The Goldfield News and Weekly Tribune Archive

"The history of Goldfield presents to the world a fascinating and dramatic study in the elements of human character which constitute fitness to survive and triumph in the world's never-ending struggle for fortune. Merely to be rich! That is not the thing at all - that's monotonous and vulgar. The glory and the heroism are in the splendid spirit of the battle, not in the banquet that follows." So proclaimed Nevada's Goldfield News in it first and only annual number in 1905. Goldfield was the scene of the biggest gold bonanza in the United States since the Alaskan Gold Rush. At the peak of the boom in 1905-10, Goldfield was Nevada's second largest city. The editor of the Goldfield News, the town's largest newspaper, boasted that it reported on "All that's new and true in the greatest gold camp ever known." The Goldfield News was one of the leading newspapers in Nevada, and with its daily and weekly mining reports, a paper that drew a national readership. Goldfield was also the center of radical labor action as the Industrial Workers of the World fought for control of the miners and all other labor.

James F. O'Brien and R.E.L. Windle brought a press and supplies and started the camp's first newspaper; they borrowed type and paper from the Tonopah Miner. On April 29, 1905, they proudly issued the first edition Goldfield News, an eight-page, six-column weekly. O'Brien retired due to poor health in 1906. Local businessman and mining speculator, J.P. Loftus, purchased the Goldfield News and then leased it to newly arrived Colorado newspaperman, Charles Sprague.

Sprague was born in Ohio, the son of a U.S. Congressman. After graduating from college, he bought and edited a local newspaper. In 1890, Sprague moved to Colorado Springs where he founded the Colorado Springs Evening Telegraph and the Mining Investor and served in the state legislature. In 1904, he was the editor of the Rocky Mountain News. Sprague came to Goldfield, Nevada, in 1905. He leased the Goldfield News and served as its editor and the manager of its parent Goldfield Publishing Company, for which he built the Goldfield News Building, one of the largest office buildings in downtown Goldfield. Sprague enlarged the News, making it the principal promotional paper for Southern Nevada mining interests and tripling a subscription list that reached every state in the Union. In 1909, an evening edition, the Goldfield Daily News was added. When Sprague, now president of the Goldfield Chamber of Commerce, ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress as a Democrat in 1910, the rival Tonopah Daily Bonanza bitterly attacked him for posing as pro-labor when he in fact represented only “High Collar Capital” and had advocated violent measures against striking miners. Sprague was, in the words of the Bonanza’s fiery editor, William W. Booth, a “hypocrite . . . bereft of humanitarianism, manhood and honor.” The Goldfield News nonetheless prospered, but Sprague’s interests were now more in mining. He sold the News in 1911 to the rival Goldfield Tribune Printing Company, owned by millionaire George Wingfield, who also controlled most of the mines in Goldfield. Sprague then went into the mining brokerage business, taking his boosterism from the newspaper to the stock market, where, however, he was markedly less successful. The Goldfield Daily Tribune, under manager and editor, John C. Martin, suspended the Goldfield Daily News. In that same year, the two weeklies were combined to form the Goldfield News and Weekly Tribune as an adjunct to the daily Tribune. The new paper continued under a series of owners and editors. In 1952, the printing was moved to Tonopah, and in 1956 the News was finally suspended, absorbed into the Tonopah Times – Bonanza and Goldfield News.