Periodicals of the Old West

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Periodicals of the Old West

Newspapers. In 1784, when John Filson finished his manuscript on the history of Kentucky, he had to travel back to Delaware in order to get it published; at that time there were no printing presses in the West. Two years later the Pittsburgh Gazette was published, the first newspaper printed in the trans-Allegheny territories. John Scull, the publisher of the Gazette, also printed the first book west of the Alleghenies, the third volume of Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s novel, Modern Chivalry (1793). In the meantime, using a printing press carried from Philadelphia by wagon and boat, John Bradford, in 1787, started the second Western newspaper, the Kentucke Gazette. Since these newspapers often lacked up-to-date national and international news, the editor often published articles with a literary bent. Essays in the style of the English eighteenth-century essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and the local “poets corner” were popular features; frontier politics and religion were common subjects for verse. Despite any limitations, newspapers continued to grow in the West. By 1840 they comprised more than a quarter of the total newspapers published in the nation.

Western Magazines. The first magazine in the West was Daniel Bradford’s The Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, published only for one year, in 1803, in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1813 Zadoc Cramer briefly published Pittsburgh’s Western Gleaner. From 1819 to 1821 William Gibbes Hunt, again in Lexington, published the Western Review and Miscellaneous Magazine. Western Review featured history, biography, poetry, synopses of British novels, and natural science. In two years Hunt’s magazine also collapsed for lack of contributors. Yet the next two decades witnessed sustained growth by Western magazines. Lexington and Cincinnati became cultural rivals, and in 1824 the Cincinnati Literary Gazette (1824–1825) declared: “This is the Age of Magazines—/ Even skeptics must confess it: / Where is the town of much re-known / That has not one to bless it?”

Flint and the Western Review. Timothy Flint, a New England missionary, teacher, historian, and novelist, began publishing his Western Review in 1827. Flint had already published Frances Berrian, or the Mexican Patriot (1826), which many consider to be the first “Westerns” ever written, the tale of a New Englander who finds a new life on the frontier. Flint envisioned the Review as a journal devoted to developing and celebrating Western culture. “It is high time,” Flint wrote in the “Editor’s Address” in the first volume, “amidst our improvements of every sort, that some effort should be made, to foster polite literature among us.” Flint had a romantic faith in Western, rural virtue; he believed that great writing would come out of the “freshness of our unspoiled nature, beneath the shade of the huge sycamores of the Miami, or … in the breeze of the beautiful Ohio” just as it now came out of “the dark dens” of the cities in the East. Unfortunately, Flint’s optimism was not entirely justified; he himself wrote three-quarters of the material in the Review, with his son, Micah, contributing poetry. Most of the material was historical or factual, but Flint also contributed his own tales and reviews. In 1830, unable to continue editing and writing most of the magazine, Flint ceased publication; but Flint had made his mark. In her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) the English traveler Francis Trollope deplored the volume and quality of America’s “periodical trash” but singled out Flint as an exception. “In some of his critical notices,” she wrote, “there is strength and keenness second to nothing of the kind I have ever read.” Nathaniel P. Willis, New York publisher and writer, praised the Review to Eastern audiences, though he reassured incredulous readers that the journal’s success was understandable because, after all, Flint was originally “a New-England man.”

Western Monthly Magazine. James Hall, lawyer and politician, started the first literary periodical west of Ohio, The Illinois Monthly Magazine (1830), which later became the Cincinnati Western Monthly Magazine. Like Flint, Hall was a champion of western virtue, and he criticized James Fenimore Cooper and others for their unrealistic view of the West. This same realistic impulse informed Hall’s own work, published as Letters from the West(1828), The Soldier’s Bride & Other Tales (1833), and Tales of the Border (1833). Hall’s style was somewhat sentimental, but he aimed at realism. Genteel readers critiqued his use of “vulgar backwoods expressions” and his portraits of the sometimes crude living conditions on the frontier.

Western Messenger. Perhaps the most significant Western journal to come out of this era was the Western Messenger, begun in 1835 by the Unitarian reverend James Freeman Clarke. The Messenger had strong New England, Transcendentalist ties. It was the first periodical to publish Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry, and John Keats’s “Ode to Apollo” was first published posthumously in the Messenger —in part due to the efforts of George Keats, the poet’s brother, who lived in Louisville. The Messenger struggled against anti-Unitarian prejudice and stopped publication in 1841. In the 1850s, however, with the growth of San Francisco as a cultural center, magazines flourished in the Far West. Journals such as The Pioneer, Golden Era, The Hyperion, The Califor-nian, and The Overland Monthly, centered around San Francisco, Monterey, and Sacramento, sprouted up around the gold rush. Bolstered by the success of these journals, Edward Pollock, a popular California poet of the 1850s, predicted a great future for Western literature. Writing in The Pioneer, he boldly predicted that “this is the country” that will produce the “New Epic.” Where else, Pollock asked, “could exist the land of liberty and of change … [this] land should grow giants and will.”