No State nor Territory will derive such inestimable advantage from the road as the Territory of Nevada. Situated, as we are, in what, during a great portion of the year, is an almost inaccessible isolation of wealth; with mountains covered with perpetual snow frowning down directly upon us at the west, and with a series of ranges, difficult to cross, at the east of us, with a wilderness fit only for the original inhabitants of the waste, stretching away a thousand miles, and intervening between us and the frontier of agricultural enterprise; and with no means of receiving the common necessaries of life, except through the expensive freightage of tediously traveling trains of wagons; the value of the road to us will be beyond calculation.
The inscription "Library Depr State" on the Library of Congress copy indicates it must have been submitted to the Department of State, which in 1862 was still in charge of the United States Territories. A date stamp on its wrapper suggests that it was transferred to the Library of Congress by December 1900, while a stamp on page 2 reveals that it was in custody of the Library's Division of Documents in September 1907.
[Footnote 126: See Richard E. Lingenfelter, _The Newspapers of Nevada_ (San Francisco, 1964), p. 47-49.]
[Footnote 127: See Ivan Benson, _Mark Twain's Western Years_ (Stanford University, Calif. [1938]), chapters 4-6.]
Printing began in Arizona with the establishment of _The Weekly Arizonian_, at the mining town of Tubac, on March 3, 1859. The Santa Rita Mining Company, which owned this newspaper, had imported the first press from Cincinnati, and the first printers are said to have been employees of the company named Jack Sims and George Smithson.[128]
The Library of Congress file of the _Arizonian_ starts with the issue of August 18, 1859, the earliest example of Arizona printing now held by the Library. The paper had removed from Tubac to Tucson shortly before that date under rather dramatic circumstances. Edward E. Cross, its first editor, vigorously opposed a movement in favor of separating Arizona from New Mexico and organizing it as an independent territory. In attacking population statistics put forward by Sylvester Mowry, the leader of that movement, Cross impugned Mowry's character, whereupon Mowry challenged him to a duel, which was fought with rifles on July 8 without injury to either party. Mowry subsequently purchased the printing press and moved it to Tucson. Under a new editor, J. Howard Wells, the _Arizonian_'s positions were completely reversed.[129]