Edwin Bryant (alcalde)

Edwin Bryant (1805 – December 16, 1869) was a Kentucky newspaper editor whose popular 1848 book What I Saw in California describes his overland journey to California, his account of the infamous Donner Party, and his term as second alcalde, or pre-statehood mayor, of the city of San Francisco.

Bryant was born in Pelham, Massachusetts, the son of the first cousins Ichabod Bryant and Silence Bryant. Bryant had an unhappy childhood and his father was frequently imprisoned for debt. He lived with his uncle Bezabiel Bryant in Bedford, New York. He studied medicine under his uncle, Dr. Peter Bryant, father of the poet William Cullen Bryant. He may have attended Brown University. He founded the Providence, Rhode Island newspaper the Literary Cadet in 1826 and edited the New York Examiner in Rochester, New York.

In December 1830, Bryant joined George D. Prentice as co-editor of the Louisville Journal in Kentucky. Prentice, who had founded the newspaper only a month earlier, and Bryant penned blistering anti-Jacksonian editorials under the signatures "P" and "B". Following a trip to Frankfort, Kentucky to report on the Kentucky General Assembly, Bryant left the paper in May because it could not afford two editors. Bryant partnered with N.L. Finnell to edit the newly founded Lexington Observer, which a year later purchased and merged with the Kentucky Reporter (founded in 1807) to become the pro-Whig Party Lexington Observer and Reporter.

Bryant was hired to edit the Lexington Intelligencer in 1834 and spent the next decade at the newspaper, eventually becoming its owner before selling it to John C. Noble. Bryant penned frequent editorials, including editorials supporting the anti-Catholic nativism movement and a series of racist attacks on Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson for his black common law wife and two mixed race daughters. In 1844, at the urging of Whig politicians Henry Clay and John J. Crittenden, Bryant and Walter Newman Haldeman founded another pro-Whig newspaper, the Louisville Daily Dime, which was soon renamed the Louisville Courier.

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