Kate, Queen of the Thousand Isles, sleeps in one of the mountain valleys of the Sierras on the Pacific slope and no one knows just when she died or where she was buried. The dual lives of the characters in this drama ended as all such lives do end, in infamy and disgrace.
[CHAPTER XV]
The Newspapers of the County
BY FREDERICK J. LAZELL
From the days of the early settlers until now the newspapers of Linn county have been among the most potent factors in the upbuilding of the community. They have been, as a rule, constructive newspapers. Their mission has been to build up, to help their communities grow in wealth and influence. The newspapers of the county have been noted for their sagacity and their breadth of vision, their conservatism and their tolerance. They have exerted a strong and a wholesome influence upon this and adjoining counties. In the state at large their influence for good has not been small.
The old adage that the good die young has not been true of Linn county's newspapers. The best papers today are those which were started in the earliest days of the various towns in this county. They have prospered as their respective communities have prospered. Their publishers and editors have been, for the most part, men with personal and property interests in their respective communities. That is why they have been builders and boosters. Linn county's proud position among the counties of the state, commercially, intellectually, and politically, is largely due to the fact that men of ability and integrity have worked and written and fought for the things they knew would be helpful to their constituents. And this is as true of the weekly newspapers as it is of the daily press. Very few counties in the state have had such an able corps of newspaper writers.
There were some weaklings, papers which were born and soon died. There have been a few freak newspapers. But not many. There have also been many able, brilliant young newspaper men who did good work in the Linn county editorial and newspaper offices for awhile and then left for larger fields of labor. Some of the county's ablest politicians and some of its most prominent business men have occasionally dabbled in newspapering, for the sake of some party or some pet project they were anxious to push through. That was in the earlier days. There has been very little of it in the county of late years.
In the main the newspaper men of the county have been men to the manner born, with a knowledge of the business from the ground up, men to whom the smell of printer's ink is as essential to their enjoyment of life as the scent of the sea to a sailor. If, as Elbert Hubbard tells us, art is the expression of man's joy in his work, then nine-tenths of the newspaper men of Linn county have been real artists, for they have stuck to their papers when they might have made heaps more money in some other line of business. But this love of the work so characteristic among the brethren of the Linn county press doubtless has something to do with the fact that their readable papers are read and quoted by the readers of other papers, from one end of the state to the other.
No chronological list of the newspapers of Linn county has been published, but it is interesting and instructive, and worthy of preservation in permanent form: