And a happy birthday to us.
The Deseret News is 175 years old this month. The inaugural edition came off the presses — or press, as there was just one — in a small adobe building on South Temple Street in Great Salt Lake City on June 15, 1850. There were 220 copies that went on sale that Saturday at the rate of $2.50 for a six-month subscription or 15 cents for a single copy ($6.15 today). The paper was eight pages and measured 7 1/4 inches by 9 3/4 inches, which, by way of comparison and sheer coincidence, is almost exactly the size of an iPad.
A handful of newspapers in the California gold fields had started printing before 1850, but all of them, like the gold, disappeared. With the exception of the Santa Fe New Mexican, first published just seven months prior on Nov. 28, 1849, the Deseret News is the oldest newspaper in the United States west of the Missouri River.
At that, the paper might have started back in 1847 when the first Latter-Day Saint pioneers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, except for the fact they didn’t bring a printing press with them. It took three years and several teams of oxen to get a second-hand 4,000-pound Ramage hand-press from Philadelphia to the newly established territory of Deseret — a much larger version of what is today the state of Utah…