Harmon’s Histories: Early newspaper took aim at Big Arm’s ‘poisonous tongues’
By Jim Harmon
“Big Arm needs a banking house, a general drugstore, a gents’ furnishing establishment, a shoe store, a jeweler’s store and a food store!”
So proclaimed the editors of the Big Arm Graphic in their 1912 salutatory issue.
Booster-ism, of course, was one of the key roles of a local newspaper in the early days of Montana. The Graphic suggested such economic investments could “start on a small scale,” then hopefully “grow into large establishments,” so “let us boost for them and see.”
The Big Arm Mercantile was among the early advertisers, selling its groceries, fresh fruits and the “best grades of flour.”
The Bay View Lumber company took out an ad to “solicit your trade” in chimney brick, lumber and building paper.
The Hennessy Brothers’ meat market promoted its “fresh, salt and smoked meats” as well as lard and poultry ... and Mrs. Neising assured readers that the cost of her sewing and dress-making was very reasonable.
The front page of the Graphic carried news of Montana Governor Edwin L. Morris’s prediction that the state was “on the eve of unreal growth and development.” Morris had just completed a trip back East with a delegation of Western governors.
Morris said everywhere he went he found people “much interested in and desirous of having more information concerning Montana” and, in talking with financiers heard “the opinion that more prosperous times are near at hand” and “the West will grow and develop as in no former period of time.”
Locally, the Graphic reported that “Mrs. William Jackson has been on the sick list for the past month but is convalescent now” and that “eggs are 50 cents a dozen. What do you think about that?”
The new schoolhouse was said to be going “up in a hurry, and if the weather permits will be ready for the bell” in less than a month.
By the time the next issue of the Graphic was published, it was clear some folks had been throwing shade on others in the community (possibly including the editor and his family).
Below a front-page article on a successful local masquerade ball “held at Parsons hall by Mr. Triebel” was a piece titled, “Social Stumbling Blocks.”
The writer did not hold back: “In every small community is to be found a few people who are neither useful nor ornamental to society.”
They are “like the scum on boiling syrup, come to the surface with the imagination that they, and they only, are ‘It,’ with a great big ‘I.’”
“Both men and women are found in the role. They are vipers, in one sense of the expression, and few men or women escape the scourge of their poisonous tongues.”
“They pose as models of virtue and martyrs to the slander of others, while they consume their leisure hours criticizing the affairs of their neighbors.”
“They belong to a class, exceedingly small, found in every struggling community, whose minds are depraved, whose souls are iniquitous and bodies defiled, but who declare righteousness their creed, and, like Satan on the mount tempting Christ, claim that all is good.”
OMG! But he or she wasn’t done.
“They are festering pustules on the cheek of nature, blotches on the body politic, and while their existence may not prove fatal, they are very annoying, and the quicker the community can get rid of such barnacles, the more prosperous the country will become!”
Boy, would I like to know who wrote that piece - and what prompted it.
But alas, it’s likely I’ll never know as many of the subsequent issues of the Big Arm Graphic no longer exist in the Chronicling America database. It just states: “Missing Page: Not digitized, published.”
Jim Harmon is a longtime Missoula news broadcaster, now retired, who writes a weekly history column for Missoula Current. You can contact Jim at fuzzyfossil187@gmail.com. His best-selling book, “The Sneakin’est Man That Ever Was,” a collection of 46 vignettes of Western Montana history, is available at harmonshistories.com.