Digital Bob Archive

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is probably the \"outside\" paper that is most widely read in Alaska, although in recent times the Wall Street Journal and USA Today perhaps have been cutting in on its circulation. But \"the P-I,\" as it is usually referred to, has some long-standing ties with Alaska. One of its roots, in fact, goes back to Sitka and the first newspaper to be printed in Alaska.

Thomas G. Murphy started The Alaska Times in the spring of 1869 and managed to keep it going for a year and a half. Then the town's economy went into a slump; merchants were closing up their shops and people were leaving every month on the mail steamer. So Murphy took his paper to Seattle, which was beginning to get on its feet. His first issue in Seattle was on October 23, 1870.

Murphy kept the Alaska name and tried to run Alaska news and Alaska advertisements, but both were hard to get and before long the Times was just another Seattle weekly paper. Murphy continued as editor and publisher until May, 1871, when he sold it and it was renamed The Puget Sound Dispatch.

In 1878 the Dispatch merged with a paper called The Intelligencer and took that name. Then in 1881 there was another merger, this time with The Seattle Post, and The Post-Intelligencer resulted.

There have been other ties between The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Alaska, too. Walter Eli Clark, who later was the first governor of the Territory of Alaska, was a roving correspondent for the Post-Intelligencer from 1897 until 1909, as well as correspondent for other papers including The New York Sun and The New York Commercial Advertiser. Those were the boom years in the North; the Klondike was at its most productive and the new gold discoveries resulted in the founding of Nome and Fairbanks as well as several less durable camps. Walter Clark made many northern trips and did much to bring Alaska to national attention.

In 1909 President William Howard Taft appointed Clark the seventh governor of the District of Alaska and when it became the Territory of Alaska on August 24, 1912, he became the first governor of the new political entity.

In the meanwhile, in 1911, while Alaska was still in district status, Scott Cordelle Bone became editor-in-chief of The Post-Intelligencer. A top-flight newspaperman from the East, Bone had been an editor of the Washington Post and of the Chicago Tribune and had owned the Washington Herald. He was with the P-I until 1918 and served for two years as chairman of the Alaska Division of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce. He visited Alaska at least twice. Bone left the P-I to become publicity director for the Republican National Committee. In 1921, after Alaskans had squabbled for six months over who should be appointed governor, without reaching served agreement, President Harding named Bone to the post.

Today the P-I, a morning paper, is the one that gets aboard the early northbound planes and reaches most parts of Alaska the same day.