The first West Coast newspaper was a hand-written satirical publication first published in Oregon City in the spring of 1844. “The title of the paper was the Flungudeon Gazette, or Bumble-Bee Budget, edited by the Long-tailed Coon, a sort of Pike County Punch affair. The motto read, ‘Devoted to scratching and stinging the Follies of the Age.’
“It was tri-weekly, some eight or ten numbers being issued, continuing during the session of the Legislative Council of the [Oregon] Territory. The paper made quite a stir in those parts, and kept the members on their p’s and q’s all the time. It was burlesquing, comical, and humorously critical upon the honorable body, which, like the California Legislatures, was a compound mixture of Hoosierism and Yankee, without the addition, as with us, of the Chivalry, Greasers, and Sour Krout.”
-From an unsigned article quoted in Journalism in the United States 1690 – 1872, by Frederic Hudson, published in 1873.
