for other Gentiles. Beadle agreed with his successor that "Ours is a fight of no ordinary consideration. . . . We have the banded influence of Mormonism against us on three sides, and rival towns on the fourth." 41 The extravagant chamber of commerce editorials exceeded even the well-known propensity for small western towns to blow their own horns. The Boise Idaho Statesman, despite its usual support of the Reporter's anti-Mormon tirades, could not refrain from commenting that one would think that according to the columns of the Corinne newspaper "New York, Chicago and San Francisco were situated too far from Corinne ever to amount to much," and although a good paper, the Reporter's "inordinate, uncontrollable weakness is Corinne. It seems to suppose that adjectives and assurances will build a city." 42 Although boosting the prospects of Corinne was a necessary and vital part of /promoting the financial success of the town's business, including that of the Reporter, the barrage of anti-Mormon attacks, asides, and ridicule became almost an obsession with the various editors who tended to look upon themselves as the intellectual and cultural leaders of the town's citizenry. Nothing was too far-fetched that it could not be enlarged upon not only to the delight of the Gentile readers of Utah Territory but also to the consternation and exasperation of easterners far removed from the field of the newspaper battles. For example, the New York Tribune of May 1, 1869, quoted the Utah Reporter's account of a sermon by Brigham Young in which the prophet was supposed to have censured Thomas L. Drake, a vociferous Mormon-hater and associate justice of Utah Territory in 1863: There was old Drake, the D dest old rascal in the country, that said he "loved to d n the Mormons, he'd get up at midnight and walk ten miles over thistles to d n them, and he'd d n any man that wouldn't d n them"; and I say G d d n him, and God will d n him and all such scalawags as they send out here. The Tribune writer attested that the Corinne paper had the most positive proof that the above remarks were reported word for word and concluded that if such things could be said publicly what thoughts and feelings must the Mormon leaders keep hidden in their wicked souls.43 Typical onslaughts against the Utah Saints by the Reporter included disparagement of Mormon leaders, charges of injustices perpe-
The Burg on the Bear
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