Robert N. Sutherlin

Robert N. Sutherlin
1844 – 1926

William H. Sutherlin
1840 – 1902

Inducted June 25, 1985

On Nov. 25, 1875, Robert and William Sutherlin tightened the quoins, locked the chase onto their second-hand Washington press, rolled on ink, pulled the large lever and printed the first page of Montana’s pioneer agricultural newspaper, the Rocky Mountain Husbandman.

Their print shop in Diamond City had been a saloon where miners delighted in smashing the mirrors with gold nuggets taken from nearby Confederate Gulch.

The Husbandman’s appearance on that Thanksgiving Day followed by only 11 years the establishment of Montana Territory’s first newspaper.

The Sutherlin brothers bought their hand press from the Virginia City Madisonian. The press reportedly had been used to publish the Salt Lake City Valley Tan and in 1865 the second newspaper in Montana Territory, the Virginia City Montana Democrat.

Robert Sutherlin served as editor of the Husbandman and William as business manager. In the first issue, Robert announced the newspaper’s columns would embrace “agriculture, stock raising, horticulture, social and domestic economy.” He promised to “boldly and fearlessly champion the cause of the sons of toil – commending the good, denouncing the wrong — unawed by fears and unswerved by favors.”

The Sutherlins proved that a need and an audience for a farm newspaper existed in Montana when the territory’s economy still was geared to mining.

Like other pioneer editors and manager, the Sutherlins often encountered financial difficulties. In 1876 a grasshopper scourge, which lasted for six years, hindered progress of the paper. In 1879, Diamond City was a fading community, and the Sutherlins were forced to move the plant to White Sulphur Springs. Nevertheless, the newspaper over the years successfully crusaded to place 3 million acres in southern Montana under the water ditch and it proposed irrigation of 3 million acres in northern Montana.

As one student of Montana frontier journalism has noted, the Husbandman initially was Montana’s Grange newspaper. It was, “in the sense that it printed Grange grievance and crusade material against the incipient enemies of agriculture, a definite rallying point for agitation.” Another student of the period wrote: “Robert N. Sutherlin left Montanans an enduring legacy. In thousands of columns of print he created a record of Montana agriculture’s history and the people who made that history. And in countless editorials he left us a vision and a challenge: a vision of agricultural abundance benefiting all of the people and the challenge to husband the land to sustain that abundance.”

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