On this day in Duluth in 1873, Robert C. Mitchell published the final edition of his Duluth Daily Tribune. The newspaper had begun across the bay as the Superior Gazette, which Mitchell purchased in 1870 and changed its name to Superior Tribune. Duluthians, feeling that Minnesotian publisher Thomas Foster had become “arrogant and dictatorial and entirely too obstreperous,” lured Mitchell and his newspaper to the Zenith City. He moved his equipment in the dead of night, knowing it would anger Superiorites, and published the first issue of the renamed Duluth Tribune on May 4, 1870. Unfortunately, his office burned a few months later, taking all his equipment with it. On May 15 of 1872 he was back in the newspaper game, publishing the Duluth Daily Tribune as Duluth’s first daily newspaper, a “sprightly little six-column four-paged paper, containing the full Associated Press dispatches for that period—about 2,500 to 3,000 words.” It would last just 17 months, closing after the Panic of 1873 wiped out most commercial ventures in Duluth, which cut off the newspaper’s advertising revenue. The paper would be revived (along with much of Duluth) in 1881 as the Duluth Evening Tribune. The next day the following jab ran in its biggest competitor, the Minnesotian: “The Duluth Daily Tribune died last night. The Minnesotian still continues to be the leading paper of Duluth; and will be in the future, as it has in the past—fulfill all its promises to the public.”
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