  Joseph T. Goodman, editor of the Territorial Enterprise. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. Joseph T. Goodman, editor of the Territorial Enterprise. Courtesy of the New York Public Library. Nevada owes its first printing to W. L. Jernegan, who in partnership with Alfred James established a weekly newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise, at Genoa, then in western Utah Territory, on December 18, 1858. Jernegan had transported his printing equipment across the Sierras from Yolo County, Calif. The earliest Nevada imprint in the Library of Congress dates from 1862, the year after Nevada's establishment as a separate Territory: Second Annual Message of Governor James W. Nye, to the Legislature of Nevada Territory, November 13, 1862. Together with Reports of Territorial Auditor, Treasurer, and Superintendent of Public Instruction. Printed at Carson City by J. T. Goodman & Co., Territorial printers, this publication has 48 pages, not including the title page printed on its yellow wrapper. Joseph T. Goodman was not only involved with official printing at this time, but he was also editing the Territorial Enterprise, which was then located at Virginia City and had become a daily paper. He is perhaps best remembered Governor Nye's Second Annual Message covers an important period of national history. Strongly pro-Union, it gives an optimistic account of the year's events in the Civil War and bestows high praise on Lincoln's preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862: "As an engine of war, its formidability is a powerful warrant of early peace, and as a measure of humanity, the enlightened world receives it with acclamations of unbounded joy." Part of the message concerns expected consequences from a bill recently passed by Congress authorizing construction of a Pacific Railroad, which would profoundly affect life in Nevada: No State nor Territory will derive such inestimable advantage from the road as the Territory of Nevada. Situated, as we are, in what, during a great portion of the year, is an almost inaccessible isolation of wealth; with mountains covered with perpetual snow frowning down directly upon us at the west, and with a series of ranges, difficult to cross, at the east of us, with a wilderness fit only for the original inhabitants of the waste, stretching away a thousand miles, and intervening between us and the frontier of agricultural enterprise; and with no means of receiving the common necessaries of life, except through the expensive freightage of tediously traveling trains of wagons; the value of the road to us will be beyond calculation. The inscription "Library Depr State" on the Library of Congress copy indicates it must have been submitted to the Department of State, which in 1862 was still in charge of the United States Territories. A date stamp on its wrapper suggests that it was transferred to the Library of Congress by December 1900, while a stamp on page 2 reveals that it was in custody of the Library's Division of Documents in September 1907. |
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