The Tent City Spokesman
Recalling the winter of 1909, when the White Bluffs Spokesman was forced to publish out of a canvas tent to keep the town's news flowing.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
From W. B. Spokesman, Jan. 15, '09: This is the 15th day of January in the year 1909, and this newspaper is published in a tent in White Bluffs, Washington. To accommodate a new business in town, the Spokesman leased its office building and is using a tent until it can construct another. Meanwhile, the snow is 15 feet deep in the Cascades, and the Columbia River is running full of ice—great hunks 300 feet across are sweeping down. Mrs. F. D. Rollins, suffering from a felon, braved the dangers of the running ice in the Columbia last Friday just to get to White Bluffs to consult Dr. Schwabland. The last water route mail was received last Tuesday, and nothing but a chinook wind will change conditions.
“This newspaper is published in a tent in White Bluffs, Washington. If you don’t understand what that means, ask any practical printer.”
This archival retrospective captures the precarious, frontier spirit of early White Bluffs. Today, the town is a vanished settlement, its history largely erased by the Hanford nuclear site, making these accounts of 'tent journalism' and icy river crossings vital fragments of a lost landscape.
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