Few occurrences could exert less effect on the Press of the land than the passing last week of the Anaconda (Mont.) Standard. As an important State daily it had been anesthetized three years ago, cut to a strictly local circulation of 2,000. Last week witnessed merely its last official gasp: the paper was taken over as a four-page section of its thriving stepchild, the Butte Montana Standard.
But many an oldster could recall the lusty history of the Anaconda Standard— conceived in anger, nurtured in strife and extravagance; could recall how, as the personal organ of the late famed copper tycoon Marcus Daly, the Standard stood at the turn of the century among the best edited dailies in the U. S.
Marcus Daly and the late U. S. Senator Andrews Clark, prospectors, amassed great riches from Montana gold & copper in the 1870's and 1880's. Clark centered his interests in Butte. Daly built a huge copper smelter at Anaconda, 26 mi. away. From close friendship, their relationship cooled to business and political rivalry, flamed finally in open warfare.
In the course of his financial manipulations Clark came into possession of the indigent Butte Miner. To his surprise and delight he found it a handy weapon for belaboring Marcus Daly. Daly endured the attacks until 1889, then vowed to put his enemy in his place.
Fortuitously Marcus Daly then met Dr. John H. Durston, a learned philologist who had abandoned a professorship at Syracuse University to edit the Syracuse Standard, which he quit in the heat of an editorial dispute. In his own luxurious Montana Hotel (to which an extra story had been added because "it didn't look good enough") Daly opened his checkbook and commanded Dr. Durston to build for him, there in the sprawling, brawling smelter village of Anaconda, "the best newspaper that can be made." Editor Durston imported two of his associates from the Syracuse Standard and set to work. In time the new paper attained some 20,000 circulation (practically the saturation point for the State) mostly in Butte, where it gave Clark's Miner a sound thrashing. A special "paper train'' of Daly's own Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railroad would rush it there, hot off the press.
Its news section thoroughly covered the State, the Nation and the world. Every intermountain town of importance had its Anaconda Standard bureau. It was like a metropolitan gem set in a mountain wasteland. The finest mechanical equipment was bought. In the early days of the Mergenthaler linotype machine, the Anaconda Standard at one time had more of them in operation than had any Manhattan daily. When Richard F. Outcault's "Yellow Kid" ushered colored comics into the Manhattan field, Publisher Daly had to have some, sent for Thorndyke, Trowbridge, Loomis, then three of the highest-priced newspaper artists in the country. Color decks and photo-engraving equipment were rushed to Anaconda and the Standard produced its own four-page colored comic supplement.