e West, with a chain of thirty-five papers
strung over that part of South Dakota.

As civilization pushed into a new district the king picked up another
printing outfit and made entry to the Post Office Department at
Washington of another newspaper. Sometimes he moved his own outfits from
one region to another, but often he merely shut the door on an old plant
not worth moving and let it return to scrap-iron while the print shop
tumbled down with it.

It cost a lot of money, he used to complain, with investments
depreciating like that and the proof business so short-lived, when the
settlers filled a section and all proved up at once. And he had to run a
paper a year before it became a legal publication.

But the proof sheets soon became gold mines, the plants costing but a
few hundred dollars and the expenses of operating only ten to fifteen
dollars a week--a cheap printer, the prints, the ink. Established at
inland post offices they became the nuclei for crossroad trading points.

At this time he had embarked on another cause, prohibition, which was
causing great excitement in South Dakota. A few years later, with his
proof sheets extending through the Black Hills, he bought a newspaper in
Deadwood, the notorious old mining town which is usually associated in
people's minds with the more lurid aspects of the Wild West. He found
conditions all that they had been painted, dominated by underworld vice
rings, with twenty-four saloons for its population of 3000, and gambling
halls, operated as openly as grocery stores, running twenty-four hours a
day. Even the two dance halls exceeded all that has been written about
similar places.

With his newspaper as his only weapon E. L. Senn set out to clean up
Deadwood. In the fight he sunk his own profits until he had to sell most
of his newspapers, emerging from it almost penniless.

It was this doughty warrior whose printing press I had strewn widely
over the prairie. When he entered the hotel in Presho where I was
awaiting him my courage almost failed me. He was wise enough not to ask
me what was wrong. He must have been secretly amused by the very small,
frightened girl with the determined expression in her direct blue eyes.

To my surprise, he asked no questions. Instead he took me to supper and
then to a moving picture, the first I had seen in the West. His kindness
so melted my exasperation with the press that I was at a loss to know
how to begin the fighting talk I ha