Joseph Charless (1772–1834), printer, immigrated by 1796 to the United States via France as a political refugee from his native Ireland. Following the failure of his attempts to start newspapers in Lewistown and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he worked for other printers in Philadelphia. Charless ventured west in 1803, spending time in Kentucky and Ohio before moving in 1808 to Saint Louis, where he established a press and, with the encouragement of Governor Meriwether Lewis, began publishing the Missouri Gazette, the first newspaper in Louisiana (later Missouri) Territory. Charless gave up journalism in 1820 and relied thereafter on his farms, boardinghouse, and drugstore. A vocal supporter of Missouri statehood and Jeffersonian Republicanism, he opposed slavery and the emerging Democratic party of Andrew Jackson (William H. Lyon, “Joseph Charless, Father of Missouri Journalism,” Missouri Historical Review 17 [1961]: 133–45; David Kaser, Joseph Charless: Printer in the Western Country [1963]; Brigham, American Newspapers description begins Clarence S. Brigham, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 1947, 2 vols. description ends , 1:162, 171, 433, 2:877).