that many old timers so painfully remember. Of those forty-six tender journalistic children that ascended in that explosion, the oldest of which had lived less than twenty-eight months, there came down, dead and mortally wounded, seven of the nine born in 1855; seventeen of the eighteen of 1856; and eighteen of the nineteen that had started during the first eight months of 1857. The mortality of corner lots was hardly greater than that of the newspapers of those twenty-eight months. THIRD PAPER, 1856. The year 1856 came in, scattering with prodigal hand along its course eighteen additional weeklies through the vigorous young towns of Minnesota Territory. The fever of pioneer enterprise increased. Alert traders, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, and other village and city builders, crowded every upbound steamboat on the Mississippi. Prairie schooners, crammed with farmers' families and their belongings, dotted the country landscape in all directions. Everywhere swarmed eager men intent on corner lots, land claims, and business and professional locations. The boom that finally brought disaster to the Northwest by over-doing things was rapidly building. What wrecks it left! About every twenty years the boys of the preceding financial storm have grown to be men and are taking their turn in commanding the business crafts of the country. Some day they drift into the fogs of what men call new conditions, and in turn they go down on the same old rocks that wrecked their fathers and grandfathers. It reminds me of the story of the retired merchant whose grandson came to him for a record of his experience to guide him in the business life he was about to enter. "No, John," said the old man, “you wouldn't foller it if I should give it to ye. The best thing fer you is to pitch right in and get yer own experience, and,—John, get it arley." No matter how or when the time comes, communities, states, and nation, alike must have their financial disciplinary periods. They seem to be part of the needs of men. Individuals go down in these storms to irretrievable ruin, but as a whole there has been an advance. The masses of men have come out of the wreckage each time on safer ground. THE FILLMORE COUNTY PIONEER. The St. Paul Daily Minnesotian of January 18th, 1856, says it has received the first number of a new paper called the Fillmore County Pioneer. Its place of publication was Carimona, a town laid out in March, 1855, by a company of townsite proprietors. It was neutral in politics; was owned by David Olmsted, William P. Murray, and Louis Robert, of St. Paul; and was edited and published by Ezra R. Trask. After running it awhile, Trask found that there was no money in the paper for him unless he owned the plant. He therefore proposed to the proprietors that they give him the plant on condition that he continue to print the Pioneer at Carimona and pay the bills. This was done. At that time, Carimona was the county seat of Fillmore county. Soon afterward, however, the county seat was moved to Preston. Trask then picked up his little hand press and its belongings, cast his agreement with Olmsted and Co. to the winds, and moved into Iowa, where he sold out, and that was the last heard of him. The History of Fillmore county says that Trask sold the Pioneer outfit October 22nd, 1855, which is a mistake, as the paper was not started until January, 1856, as above stated. Probably the month and day are right, but the year should be 1856, instead of 1855. H. C. Butler is said to be the party who bought it. Who he was, or where he moved the press and material, I have no means of knowing. The Fillmore County Pioneer was the twenty-fourth newspaper started in the Territory, and the first of three papers that lived and died early in the little village of Carimona. CHARLES J. HENNISS. The next important chronological event of Minnesota journalism was the death of Charles J. Henniss. He died of consumption, February 14th, 1856, aged thirty-five. He was born in Philadelphia, and was connected with the United States Gazette, the Courier and Inquirer of New York, and the North American of Philadelphia, prior to coming to St. Paul in the summer of 1850. In November, 1850, he became editor and proprietor of the Chronicle and Register of St. Paul, the only Whig paper then published in the Territory. He was afterward connected, in various editorial ways, with different St. Paul papers, his last assignment being as miscellaneous editor of the Pioneer and Democrat in 1855. Mr. Henniss was a college graduate, a lawyer by profession, and a writer of more than ordinary ability. Like many bright fellows of those early days, he had some weaknesses of character; but they injured none but himself. He was chief among unselfish men, having been known to minister weeks at a time at the bedside of the sick and needy without reward, except the consciousness of the performance of a noble duty. THE HENDERSON DEMOCRAT. The Henderson Democrat was a four-page, seven-column, Democratic paper, which, according to the Pioneer and Democrat of April 17th, 1856, was started at Henderson, Sibley county, on April 3rd of that year. It was the twenty-fifth paper published in the Territory. Its editor and owner was the omnipresent, irrepressible Joseph R. Brown. He was a prominent Democratic leader in early days, the owner and editor during 1853 and 1854 of the St. Paul Pioneer, and the father of the town of Henderson, where in 1856 the Democrat was started as above stated. In 1857 he was elected to the Minnesota Legislature a third time; and shortly afterward he became a member of the convention to form a constitution for the new state of Minnesota. On the sixth of August, 1857, Brown installed Charles C. Guppy as editor and publisher of the Democrat. Guppy was succeeded shortly after by James W. Lynde. The latter tired of his position and of the Democracy together, and on May 25th, 1859, he resigned from the Democrat and abandoned the party. June 1st, 1859, the name of H. H. Young appeared at the head of its columns. April 6th, 1861, is the date of the last number in the files of the Library of the Historical Society. It went under soon afterward. Lynde was shot by an Indian at the beginning of the savage outbreak of 1862. Guppy I have been unable to trace. H. H. YOUNG. Harry H. Young was born in Virginia in 1825 of Quaker parentage. He came to Minnesota in 1859, and lived first at Henderson. During the civil war he went back east and was correspondent of a Baltimore paper. He returned at the end of the war, and was employed on Red Wing and Rochester papers, and later became Immigration Secretary of Minnesota. While in that office he edited and distributed seventy-five thousand copies of "Illustrated Minnesota." He died in St. Luke's Hospital in St. Paul, of congestion of the brain, February 8th, 1896. A TERRITORIAL ROLL OF HONOR. I like to enliven the rather dry routine of my stir among the journalistic dry bones of the territorial period by relating incidents of those early days. Not all are of the humorous kind, however. One carries me back to the beginnings of the Minnesota Historical Society. In my search through the files of early territorial newspapers I came to the January 16th, 1856, issue of the Pioneer and Democrat. There I found the names of sixtytwo men who contributed twenty-five dollars each for a life membership in the Society to enable Colonel D. A. Robertson to purchase two lots for building purposes. Fifteen hundred dollars were paid for the lots, the basement walls and corner stone were laid, and then 1857 rolled over the foundations and the building stopped. The lots are on the northwest corner of Wabasha and Tenth streets. They will prove a valuable nucleus towards providing permanent quarters when the Society has outgrown the rooms given it in the new capitol building. This will come sooner than most of us now believe possible. Naming the sixty-two donors of life memberships to buy those two lots seems now like calling the roll of the dead. Here they are: N. J. T. Dana, Truman M. Smith, C. J. Pettys, J. E. Whitney, Justus C. Ramsey, Charles D. Elfelt, J. C. Martin, William Henry Forbes, John R. Irvine, William L. Banning, William Constans, W. L. Ames, A. F. Hows, M. E. Ames, David Gurin, Edmund Rice, John Nicols. I knew nearly all these men, and of the sixty-two I am not certain that more than nine still survive. They are D. A. J. Baker, Peter Berkey, William Constans, N. J. T. Dana, A. L. Larpenteur, William G. Le Duc, R. R. Nelson, Joseph S. Sewall, and Truman M. Smith. DAKOTA WEEKLY JOURNAL. The Dakota Weekly Journal was the twenty-sixth newspaper started in Minnesota. Only one copy of this paper is in the library of the Historical Society. I find it bound with the files. of the Hastings Independent. It was a four-page, six column, Democratic paper. The copy preserved is No. 5 of Volume 1, dated June 21st, 1856, making the date of first issue May 24th, 1856. The press and material were the same as had been used to print the Red Wing Sentinel No. 1, referred to in my record of the papers of 1855. The purchase was made by Alexis Bailly, an old time fur trader of Mendota, and member of the first Territorial Legislature of Minnesota. The place of publication was Hastings, Dakota county. Henry G. Bailly, son of Alexis, ran the paper and James C. Dow was its editor. Henry G. Bailly was a member of the Constitutional Convention of Minnesota and a senator in the first legislature after Minnesota became a state. The county seat of Dakota county was at first located at Kaposia, a small Indian trading post a short distance below St. Paul. The village of Mendota being somewhat prominent in the early fifties as the headquarters of Hon. H. H. Sibley, who became the first governor of Minnesota after its admission as a state, the county seat was removed to that place in 1854. At an election held March 27th, 1857, it was ordered that the county seat be removed to Hastings, and the records were transferred June 2nd, 1857, where they have since remained. |