Portland Bee

D. H. Stearns, the paper's founder, repurchased the Bee following the scandal, and emphasized the change in leadership in advertisements in newspapers around the state.

[12] Bee founder Doran H. "Don" Stearns had a background in journalism in his native Nebraska,[13][1] and married into a prominent news family in Portland in the same year he started the Bee: his wife, Clara Belle Duniway, was the only daughter of New Northwest founder Abigail Scott Duniway, and niece of longtime The Oregonian editor Harvey W.

[16] In 1878, Bee editor James K. Mercer engaged in an ongoing war of words with A. C. MacDonald of the Portland Telegram, through the columns of both papers.

A contemporaneous article in the Oregonian about McDonald's death described the Bee as a "deadly stench to all decent people who come in contact with it.

"[21][22] Upon his return to the Bee, Stearns hired his wife's aunt, Catherine Amanda Coburn, who edited the paper from 1879 to 1880.

[23] Upon her hire at the Bee, Coburn became one of the few 19th century women editors of a daily newspaper in the western United States.

A few months after Mercer killed MacDonald, the Bee emphasized its new leadership and presented itself as the "most complete and reliable farmers paper published on the Pacific Coast. Advertisement published in the Douglas Independent , in several editions in December 1878.