Newman Henry Mix

“A NEWSPAPERMAN WHO, even when the masthead changed, stayed close to the press.” Newspapers were among the first signs that a mining camp or prairie town intended to stay. Long before brick buildings or paved streets, a press set in motion signaled permanence. Through its columns came the record of births and deaths, business ventures and bankruptcies, elections, crimes, and the social doings that bound a scattered population into something resembling a community.

At the heart of this enterprise stood the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, the gold standard by which newspapers measured their purpose, guaranteeing freedom of speech and freedom of the press. On the western frontier in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, those freedoms were not merely ideals—they were hard-won, hauled in by wagon, and defended with ink and determination.

Newman Henry Mix was one of the men who carried those principles west. The earliest surviving records of his long and consequential newspaper career appear in 1887. That year, C. Frost Liggett, a veteran newspaperman of Colorado, later recalled the beginnings of Mix’s work on the plains: “The first newspaper, in what was to be carved out of this old Bent County into Kiowa, was published at Sheridan Lake, with Newman H. Mix managing editor. The printing material, job press and type, was supplied by the writer, and delivered by wagon to this new town site, before the railroad went through.”

Mix’s early newspaper work followed the rails west. From 1887 to 1888, he published the Sheridan Lake Courier, followed by the Sheridan Lake Chronicle, which he produced from 1889 until 1890. Sheridan Lake was one of many hopeful towns strung along the railroad line running west from the Kansas border toward Pueblo, Colorado, and like so many of them, its fortunes rose and fell with the steel tracks that sustained it.

By 1891, Mix had pushed his publishing career farther west. He settled in Springville, Utah, where on August 20 of that year he launched The Springville Independent. From there he went on to produce the American Fork Republican, though that paper survived only briefly and disappeared sometime in 1892.

Tooele County came next. In 1892, Mix established the Tooele County Times, continuing a pattern that marked his career—bringing a press into young communities hungry for a public voice. On March 11, 1893, the Brigham City Report informed its readers that Mix had assumed charge of the Eureka Miner, a paper he produced until its sale in August 1894.

The federal census of 1900 still places Mix in Eureka, now married to Betsy Chipman and the father of two young daughters. Whether he remained formally attached to a particular newspaper at that time is unclear, but his continued presence in the town suggests a newspaperman who, even when the masthead changed, stayed close to the press.

By 1903, the family—now with three daughters—had moved to Lane, Nevada, a small settlement just west of present-day Ely. A gold and copper boom was underway there, though it would prove short-lived. The contrast between comparatively urbane Eureka and the raw Nevada frontier was stark, and Lane’s primitive living conditions were likely among the factors that eventually prompted Betsy and the children to leave. By early 1905, they had been retrieved by Betsy’s brother, James, and returned to more stable surroundings. Although they remained married, Betsy died in Utah in July 1908 and it was noted in the Goldfield Press and Weekly Tribune that he traveled there for her funeral and likely to make arrangements for the care of their daughters.

That same year, Mix’s newspaper career gathered momentum once again. A mining boom driven by activity in Goldfield and nearby Tonopah had reignited the region, and Lida—an old Esmeralda County camp—was revived and ready for a newspaper. On April 14, 1905, the Friday weekly Lida Enterprise began publication, with Mix and Charles F. Spillman listed as editors and proprietors.

From Lida, Mix moved on to the Palmetto Herald, and then to Blair, west of Tonopah near another boomtown, Silver Peak. There he would remain for four years, continuing the restless but essential work of frontier journalism—following the ore, the people, and the stories that bound these fleeting camps together.

In September 1908, the Republican Party nominated Mix for Recorder and Auditor of Esmeralda County. Though he was not elected, public service followed nonetheless. By April 1909, he had been appointed tax collector of Blair, and in 1911 he was still living there, now serving as a school trustee. He had been elected to a four-year term in 1909, but that tenure ended abruptly in January when a dispute over the location of a new school building escalated into injunction proceedings and Mix resigned his post.

By February 1, Mix had surfaced in Manhattan, Nevada, where he undertook the revival of the Manhattan Mail, a move that followed closely on the heels of his resignation in Blair. It would be his final newspaper.

Every trail has an end, and Manhattan proved to be the end of Mix’s. Scarcely six weeks after his arrival, just before midnight on July 21, 1911, he suffered a fatal stroke. He was only forty-nine years old. During his illness, members of the Knights of Pythias—of which he had long been a member—attended him and later arranged his burial in the Old Tonopah Cemetery, where funeral services were reported to have been “quite impressive.”

He was survived by his mother and three daughters, who were then in the care of relatives of his late wife—a quiet coda to a life spent following booms, founding newspapers, and giving voice to frontier towns that often vanished almost as quickly as they appeared.