Cheboygan county has a rich history, yet, as a historian, it makes me sad to know so many interesting stories of our people have been lost and forgotten. Capturing some of these stories and publishing them for the historical record in today’s modern Tribune is what drives me to share a regular column on local history with my readers.

I was very fortunate recently. My neighbor (whose husband died a year ago) brought me a very old, yellowed and faded copy of a Cheboygan Daily Tribune special millennium keepsake edition from 1939 she had found in his possessions. It was a treasure trove of old stories and history.

One very funny story about two of our earliest newspapers caught my eye, and I felt it deserved to be shared with today’s generation of readers.

First, I must give you a bit of Cheboygan’s newspaper history. Cheboygan’s first settler was Jacob Sammons, who arrived from Mackinac Island in 1845. Cheboygan grew rapidly from that beginning, but it would be 25 years before a weekly newspaper appeared in 1871. It was called The Manitawauba Chronicle. It was a small four-page paper. It lasted about six months.

The Cheboygan Times was the second local paper. Its name was later changed to The Cheboygan Independent.

A third newspaper, The Northern Tribune, was founded by William and Merritt Chandler in 1875. This paper started as a weekly and it competed with the Times/Independent. Merritt Chandler was my great, great uncle. Decades later, it was renamed The Cheboygan Daily Tribune. The editor was Charles S. Ramsey. He purchased The Northern Tribune from the Chandler brothers in 1880 and started publishing daily.

William Chandler moved to Sault Ste. Marie, where he founded The Sault Evening News and a bank. He was later elected to the Michigan Legislature. Merritt Chandler was an entrepreneur. He completed a contract to build a road from Presque Isle on Lake Huron to Petoskey. The state of Michigan had no money to pay him, so it gave him thousands of acres of land. In the center of this land, he co-founded Onaway.

The Northern Tribune and Cheboygan Independent were engaged in a hot competition for newspaper sales and advertising when Edward Forsythe arrived in Cheboygan from Bay City and founded a third newspaper, The Cheboygan Democrat.

Forsythe was very creative and aggressive. He pushed to sell more newspaper by filling The Democrat with interesting local news, somewhat “spicy” stories and even a few rumors.

Now comes the funny part.

Ramsey was losing sales to this new upstart paper. He decided he had to compete with Forsythe’s Democrat by becoming more creative.

Ramsey and Forsythe became (secret) good friends, but they both had to sell newspapers. They decided to invent a verbal war between them to entertain readers and get the town talking about what insults and slurs would be printed next.

To keep readers’ interest high, Forsythe began to sell his newspapers the day after Ramsey, so he could always have the last word. It became a great competition as they chased each other round and round every week. It also sold a lot of copies of both papers, as residents did not want to miss the latest response to the insults hurled the day before.

People of all ages would gather in kitchens, parlors, taverns, grocery stores and blacksmith shops to discuss the latest attacks. They roared as they heard the insults that the two printed about one another.

Ramsey and Forsythe were having a blast. They surely chuckled as their subscription lists grew by leaps and bounds! Forsythe called Ramsey “the old woman publisher on Main Street.” Ramsay told his daughter Forsythe was “a man whose brain was a two-story and mansard-roof affair.”

As the verbal war went on, the two owners reaped ever-increasing profits. The public spats ended when Ramsey hired a new editor named William H. Gamble and Forsythe hired Al H. Weber. These two young professionals returned dignity, sincerity and courtesy back to Cheboygan’s newspapers.

But older readers continued to laugh for a long time about the war between their two local papers.