By Erik Sietsema
The Mountaineer has been serving the community of Big Sandy since 1911, when it began publishing under the name The Bear Paw Mountaineer. For two years in its early days, the Mountaineer faced competition from a second local paper: The Big Sandy Sentinel. Published from 1915 to 1916, the Sentinel styled itself as the progressive Democratic local paper. Openly political and featuring a substantial German-language section with news of the war in Europe, the Sentinel engaged in an aggressive war of words with the Mountaineer over local issues before disappearing almost completely...
