Red Lodge Picket (Red Lodge, Mont.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
531 issues from 1889 to 1902, published in Red Lodge, Montana, digitised for Chronicling America.
In 1889, publisher Shelby Eli Dillard launched the Red Lodge Picket, a Republican weekly in Red Lodge, Montana. It provided regular coverage of the town’s productive coal mines and discussed the imminent arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Laurel, Montana, along its transcontinental mainline. Early editions of the seven-column, four-page newspaper featured world news, reports from the state legislature, and local politics.
By 1893, a new editor took charge. Edward L. Boardman was a veteran of the New York Tribune who also worked on the Billings Gazette and Helena Herald before landing in Red Lodge. Under his direction, the Pickett sought the support of agricultural interests and the business community, while maintaining its distance from organized labor and the Finnish immigrant population, who by the beginning of the 20th century, constituted a large segment of the region’s coal mining workforce. During the 1894 election to determine the location of the state capital, the Pickett threw its support behind Butte “Copper King,” William A. Clark, by attacking his rival, Marcus Daly.
By 1905, stories of local issues such as a new sewage system, an addition to the Northern Pacific depot, and a new county high school filled the front pages of the Picket under its new editor, Walter Alderson, a veteran newspaperman with ties to Livingston and Billings, Montana. Alderson’s brother, Adelbert M. Alderson, served as Montana Secretary of State and also worked in the…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Red Lodge, Montana, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress