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Reviews
Asa Shinn Mercer: Western Promoter and Newspaperman, 1839–1917
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By Lawrence M. Woods
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Arthur H. Clark, Spokane, Wash., 2003. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 238 pages, $32.50 cloth.
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Reviewed by Floyd J. McKay
Western Washington University, Bellingham
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| Mercer is a familiar name in the Puget Sound region, but most appearances of the names can be traced to Asa Shinn Mercer's older brothers, Thomas and Aaron. Asa spent some of his early years in Seattle, where he claimed (in somewhat of an exaggeration, according to Lawrence Woods) to have been the first president of the University of Washington, but he left more of a mark in other regions, primarily Texas and Wyoming, his last two states of residence. |
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Newspaper editors on the western frontier were usually hustlers, willing to slant their stories in order to promote a cause, a political party, or, frequently, themselves. Mercer was no exception, and his newspapers in Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming were openly associated with causes and organizations generally related to agriculture. |
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In the Pacific Northwest, Mercer's most notable effort was the recruitment and transport of young women ("Mercer's Belles") from New England to provide mates for male pioneers in the Puget Sound region. Along the way, Mercer hustled Secretary of War U.S. Grant for shipping, got support from Edward Everett Hale, forged a contract of convenience with Ben Holladay, and tangled with the formidable feminist orator Anna Dickinson — quite remarkable for someone well short of his thirtieth birthday. |
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Mercer's brief stay in Oregon (1867–1876) was marked by his indictment for smuggling liquor from Canada while he was a U.S. Customs Service collector (the charge was dropped after four hung juries) and his founding of the Oregon Granger in Albany in 1873. The Granger found a niche market among members of the agrarian organization, but its focus was too narrow to be profitable and Mercer sold it after less than a year. |
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The Granger and the "Mercer's Belles" expedition show Mercer as a true promoter, brash and opportunistic, using whatever contacts he could make to push his project one step further, usually in an unsuccessful attempt to make a fortune. Woods, relating Mercer's many careers and promotions, concludes: "The list boggles the mind, and the unlikelihood of it all mounts up when one considers that these experiences were mostly financed by others' money" (p. 225). Along the way, Mercer was — in addition to his editing, teaching, and customs work — a ship salvager, surveyor, tobacco farmer, immigration promoter, and cattle rancher. |
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Mercer's history in the Northwest was a prelude to his most significant contributions, as a pioneer newspaperman and promoter in Texas and Wyoming, which were still wild and open country in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The Texas and Wyoming years, from 1878 until his death in 1917 at age seventy-eight, put him in the middle of an untamed and often violent region as the frontier closed. Mercer published four small weeklies in Texas cattle country, conveniently switching his longtime Republican registration to Democratic to fit into the predominant politics of the new state. Texas was beginning to boom, and newspapers seemed to spring from every tiny hamlet. In 1880 there were up to two hundred papers, some claiming only a few hundred subscribers. Mercer engaged in the hyperbole that was common at the time, warning young miscreants: "If there is any one thing for which a young man should be hung and quartered, it is for standing on the streets [sic] corners and making insinuating remarks about respectable women" (p. 125). |
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By 1883, Mercer had sold or lost his Texas papers and relocated to Cheyenne, where he founded the Northwestern Live Stock Journal, which quickly became the voice of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. The business was profitable. Ranchers bought advertising space to display their brands, which ran without change for months, and other cattle-related advertising finally made Mercer somewhat independent financially. His close ties to the industry — he made speeches and wrote industry pamphlets — came to an abrupt end in 1892 after the infamous Johnson County Wars. Johnson County was swept by violence as big cattlemen rode roughshod against smaller competitors accused of rustling. Mercer sided with the victims of the lawless violence, resulting in a boycott of his newspaper and financial ruin. He later wrote a book about the range war, which was as controversial as the war itself. |
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Lawrence Woods, a retired oil executive and historian, is meticulous in calling attention to Mercer's contradictory descriptions of his colorful life and has made good use of regional newspapers as well as historical documents. The footnotes, bibliography, and index are useful and well-organized, and this addition to Arthur H. Clark's Western Frontiersmen Series is a useful description of a particular type of frontier promoter. |
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