It became, in fact, a common occurrence for the town itself, where no individual showed a willingness to assume the financial' obligations, to offer inducements to printers. The consequent demand for their services made it easy for journeyman printers to find employment wherever they went; this soon produced an itinerant class of printers, who gave to their trade a character and a reputation that outlasted, for many generations, the settling of the country in which they had so striking a part. [1]
The speed with which the towns developed was a source of amazement to travelers from eastern cities. The town of Vevay, Indiana, was laid out in 1813, in 1814 it was a mere collection of huts—two years later it was a prosperous county seat with a court-house, a school-house, and seventy-five dwellings, and was the boasted possessor of a weekly newspaper called the Indiana Register.[2]
The founder of the first paper in Indianapolis has left behind a picture of the manner in which the settlers of the west looked to the newspapers as an inevitable accompaniment to a real live town. In 1821 the site of Indianapolis was selected as the permanent seat of government for the new state. Two hundred persons immediately moved there, and within a year Nathaniel Bolton announced the publication of the Indianapolis Gazette, gotten out in a buckeye log cabin of but one room, "part of which was occupied for a family residence." The ink was put on with balls made of dressed deerskin, stuffed with wool. There was no post-office nearer than Connersville, a distance of sixty miles, and every four weeks a person was employed to bring the letters and other mail. President Monroe's message, delivered in December, arrived at Indianapolis in February, and
