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chapter ten Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport I killed the old man first. I shot him. He never woke up. Then I shot the old woman. She woke up and I had to shoot her again. She fought me and I had to hit her on the head with the butt of her gun. Then the daughter came in but tried to run and I then clubbed her to death. I hit her a number of times and her brains were all over the floor. I did not outrage her. After they were dead I went out into the yard and took a sheet off the fence and covered up the bodies. Then I went into the woods. I stole the gun I shot the white people with. I killed them because they hurt the feelings of a friend of mine. I wanted to be called a bad nigger, a desperado. confession of jim buchanan in the shreveport times, october 15, 1902 October 14, 1902 sentinel editor bill haltom was furious. Unconfirmed reports ran rampant as to the whereabouts of Jim Buchanan , the accused killer of the Hicks family: he was in the Rusk prison, he had barely escaped a howling mob in Tenaha, he had been seen in Appleby. As it turned out, there was some truth to all of these reports. But Sheriff A. J. Spradley was nowhere to be found. The Daily Sentinel was an afternoon paper, which meant that by late morning Haltom had no choice but to go to press with what little news he had to fill his modest four-page sheet. Most of the newspaper’s day-today content consisted of display ads and filler advertisements—disguised as stories—attesting to the efficacy of various patent medicines. There were no wire reports of news elsewhere because Haltom couldn’t afford to subscribe to the Associated Press. Haltom relied heavily on the “exchange ” papers from other Texas towns to provide his readers with news of the outside world, albeit several days late. Running a daily newspaper in a tiny town was backbreaking work, a Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport { 89 never-ending cycle of setting type (picking up a single character at a time and placing it in a wooden frame), running a balky press, dealing with unhappy readers, trying to cadge cash from both advertisers and subscribers —all the while attempting to hold on to printers and typesetters prone to go on drunken benders and disappear for days at a time. Haltom wasn’t shy about complaining about the hardships of running a small-town daily newspaper in a town that wasn’t exactly booming. In June 1902 he ominously announced, after a spate of typographical errors had slipped into the newspaper: “There hasn’t been a killing in the office yet, but the editor is still on the warpath.”1 A few years earlier he had complained that the newspaper had expanded the number of pages published daily, but a proportional increase in revenue had not been forthcoming: “It was suggested that The Daily Sentinel would get more advertising if it would enlarge. We have made it larger. Where are the ads?”2 By 1902 Haltom had had more than two decades of newspaper experience , but it had all been at weeklies. Running a daily that published Monday through Saturday was a far more expensive, and riskier, financial proposition. By 1902 Haltom and his younger brother, Giles, had managed to survive three years with a daily newspaper and had beaten back a challenge from the Populist Plaindealer, which under new ownership had gone to daily publication in March—only to revert back to weekly publication in late summer. Now that Spradley, the sheriff, no longer had an active role at the Plaindealer, the disputes between the two newspapers were more political than personal. On the day the Plaindealer went daily, Haltom wrote, “We may get to scrapping once in a while like the proverbial old man and his wife, but we won’t allow anyone else to monkey with our affairs, and we shall guard with a jealous eye the best interest and welfare of the East Texas Metropolis.”3 And when thePlaindealer (though only temporarily) rescinded its plans to cease daily publication, Haltom pronounced himself pleased, reasoning that readers liked to subscribe to both papers and compare their separate political positions, and predicted that readership would actually drop if there were only one local newspaper. However, as later events demonstrated...

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