Minnesota Territory was less than two months old when its first newspaper appeared on the streets of St. Paul 170 years ago.

The first issue of the Minnesota Pioneer — the earliest ancestor of the Pioneer Press — was printed in the drafty spare room of a carpentry shop on what is now Kellogg Boulevard, between Jackson and Robert streets.

Hogs rooting around beneath the floorboards threatened the balance of anyone who stood on them, and daylight was visible through hundreds of gaps in the wooden planks of its walls, writes George S. Hage in his book “Newspapers on the Minnesota Frontier.”

The force behind the Pioneer was 38-year-old James Madison Goodhue, a combative and clever newspaperman who had only recently arrived in the territorial capital from Wisconsin, along with a hand-operated press and a pair of printers (which in those days were people and not office equipment).

“But little more than a week ago, we landed in St. Paul, amidst a crowd of strangers, with the first printing press that has ever rested upon the soil of Minnesota,” Goodhue wrote in his debut editorial on April 28, 1849. “Every person we meet expresses a wish to favor our new and expensive enterprize.”

Goodhue’s lead item that Saturday morning, occupying three of the six columns on his front page, was the entire text of the act of Congress that established Minnesota Territory. On page 2, he set about what he saw as the primary purpose of a frontier newspaper: boosterism.

“A more beautiful site for a town cannot be imagined,” Goodhue wrote of St. Paul. “A description of the village now would not answer for a month hence — such is the rapidity of building, and the miraculous resurrection of every description of domiciles. Piles of lumber and building materials lie scattered everywhere in admirable confusion.”

St. Paul at that time was just a motley collection of about 30 timber-frame and log buildings along dirt roads, according to Hage, but Goodhue saw the makings of a bustling metropolitan river port.

“The whole town is on the stir — stores, hotels, houses are projected and built in a few days,” Goodhue wrote in that first issue. “California is forgotten and the whole town is rife with the exciting spirit of advancement.”

Goodhue’s pen grew more venomous in later issues as he directed his razor-sharp wit at his political enemies in the pages of the paper. (It was common in this era for newspapers to be openly partisan in their coverage.)

Although his previous paper in Wisconsin was affiliated with the Whig Party, Goodhue saw that the bulk of political power in St. Paul was held by the Democrats, writes Jane Lamm Carroll in the book “Making Minnesota Territory.” Thus the Pioneer was staunchly Democratic.

His characterization of a local Whig judge as an alcoholic, “who habitually gets so drunk as to feel upward for the ground,” prompted the judge’s brother to attack Goodhue in the street with a knife. Goodhue happened to be carrying a pair of pistols and ably defended himself.

Goodhue also focused his wrath on competing newspapers, which seemed to be sprouting all around him in St. Paul’s early years. Just a couple of months after the Pioneer’s first issue hit the streets, the tiny town of about 500 people was home to two more newspapers, Hage writes. By the time Minnesota entered the Union as the 32nd state in 1858, that number had grown to 21.

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There weren’t many Beatlemaniacs at the Pioneer Press in 1965 Although Goodhue’s premature death of illness in August 1852 cut short his tenure atop the Pioneer masthead, the newspaper he founded would survive, gradually absorbing its rivals.

By 1938, all of St. Paul’s newspapers had been consolidated under the one company called Pioneer Press and Dispatch, the direct descendant of Goodhue’s Pioneer.