The reasons for this lie not far afield: the leading magazines and periodicals of the east through the immensity of their circulation secure that large patronage necessary to maintain a publication conducted on a generous basis, ensuring variety and excellence. Experience has long since demonstrated even to the bravest of the inland publishers that the point of distribution is the controlling factor in success. The means of transportation which have so miraculously improved, have annihilated distance and along with it to no small extent the Western and Southern periodical of literary flavor. The opulent publications are enabled through their very prosperity to command contributors not to be approached by a periodical circumscribed in means and constituency. Again, the Kentucky magazines have all along made the fatal mistake of truckling to dead prejudices and sectionalism. The material and the moulders have long been with us, but the wide popular support, which after all is the first essential, has failed to materialise, and it may be regretfully apprehended that it now lies as far away as ever.
The first magazine issued in Kentucky or the West was _The Medley, or Monthly Miscellany, for the year 1803_, which was edited and published by Daniel Bradford, son of old John Bradford, the editor of _The Kentucky Gazette_. _The Medley_ lived through the year of 1803, but in January, 1804, Editor Bradford announced that he was compelled, from lack of appreciation, to abandon its publication. The twelve parts were bound for those of the subscribers who cared to have them made into a single volume, and probably not more than two copies are extant to-day. _The Medley's_ literary merit was not impressive, and its death can only be deplored because it happened to be the first Western magazine.
_The Almoner_, a religious periodical, the first issue of which was dated from Lexington, April, 1814, and which died a twelvemonth later, was published by Thomas T. Skillman, the pioneer printer. Its account of the preacher, John Poage Campbell, and his many theological works, is about all one finds of interest in it.
William Gibbes Hunt, a Harvard man, who later took a degree from Transylvania University, established _The Western Review_ at Lexington, in August, 1819, and this was the first literary magazine in the West worthy the name. Hunt was a man of fine tastes, and he had a proper conception of what a magazine should be. He worked hard for two years, but in July, 1821,--the number for which month is notable as having contained the first draft of General William O. Butler's famous poem, _The Boatman's Horn_, which is there entitled _The Boat Horn_,--Hunt rehearsed the pathetic tale of the lack of support and appreciation for a Western magazine, and, without any expressed regret, entitled it his valedictory. He had survived twice as long as any of his predecessors, and he probably felt that he had done fairly well, as he undoubtedly had. The four bound volumes of _The Western Review_ may be read to-day with more than an historical interest. Hunt returned to his home in New England; and the only other thing of his that is preserved is _An Address on the Principles of Masonry_ (Lexington, 1821), and a very excellent oration it is, too.