Gove County KS Archives History - Books .....The Gove County Advocate 1930
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Book Title: History Of Gove County, Kansas, Part II

CHAPTER VI
THE GOVE COUNTY ADVOCATE

  Perhaps the reader will bear with me if I give a personal experience. This
chapter is about the Gove County Advocate which the writer founded and ran for
four years and discontinued, at Gove City. Those who are not interested are at
liberty to skip this chapter—I will take up the general thread of the history in
the later chapters.

  Old Tom Kirtley, running a Populist paper in Gove City, was tired of the game
and wanted to quit. The county board was Republican and he could not get the
county printing; the Republicans had just come into control of the national
administration and his patronage from the U. S. Land Office was cut off. It was
a gloomy outlook for a Populist paper.

  I was a newcomer in the county and had not come with any thought of running a
newspaper. But, given a Populist who takes his politics seriously, just out of a
print shop and fond of the work, some leisure time on his hands and an editor
who is about to quit and leave the county without a Populist paper,—and perhaps
it is not strange that a fellow soon gets back into the game. In my state of
mind at that time life was not worth living in a county without a Populist
paper, where we had to bear the slings and arrows of an outrageous opposition
and had no way of returning them. It began to look as if there might be some fun
in being a Pop editor in Gove county, and possibly some profit.

  But before bargaining with Kirtley to buy his paper I wanted to know something
about the newspaper business in the short grass country, so I took a few days
off to visit the Populist editors at WaKeeney, Hill City and Hoxie in quest of
information and advice. Results were not altogether encouraging. I learned much
about the hard struggles for existence of short grass editors (particularly
those of the Populist faith), and the advice ran all the way from "you can't
make it, you will go broke," to "go it, we admire your spunk,"—but after a
week's absence and a horseback journey of nearly two hundred miles I returned to
Gove City-with the intention of buying the Leader. But too late; during my
absence Kirtley had sold the paper to L. O. Maxwell, who changed its politics,
and now Gove county had two Republican papers and no Populist paper at all.

  Well, perhaps two Republican papers would be no harder to fight than one.
Having determined to go ahead, and being unable to buy a paper already
established, it was now necessary for me to buy a new outfit and begin at the
bottom. Inserting a paid notice of my intention in the Leader, I boarded the
train for K. C. to purchase the necessary equipment. It took no very large sum
of money to start a paper on the frontier in those days; a hand press and a few
pounds of type was enough. Not all of my outfit was new. The Republican-Gazette,
as a result of absorbing many other papers (Guide, Echo, Graphic, Gove Co.
Republican, Gazette, and Quinter Republican) had more material than it could
use, and Mr. Trimmer was glad to sell me a few fonts of display and advertising
type at a reasonable figure.

  As I look back now upon that adventure it seems to me to have been a very rash
undertaking. I had been in the county less than a year and my acquaintance was
very limited. I had no assurance of support not a dollar of advertising
patronage promised, nor—I had almost said not a subscriber, but my friend Col.
S. S. Reynolds of Grainfield asked for the privilege of being my first paid-up
subscriber and paid over his dollar before I had even purchased my outfit. There
was not even a decent place in town for a shop—during those years of depression
the empty buildings in Gove City had been bought up by ranchers and moved out of
town—-and I was forced to build an office for my paper, meanwhile taking
temporary quarters in an old "lean to" with a very leaky roof and no room at
all. The population of the county had been practically stationary for several
years. Newcomers were few and were looked upon with something like suspicion,
and there was a growing feeling that the only people worth considering were
those who had come to the country in Eighty Six and had stayed with it, and that
the later comers were an inferior lot. This feeling of superiority was hardening
into something like a caste system, and the Men of Eighty Six were being made
into a sort of local aristocracy. Of course, this state of affairs was shattered
later by another influx of new settlers, but it was quite noticeable at this
time, in the year 1897, and it had its depressing effect even upon the egotism
and self assurance of the new Populist editor. There was but one other Populist
in Gove City, and he not very trustworthy; and many a time when I felt myself
slipping and in need of encouragement I have jumped into the saddle and ridden
far out into the country and sought out some old Pop (the more radical the
better) and put up with him for the night and bade him talk to me and stiffen my
backbone, lest I should lose the faith.

  As for the Advocate itself, Gove county never had another paper like it, and
never will. An old newspaper friend who knew the country had given me this
advice, "Gove is a county where it does not pay a Pop to be good;" and this was
the policy upon which the Advocate was run. It might be all right in some places
for a Populist paper to roar gently and be mild and conciliatory, but the
Advocate would have none of it. It had come to fight, and it kept up the fight
as long as there was a party left to fight for; and when the Populist party
ceased to be, the Advocate's excuse for existense was gone and it suspended
publication.

  Times have changed so much in thirty years that it is difficult to imagine our
way of life in those days. We had no radio, no automobiles and no telephones.
The country was in a state of stagnation, we had few visitors and little
communication with the outside world. Business was dead, land of no value, there
were no roads or bridges, everybody lived in sod houses, and there was no
dividing line between the rich and the poor. Per consequence, our local affairs
took on a magnitude such as they do not have in these later days; they were the
only thing we had to talk about, and for the time being the editor of the local
paper had an influence as a molder of public opinion such as few of them possess
at this day. Elections were held every year, instead of biennially as now, and
politics, local politics, was the one live subject all the year round.

  Right here let me say that during its existence the Advocate was something
more than a mere political organ. It chronicled the news, such as were; it ran a
series of write-ups of the townships and their productions, and of individual
citizens. And it wrote up some local happenings in a semi humorous strain which
attracted the attention of, and caused them to be copied in, the press of Kansas
and other states—such things, for instance, as the prize fight at Grainfield,
the Advocate's prairie dog banquet, the "pigeon toed schoolma'am" story and the
tale of the plucky Gove county girl who smoked a wildcat out of his den and beat
him to death with a rock. It was the aim to have something attractive of a newsy
nature in every issue. But the main purpose of the sheet was political.

  And Politics at that time was a matter of personalities. Gove county was
fiercely Republican. While neighboring counties had gone Farmers Alliance and
Populist, Gove county had steadily refused to change. In a total vote of about
five hundred the county gave about 125 majority Republican. Republicans might
fight among themselves like cats and dogs, but they lined up for the straight
ticket on election day. Those were the days when men boasted loudly of voting
their ticket straight. Probably this was why my friend had said that it did not
pay a Populist to be good. Up to this time the Populists had never been able to
place a man in a single office in the court house. They had elected
representative in 1894 and a county commissioner in 1896; these had been elected
in a campaign full of personalities, which showed that this was at that time the
only way to success.

  Not to make the story too long, let it be said that the Advocate never gave
the enemy a rest. The political "ring" was bombarded constantly. Every
Republican candidate had to run the gauntlet of criticism. Public records were
dug up and published if they could be made to reflect upon some candidate.
Something had to be done to make these voters mad, and to shock them out of the
habit of voting the straight Republican ticket. As is likely to happen in a
campaign of this sort, the editor often got encouragement and assistance from
unexpected sources. (I had a good laugh one day when glancing out of the window
of my shop I saw a candidate shaking hands with one of his friends. This
candidate was at that time under my heaviest fire, and his "friend" was the very
fellow who had secretly furnished me the ammunition to make the attack,—but the
poor candidate never suspected. I had to establish a reputation for keeping
secrets, and for keeping my mouth shut, before any one would trust me like that.)

  Under this style of attack the enemy's forces gave way. There are some voters
still living in Gove county who learned then for the first time to vote a mixed
ticket. The Populists put up only part of a ticket in 1898, and elected all
their nominees. They elected most of their ticket in 1899; it was a nice war.
But now Luck deserted. Perhaps the voters tired of the Advocate's style of
journalism, after two campaigns. More surely, the Populist party itself had
entered upon its decline, due to causes far beyond my control. The party was
never to win any more victories, local, state or national, and soon was to
disappear from the political field entirely. The Advocate did its part well
enough, but it was involved in the ruin of the party.

  The Advocate never was anything but a "side line" to me, and an expensive one
at that. After having run it a year and put it on its feet I tried to dispose of
it, but never had a chance; failing to find a buyer I leased the paper to Earl
Hoffer and took the family back to the ranch. Hoffer was a better printer than I
and a good writer and newsgetter. He needed no help from me except during the
few weeks of each year's campaign. The paper paid its own way during the one
year when it had the county printing. Hoffer ran the paper during 1899 and 1900,
then went to run a paper of his own at Utica, and I came back into the shop
again. The political party I was serving had lost its spirit. There was nothing
left, to run a paper for. At the end of the year 1901 the paper stopped
publication, and the first Gove County Advocate had passed into history.

  The life of a pioneer editor was usually not a happy one. They might get quite
a kick out of it, but they made no money and few of them broke even. During my
brief career I was assaulted more than once, and I know how it feels to have a
gun drawn on you. Also, to be arrested. A libel suit was hung over me, finally
to be withdrawn after it had cost me several hundred dollars for attorneys' fees
and court expenses. But my greatest grief is found in the realization that I
accomplished so little—could have employed my time so much better at something
else. I got quite a shock at the very time the Advocate was going the best. We
were having a party committee meeting (at Colby, I think,) and each county was
being called on in turn for its report. My report for Gove county seemed quite
satisfactory to me—our party was united and feeling fine, we had elected certain
county officials and expected to elect more. Then a wise old Pop mildly
inquired, "Your campaign in your county seems to be of a personal nature, does
it not?" Quite true. Then inquired my friend, "Do you think the kind of a fight
you are making has helped to advance the Populist principles?" It had never
occured to me before, but I was forced to admit that while we had raised
considerable hades we had not made a single convert to the party. And so all my
efforts had gone for nothing. There is a lesson in life which we all have to
learn, to not take ourselves too seriously.

  The Advocate press and type were moved out to the ranch and stored away, in a
sod house. Then after a time the sign was right again to start another paper,
and Bill Tuttle bought the outfit from me and started his paper, which, to my
surprise, he called the Advocate. It was the "Short Grass Advocate," to be sure,
but the prefix went through several successive changes until the name became
again the Gove County Advocate, as it is today at Quinter. It is a good old
name. But—sometimes I find myself wishing that I had copyrighted the name thirty
years ago, so that no one but myself could ever run a newspaper under the name,
Gove County Advocate.


Additional Comments:
History of Gove County, Kansas
by W. P. Harrington

Gove City, Kan.	1930

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