This big, anecdotal study of western newspapering begins, naturally enough, in 1808, with Irish emigrŽ Joseph Charless bringing the first printing press west of the Mississippi. Charless had already sold two newspapers in Kentucky before coming west to start the Missouri Gazette in St. Louis; after seven years he had so annoyed some locals that they raised a thousand dollars to bring a competing paper to town, advertising for a printer "of correct Republican principles with even moderate abilities."

 The second printing press west of the Mississippi belonged to Charless's new competitor, but hundreds of newspapers would follow, often born with the start-up towns they hoped to serve. As author David Dary, a social historian and head of the University of Oklahoma's School of Journalism, writes: "While many early western towns have grown into modern cities, far more have become ghosts: they were born, flourished and died . . . . Most of those that survived had newspapers with civic-minded printers-turned-editors who were willing to cast their lot with the towns and promote, or boom, the places." Once the first printers had planted themselves in the unscrutinized wilderness, their stories followed, promising fertile farmland and cheerful, godly townspeople. Boosterism or "booming," and not hard journalism, was the first job of most founding editors.

Dary's small-town western editors dueled, drank, and lied picturesquely enough to keep this volume rolling along in a way that a history of The HarvardCrimson's editors perhaps might not. The story of western newspapering is the story of the frontier settlement itself, only with pithier quotes from its principals, who needed the space. "Nowhere in the history of any other nation has a free press ever played the role it played in settling the American West," claims Dary, whose account goes from the unrequited early efforts of Joseph Charless to the golden age of recognizably modern papers such as William Allen White's Emporia, Kansas, Gazette more than a century later.

In chapters on "Town Booming," "Pistol Packin' Editors," "Reporting the News," "Personals," and "Women and Printer's Ink" (hundreds of pioneer women were involved in running Old West papers), Dary shows the evolution of modern newspapers from journals of opinion and musty foreign rumor into the alternately engaging and silly things you read these days; how, before the telegraph closed part of the considerable gap between event and account, editors had relied heavily on exchanging stories with other newspapers, using scissors and paste. As one wrote: "He can live without towels/Live without soap, Breakfast on vowels/And dine upon hope . . . He can manage to get on/Without advertisers/But the editor cannot/Survive without scissors."

 "Personals" or "local" columns appeared increasingly after about the 1850s and helped sustain many frontier papers, bearing out Horace Greeley's iron law of journalism Ð that most readers wanted to see their own names printed or those of people they knew. "By the 1870s," writes Dary, "local news columns of many western weeklies had an impressive array of banner lines with such titles as 'Local Record of Passing Events,' 'What We See and Hear,' 'Hither and Yonder,' 'Local and Miscellaneous.'"

Editors were not beloved. There were 756 libel suits pending against newspapers in 1869 alone. But Dary asserts that "until about 1890 editors and publishers in the West were not that concerned about libel or defamatory statements" and judges were slower to act on these claims. Frontier editors freely called their enemies the "skunks" and "dirty dogs" that they were. Many newsmen were killed by aggrieved readers. In 1878 the San Francisco Argonaut's Ambrose Bierce wrote: "There is no recorded instance of punishment for shooting a newspaper man. The restrictions of the game law do not apply to this class of game."

Western newspapermen also did their share of shooting each other, and Dary recounts a number of duels, like that fought between the editors of the San Augustine, Texas, Red-Lander and Shield in 1847; both missed, but the Shield's editor got a better shot the next day, killing his enemy as he left his office.

Dary clearly loves the romance of the Old West, and it's not hard to imagine which side he took playing boyhood games of Cowboys and Indians. He has no use for "revisionist" western historians who "have focused on what they consider the failures of the United States and condemn the long-dead pioneers for not adhering to today's political correctness."

 In all his books, Dary is very close to the pioneers, be they mountain men adding buffalo gall to their moonshine or frontier prostitutes named Hambone Jane and Squirrel Tooth Alice. Of the hundreds of characters who take a turn in Red Blood & Black Ink, my favorite is Lying Jim Townsend, the author of many "hoax-filled stories" who somehow found regular newspaper work from the early 1860s to 1886 despite almost never telling the truth in print or even doing his work on paper: He wrote at the type case."He simply set type when he felt like expressing an idea," Dary explains. Lying Jim was a "tramp printer," a traveling breed often driven by a drinking habit or gambling debts or other romantic past. The tramp printers lasted into the 1920s, when the Linotype machine finally replaced them.

Alas, the significance of frontier newspapers -- both as civilizing institutions and historical resources -- has been undervalued by frontier historians from Frederick Jackson Turner down to the modern revisionists, often out of distrust for frontier reporters' facts. "This story of newspaper journalism in the Old West is more than just a colorful page of American history," Dary writes. "Reflecting eastern culture, [newspapers] usually were the first such transplant in each new western town. The establishment of a newspaper gave hope that the community would soon erase its frontier status." Yet they spoke in a new and powerful western voice.

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