The Night Bismarck Told the World

On July sixth, eighteen seventy-six, the steamboat Far West pulled into the docks at Bismarck carrying wounded soldiers, sacks of dispatches, and the diary of a dead journalist. The nation's biggest story of the year had just arrived at a small newspaper that published three times a week.

The Bismarck Tribune had been founded on July eleventh, eighteen seventy-three, by Clement A. Lounsberry. Mark Kellogg, one of his correspondents, had ridden with Custer's column to report on the summer campaign against the Lakota. Kellogg's last dispatch, sent from the Yellowstone River on June twenty-first, described the expedition moving confidently toward the Little Bighorn. Four days later, both Kellogg and Custer were dead.

When the Far West docked at Bismarck on July sixth, Lounsberry met the boat and received Kellogg's diary and the army's dispatches. He immediately ordered his telegrapher, John N. Carnahan, to open the single-line telegraph to New York and keep it open. For the next twenty-two hours, Carnahan tapped out an account of the battle that ran to roughly fifty thousand words. The Bismarck Tribune was the first newspaper in America to report what would come to be called Custer's Last Stand.

For a frontier town of a few thousand people, perched at the edge of the known world, it was an extraordinary moment. The telegraph line that made Bismarck commercially useful also made it, for one night in the summer of eighteen seventy-six, the most important dateline in American journalism.

The Bismarck Tribune continues to publish today, making it one of the oldest continuously operating newspapers in the Northern Plains.