FIGHTING WORDS

Arizona's Pioneer Newspaper Battles Fighting words

At noon on a hot October day in 1870, Gov. Richard Cunningham McCormick marched into the office of the Weekly Arizonan in Tucson. There he stood eye to eye with a man who had just become his most bitter enemy: Editor P.W. Dooner.

The two men did not speak. As McCormick ordered his accompanying men to disassemble the paper's printing press, Dooner started to protest, but there was little he could do. Like much of the equipment in his office, the press belonged to McCormick.

So the editor watched in a helpless rage as the governor's men took the press apart and carried it off piece by piece. Finally Dooner stood in his empty office, infuriated and indignant - but already planning his revenge.

Until that week, Dooner and McCormick had been allies, a relationship they'd both profited from since the editor's first year at the paper. The Arizonian already had a long history of trouble when Dooner took the helm. Edward Cross, who founded the paper in Tubac under the name Weekly Arizonian, once argued so fiercely with the Territorial delegate to Congress, they ended up in a gunfight.

Fortunately both men were lousy shots, nobody was hurt, and they shook hands afterward. The Arizonian soon left Tubac and died a rapid death. For several years, the paper revived in fits and starts, its name changed then changed again, and various editors came and went. Then a 28-year-old Canadian printer decided to try his hand.

Pierton W. Dooner was an idealistic young man, full of civic-minded ideas. He declared that a frontier editor must be “a fighting man a first-class bruiser unless [he] would have his paper controlled by every demagogue who might feel disposed to dictate to him.” idealistic young man, full of civic-minded ideas. He declared that a frontier editor must be “a fighting man a first-class bruiser unless [he] would have his paper controlled by every demagogue who might feel disposed to dictate to him.” At first Dooner handled the entire paper himself, editing, reporting, printing, and running his own errands. And he was soon writing editorials in favor of better schools, streets, and mail service. He also changed the name of the Arizonian to Arizonan, in a burst of loyalty to the Territory: “I am an Arizonan from Arizona, not Arizonia.” But Dooner's idealism lasted exactly as long as his money a matter of weeks. From the beginning, he was desperate for funds, and however passionately he espoused his ideals in print, he didn't let them interfere with his attempts to finance the newspaper.

Dooner tried to sell advertising to everyone, even stating that he didn't care if an advertiser were “a smuggler [or] pickpocket.” When that didn't work, he lambasted his own readers for wanting a paper but not being willing to support one.

Dooner finally received an answer to his financial woes, in the form of Arizona's new Territorial governor. McCormick wrote to Dooner with an offer: If the Arizonan would support him politically, McCormick would repay Dooner with a contract for printing government documents.

It was too good an offer for Dooner to reject merely because of some high-minded principles. Suddenly his editorials were laced with admiration for McCormick.

At the same time Dooner was repaying McCormick's generosity with lavish editorial praise, the editor of Prescott's Arizona Daily & Weekly Miner was heaping invective on the governor. John Marion had personal reasons for hating McCormick — it was McCormick who'd sold him the Miner. In 1864 the governor, then Territorial secretary, had gotten together some old equipment from a failed New Mexican newspaper to start the Miner in the Territorial capital of Prescott. He became governor the following year, and in 1867 suddenly decided he wanted to sell.

Marion was a newcomer to Prescott when he bought the Miner. His qualifications were hardly sterling. He had little experience, a vicious temper, and a fondness for alcohol.

When Judge Berry of Yuma met the new editor, he was appalled: "It was then for the first time [1] discovered Darwin's connecting link between the fish and quadruped. As he lay, with drunken slobber issuing from his immense mouth, everyone present was forcibly impressed with the fact that there was a connecting link between the catfish and the jackass."

But Marion had just spent two years wandering around the desert looking for gold, he Was desperate for a new line of work, and what he lacked in experience he made up for in energy.

Unfortunately Marion soon discovered the reasons for McCormick's interest in selling the Miner. Less than a month after the governor unloaded the paper on him, the Arizona legislature moved the capital to Tucson. The move meant the Miner would no longer be the voice of Arizona's capital but an insignificant newspaper in a backwater town. McCormick had known of the move all along, and Marion never forgave him.

From that time on, Marion launched a campaign of editorial venom against McCormick, his supporters, and even the town of Tucson - that "inflated humbug of a country." He called the governor "his littleness," who "by soft soap and flunkyism has wormed his way into the gubernatorial chair of a Territory he has helped to impoverish." He insisted that McCormick had created "trouble, confusion, and disorder all over the Territory."

When Dooner came to Governor McCormick's defense, Marion turned his wrath on the Arizonan: "We had thought that the great Territory of Arizona was large enough for two small newspapers, but it seems that McCormick and his organ do not think so.. They want to re-establish the 'dark age,' when but one paper was published in the Territory, and that one paper was owned and editored by his Excellency..."

Dooner and Marion feuded for a year and a half. Dooner labeled the Miner a "trifling sheet," and Marion.called Dooner's writing "the softest, mushiest sort of twaddle." They even launched into an extended quarrel about who had the worst grammar. In 1870, when McCormick announced he would run for reelection, Dooner provided him the political support he'd paid for, and Marion threw all his editorial vehemence behind the opposition.

Then in September of 1870, Marion quite unexpectedly paid Dooner a visit in Tucson, and overnight everything changed.

No one knows what happened in Dooner's office. Some speculated that Marion had come to coax Dooner into joining him in a money-making scheme. Others rumored that Marion had hatched a plan to destroy McCormick, and a few said he was simply tired of fightA few days later, Dooner told McCormick that he'd have to pay him $3,000 if he wanted the continued support of the Arizonan. McCormick refused, and on October 1, Dooner's loyalty to the governor mysteriously evaporated: "... now that we have seen [McCormick] and learned that by advocating his reelection we have been engaged in a work calculated to damn every interest of Arizona - feel no embarrassment in declaring that we will put forth our best efforts to undo all that we have so thoughtlessly done heretofore."

The next day, McCormick arrived at Dooner's office and left with the printing press in a dozen pieces.

McCormick's plan was a simple one. He would destroy the Arizonan by confiscating its equipment and start putting out his own paper. But the scheme had a serious flaw: McCormick didn't have enough type, ink, or staff to put out a paper and the only person in town who did was Dooner.

McCormick's camp had no choice. A few days after their raid on the Arizonan, they sent an emissary to Dooner's office to buy some type, thinking that if they offered him 100 times its worth, he'd overlook the fact that they had just carted off his printing press. Dooner refused. Then they had a boy go to Dooner's office and claim he'd been sent to buy ink for the post office, but Dooner saw through the ruse. McCormick's camp even tried to hire Dooner's employees away from the Arizonan, but the men stood by the embattled editor.

Dooner then dug up an old worn-out press, somehow got it working, and within 24 hours came out with a special edition denouncing McCormick's "system of fraud and mendacity."

It took McCormick two weeks to rally. By mid-October, he had managed to get together a few fonts of well-used type and a printer's stone and started a new paper. He found a newcomer to Tucson, a selfeducated farmer, miner, and schoolteacher named John Wasson, and made him editor of the Arizona Citizen - in exchange for Wasson's political support.

The rest of McCormick's campaign for reelection was a knock-down-drag-out war of words. Dooner called Wasson "... a servile, self-asserting, and stupid upstart," adding that: "... as the gaily painted moth clothed from the slime and filth of earth which flits around the lighted candle and finally expires in the flame, so this worthless upstart but yesterday dragged from the gutters of social and political corruption and clothed, for an hour, from the spoils of official prostitutions, awaits his doom in the flame of honest, popular indignation."

Wasson referred to Dooner's "imbecility" and "brazen exhibition of ingratitude and turpitude" and called him at various times "a knave and a fool," "the malicious booby of the Arizonan," and "a poor worm having shown himself utterly untrustworthy."

When Wasson called Marion a "debauched and debased coward and slanderer," the hot-headed editor of the Miner responded with his typical flair: "[We] unhesitatingly fling those words back into the teeth of this bluffing dog, and dare him to meet us at any place he may name, and forever settle this little matter of cowardice."

But Marion never did duel with the "bluffing dog," and it was McCormick who was to have the last laugh. The governor easily won reelection and, though Dooner and Marion continued venting their editorial rage, they were fighting a losing battle. It was Wasson, not Dooner, who now had the governor's support. The Citizen's readership and advertising thrived; the Arizonan floundered. Within a year, Dooner's paper was dead.

Despite their earlier battles, Marion, who was rapidly learning the importance of tact, managed some words of respect for Wasson: "Although, in the past we have had some hot words with the Citizen," he wrote in 1872, "we freely acknowledge that it has accomplished much good for the Territory."

But Dooner was utterly dispirited. For a brief period after the failure of the Arizonan, he went in with Marion on the Miner, but he soon sold out, left for California, and abandoned the newspaper business forever. For the rest of his life, Dooner would blame his own "unworthiness" for the failure of the Arizonan.

In the end, the Arizona Citizen would become the longest-running newspaper in the history of Arizona.