboy puts in each passenger's lap.
“You look incredulous, I see, but it is true.
“I feel differently toward the currency now, and I wish I could undo what I have done. Were I called up again to jerk the Archimedean lever, I would not be so aggressive, especially as regards the currency. Whether it is inflated or not, silver dollars, paper certificates of deposit or silver bullion, it does not matter to me.
“I yearn for two or three adult doughnuts and one of those thick, dappled slabs of gingerbread, or slat of pie with gooseberries in it. I presume that I could write a scathing editorial on the abuses of our currency yet, but I am not so much in the scathe business as I used to be.
“I wish you would state, if you will, through some great metropolitan journal, that my views in relation to the silver coinage and the currency question have undergone a radical change, and that any plan whatever, by which to make the American dollar less skittish, will meet with my hearty approval.
“If I have done anything at all through my paper to injure or repress the flow of our currency, and I fear I have, I now take this occasion to cheerfully regret it.”
He then wrung my hand and passed from my sight.
During the past few years in the history of our republic, we have had leprosy, yellow fever and the dude, and it seemed as though each one would wreck the whole national fabric at one time. National and international troubles of one kind and another have gradually risen, been met and mastered, but the great national abscess known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints still obstinately refuses to come to a head.
I may be a radical monogamist and a rash enthusiast upon this matter, but I still adhere to my original motto, one country, one flag and one wife at a time. Matrimony is a good thing, but it can be overdone. We can excuse the man who becomes a collection of rare coins, stamps, or autographs, but he who wears out his young life making a collection of wives, should be looked upon with suspicion.
After all, however, this matter has always been, and still is, treated with too much levity. It seems funny to us, at a distance of 1,600 miles, that a thick-necked patriarch in the valley of the Jordan should be sealed to thirteen or fourteen low-browed, half human females, and that the whole mass of humanity should live and multiply under one roof.
Those who see the wealthy polygamists of Salt Lake City, do not know much of the horrors of trying to make polygamy and poverty harmonize in the rural districts. In the former case, each wife has a separate residence or suite of rooms, perhaps; but in the latter is the aggregation of vice and depravity, doubly horrible because, instead of the secluded character which wickedness generally assumes, here it is the common heritage of the young and at once fails to shock or horrify.
Under the All-seeing eye, and the Bee Hive, and the motto, “Holiness to the Lord,” with a bogus Bible and a red-nosed prophet, who couldn't earn $13. per month pounding sand, this so called church hanging on to the horns of the altar, as it were, defies the statutes, and while in open rebellion against the laws of God and man, refers to the constitution of the United States as protecting it in its “religious belief.”
In a poem, the patient Mormon in the picturesque valley of the Great Salt Lake, where he has “made the desert blossom as the rose,” looks well. With the wonderful music of the great organ at the tabernacle sounding in your ears, and the lofty temple near by towering to the sky, you say to yourself, there is, after all, something solemn and impressive in all this; but when a greasy apostle in an alapaca duster, takes his place behind the elevated desk, and with bad grammar and slangy sentences, asks God in a businesslike way to bless this buzzing mass of unclean, low-browed, barbarous scum of all foreign countries, and the white trash and criminals of our own, you find no reverence, and no religious awe.
The same mercenary, heartless lunacy that runs through the sickly plagiarism of the Book of Mormon, pervades all this, and instead of the odor of sanctity you notice the flavor of bilge water, and the emigrant's own hailing sign, the all-pervading fragrance of the steerage.
Education is the foe of polygamy, and many of the young who have had the means by which to complete their education in the East, are apostate, at least so far as polygamy is concerned. Still, to the great mass of the poor and illiterate of Mormondom this is no benefit. The rich of the Mormon Church are rich because their influence with this great fraud has made them so; and it would, as a matter of business, injure their prospects to come out and bolt the nomination.
{Illustration: THE FAMILY WASH.}
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Utah, even with the Edmunds bill, is hopelessly Mormon; all adjoining States and Territories are already invaded by them, and the delegate in Congress from Wyoming is elected by the Mormon vote.
I believe that I am moderately liberal and free upon all religious matters, but when a man's confession of faith involves from three to twenty-seven old corsets in the back yard every spring, and a clothes line every Monday morning that looks like a bridal trousseau emporium struck by a cyclone, I must admit that I am a little bit inclined to be sectarian in my views.
It's bad enough to be slapped across the features by one pair of long wet hose on your way to the barn, but to have a whole bankrupt stock of cold, wet garments every week fold their damp arms around your neck, as you dodge under the clothes line to drive the cow out of the yard, is wrong.
It is not good for man to be alone, of course, but why should he yearn to fold a young ladies' seminary to his bosom? Why should this morbid sentiment prompt him to marry a Female Suffrage Mass Meeting? I do not wish to be considered an extremist in religious matters, but the doctrine that requires me to be sealed to a whole emigrant train, seems unnatural and inconsistent.
An Address Delivered Before the Wisconsin State Press Association, at White-Water, Wis., August 11, 1886.
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Press of Wisconsin:
I am sure that when you so kindly invited me to address you to-day, you did not anticipate a lavish display of genius and gestures. I accepted the invitation because it afforded me an opportunity to meet you and to get acquainted with you, and tell you personally that for years I have been a constant reader of your valuable paper and I like it. You are running it just as I like to see a newspaper run.
I need not elaborate upon the wonderful growth of the press in our country, or refer to the great power which journalism wields in the development of the new world. I need not ladle out statistics to show you how the newspaper has encroached upon the field of oratory and how the pale and silent man, while others sleep, compiles the universal history of a day and tells his mighty audience what he thinks about it before he goes to bed.
Of course, this is but the opinion of one man, but who has a better opportunity to judge than he who sits with his finger on the electric pulse of the world, judging the actions of humanity at so much per judge, invariably in advance?
I need not tell you all this, for you certainly know it if you read your paper, and I hope you do. A man ought to read his own paper, even if he cannot endorse all its sentiments.
So necessary has the profession of journalism become to the progress and education of our country, that the matter of establishing schools where young men may be fitted for an active newspaper life, has attracted much attention and discussion. It has been demonstrated that our colleges do not fit a young man to walk at once into the active management of a paper. He should at least know the difference between a vile contemporary and a Gothic scoop.
It is difficult to map out a proper course for the student in a school of journalism, there are so many things connected with the profession which the editor and his staff should know and know hard. The newspaper of to-day is a library. It is an encyclopaedia, a poem, a biography, a history, a prophecy, a directory, a time-table, a romance, a cook book, a guide, a horoscope, an art critic, a political resume, amultum in parvo. It is a sermon, a song, a circus, an obituary, a picnic, a shipwreck, a symphony in solid brevier, a medley of life and death, a grand aggregation of man's glory and his shame. It is, in short, a bird's-eye-view of all the magnanimity and meanness, the joys and griefs, the births and deaths, the pride and poverty of the world, and all for two cents—sometimes.
I could tell you some more things that the newspaper of to-day is, if you had time to stay here and your business would not suffer in your absence. Among others it is a long felt want, a nine-column paper in a five-column town, a lying sheet, a feeble effort, a financial problem, a tottering wreck, a political tool and a sheriff's sale.
If I were to suggest a curriculum for the young man who wished to take a regular course in a school of journalism, preferring that to the actual experience, I would say to him, devote the first two years to meditation and prayer. This will prepare the young editor for the surprise and consequent temptation to profanity which in a few years he may experience when he finds that the name of the Deity in his double-leaded editorial is spelled with a little “g,” and the peroration of the article is locked up between a death notice and the advertisement of a patent moustache coaxer, which is to follow pure reading matter every day in the week and occupy the top of column on Sunday tf.
The ensuing five years should be devoted to the peculiar orthography of the English language.
Then put in three years with the dumb bells, sand bags, slung shots and tomahawk. In my own journalistic experience I have found more cause for regret over my neglect of this branch than anything else. I usually keep on my desk during a heated campaign, a large paper weight, weighing three or four pounds, and in several instances I have found that I could feed that to a constant reader of my valuable paper instead of a retraction.
Fewer people lick the editor though, now, than did so in years gone by. Many people—in the last two years—have gone across the street to lick the editor and never returned. They intended to come right back in a few moments, but they are now in a land where a change of heart and a palm leaf fan is all they need.
Fewer people are robbing the editor now-a-days, too, I notice with much pleasure. Only a short time ago I noticed that a burglar succeeded in breaking into the residence of a Dakota journalist, and after a long, hard struggle the editor succeeded in robbing him.
After the primary course, mapped out already, an intermediate course of ten years should be given to learning the typographical art, so that when visitors come in and ask the editor all about the office, he can tell them of the mysteries of making a paper, and how delinquent subscribers have frequently been killed by a well-directed blow with a printer's towel.
Five years should be devoted to a study of the art of proof-reading. In that length of time the young journalist can perfect himself to such a degree that it will take another five years for the printer to understand his corrections and marginal notes.
Fifteen years should then be devoted to the study of American politics, especially civil service reform, looking at it from a non-partisan standpoint. If possible, the last five years should be spent abroad. London is the place to go if you wish to get a clear, concise view of American politics, and Chicago or Milwaukee would be a good place for the young English journalist to go and study the political outlook of England.
The student should then take a medical and surgical course, so that he may be able to attend to contusions, fractures and so forth, which may occur to himself or to the party who may come to his office for a retraction and by mistake get his spinal column double-leaded.
Ten years should then be given to the study of law. No thorough, metropolitan editor wants to enter upon the duties of his profession without knowing the difference between a writ ofmandamusand other styles of profanity. He should thoroughly understand the entire system of American jurisprudence, so that in case acertiorarishould break out in his neighborhood he would know just what to do for it.
The student will, by this time, begin to see what is required of him and enter with great zeal upon the further study of his profession.
He will now enter upon a theological course of ten years and fit himself thoroughly to speak intelligently of the various creeds and religions of the world. Ignorance or the part of an editor is almost a crime, and when he closes a powerful editorial with the familiar quotation, “It is the early bird that catches the worm,” and attributes it to St. Paul instead of Deuteronomy, it makes me blush for the profession.
The last ten years may be profitably devoted to the acquisition of a practical knowledge of cutting cordwood, baking beans, making shirts, lecturing, turning double handsprings, being shot out of a catapult at a circus, learning how to make a good adhesive paste that will not sour in hot weather, grinding scissors, punctuating, capitalization, condemnation, syntax, plain sewing, music and dancing, sculpting, etiquette, prosody, how to win the affections of the opposite sex and evade a malignant case of breach of promise, the ten commandments, every man his own tooter on the flute, croquet, rules of the prize ring, rhetoric, parlor magic, calisthenics, penmanship, how to run a jack from the bottom of the pack without getting shot, civil engineering, decorative art, kalsomining, bicycling, base ball, hydraulics, botany, poker, international law, high-low-jack, drawing and painting, faro, vocal music, driving, breaking team, fifteen ball pool, how to remove grease spots from last year's pantaloons, horsemanship, coupling freight cars, riding on a rail, riding on a pass, feeding threshing machines, how to wean a calf from the parent stem, teaching school, bull-whacking, plastering, waltzing, vaccination, autopsy, how to win the affections of your wife's mother, every man his own washerwoman, or how to wash underclothes so they will not shrink, etc., etc.
But time forbids anything like a thorough list of what a young man should study in order to fully understand all that he may be called upon to express an opinion about in his actual experience as a journalist. There are a thousand little matters which every editor should know; such, for instance, as the construction of roller composition. Many newspaper men can write a good editorial on Asiatic cholera, but their roller composition is not fit to eat.
With the course of study that I have mapped out, the young student would emerge from the college of journalism at the age of 95 or 96, ready to take off his coat and write an article on almost any subject. He would be a little giddy at first, and the office boy would have to see that he went to bed at a proper time each night, but aside from that, he would be a good man to feed a waste paper basket.
Actual experience is the best teacher in this peculiarly trying profession. I hope some day to attend a press convention where the order of exercise will consist of five-minute experiences from each one present It would be worth listening to.
My own experience was a little peculiar. It was my intention at first to practice law, when I went to the Rocky Mountains, although I had been warned by the authorities not to do so. Still, I did practice in a surreptitious kind of a way, and might have been practicing yet if my client hadn't died. When you have become attached to a client and respect and like him, and then when, without warning, like a bolt of electricity from a clear sky, he suddenly dies and takes the bread right out of your mouth, it is rough.
Then I tried the practice of criminal law, but my client got into the penitentiary, where he was no use to me financially or politically. Finally, when the judge was in a hurry, he would appoint me to defend the pauper criminals. They all went to the penitentiary, until people got to criticising the judge, and finally they told him that it was a shame to appoint me to defend an innocent man.
My first experience in journalism was in a Western town, in which I was a total stranger. I went there with thirty-five cents, but I had it concealed in the lining of my clothes so that no one would have suspected it if they had met me. I had no friends, and I noticed that when I got off the train the band was not there to meet me. I entered the town just as any other American citizen would. I had not fully decided whether to become a stage robber or a lecturer on phrenology. At that time I got a chance to work on a morning paper. It used to go to press before dark, so I always had my evenings to myself and I liked that part of it first-rate. I worked on that paper a year and might have continued if the proprietors had not changed it to an evening paper.
Then a company incorporated itself and started a paper, of which I took charge. The paper was published in the loft of a livery stable. That is the reason they called it a stock company. You could come up the stairs into the office or you could twist the tail of the iron-gray mule and take the elevator.
It wasn't much of a paper, but it cost $16,000 a year to run it, and it came out six days in the week, no matter what the weather was. We took the Associated Press news by telegraph part of the time and part of the time we relied on the Cheyenne morning papers, which we got of the conductor on the early morning freight. We got a great many special telegrams from Washington in that way, and when the freight train got in late, I had to guess at what congress was doing and fix up a column of telegraph the best I could. There was a rival evening paper there, and sometimes it would send a smart boy down to the train and get hold of our special telegrams, and sometimes the conductor would go away on a picnic and take our Cheyenne paper with him.
All these things are annoying to a man who is trying to supply a long felt want. There was one conductor, in particular, who used to go away into the foot-hills shooting sage hens and take our cablegrams with him. This threw too much strain on me. I could guess at what congress was doing and make up a pretty readable report, but foreign powers and reichstags and crowned heads and dynasties always mixed me up. You can look over what congress did last year and give a pretty good guess at what it will do this year, but you can't rely on a dynasty or an effete monarchy in a bad state of preservation. It may go into executive session or it may go into bankruptcy.
Still, at one time we used to have considerable local news to fill up with. The north and middle parks for a while used to help us out when the mining camps were new. Those were the days when it was considered perfectly proper to kill off the board of supervisors if their action was distasteful. At that time a new camp generally located a cemetery and wrote an obituary; then the boys would start out to find a man whose name would rhyme with the rest of the verse. Those were the days when the cemeteries of Colorado were still in their infancy and the song of the six-shooter was heard in the land.
Sometimes the Indians would send us in an item. It was generally in the obituary line. With the Sioux on the north and the peaceful Utes on the south, we were pretty sure of some kind of news during the summer. The parks used to be occupied by white men winters and Indians summers. Summer was really the pleasantest time to go into the parks, but the Indians had been in the habit of going there at that season, and they were so clannish that the white men couldn't have much fun with them, so they decided they would not go there in the summer. Several of our best subscribers were killed by the peaceful Utes.
There were two daily and three weekly papers published in Laramie City av that time. There were between two and three thousand people and our local circulation ran from 150 to 250, counting dead-heads. In our prospectus we stated that we would spare no expense whatever in ransacking the universe for fresh news, but there were times when it was all we could do to get our paper out on time. Out of the express office, I mean.
One of the rival editors used to write his editorials for the paper in the evening, jerk the Washington hand-press to work them off, go home and wrestle with juvenile colic in his family until daylight and then deliver his papers on the street. It is not surprising that the great mental strain incident to this life made an old man of him, and gave a tinge of extreme sadness to the funny column of his paper.
In an unguarded moment, this man wrote an editorial once that got all his subscribers mad at him, and the same afternoon he came around and wanted to sell his paper to us for $10,000. I told him that the whole outfit wasn't worth ten thousand cents.
“I know that,” said he, “but it is not the material that I am talking about. It is the good will of the paper.”
We had a rising young horsethief in Wyoming in those days, who got into jail by some freak of justice, and it was so odd for a horsethief to get into jail that I alluded to it editorially. This horsethief had distinguished himself from the common, vulgar horsethieves of his time, by wearing a large mouth—a kind of full-dress, eight-day mouth. He rarely smiled, but when he did, he had to hold the top of his head on with both hands. I remember that I spoke of this in the paper, forgetting that he might criticise me when he got out of jail. When he did get out again, he stated that he would shoot me on sight, but friends advised me not to have his blood on my hands, and I took their advice, so I haven't got a particle of his blood on either of my hands.
For two or three months I didn't know but he would drop into the office any minute and criticise me, but one day a friend told me that he had been hung in Montana. Then I began to mingle in society again, and didn't have to get in my coal with a double barrel shot gun any more.
After that I was always conservative in relation to horsethieves until we got the report of the vigilance committee.