They’ve died from artillery fire, aircraft crashes, gunfire, disease – even by execution – in conflict zones and elsewhere around the world.
Over the 180-year history of The Associated Press, 38 journalists have fallen on the job while working for the independent not-for-profit news organization.
Thursday marks the 150th anniversary of the very first: Mark Kellogg, one of five civilians killed alongside Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men at the Battle of Little Bighorn.
Kellogg, 43, was embedded with Custer’s troops. He was reporting for The Bismarck Tribune and New York Herald – the AP circulated his reports across the country – when Custer underestimated the size of a Sioux village that he attacked.
Custer and his outnumbered men made a last stand on a hill. There, they were annihilated by Native American defenders. Kellogg’s scalped body was found not far away.
His last published dispatch read in part: “I go with Custer and will be at the death.”
It was more of an attempt at poetry than prophecy. “At the death” is a foxhunting term for the end of the hunt, suggesting Kellogg expected Custer to prevail.
Still, Kellogg’s final words and fate circulated far and wide through his employers and the AP. It gave the obscure, part-time journalist – a widower who worked a variety of jobs to support his two daughters – fame in death.
He got to know Custer. He covered the campaign. He mingled with the soldiers and interviewed them at their camps, historian Sandy Barnard said.
Yet in other ways, Kellogg was much different from modern journalists. He carried a rifle into action, Barnard pointed out. And he made no attempt to avoid not just bias but racism against Native Americans, whom he called “red devils.”
“During the last stages of the campaign, Kellogg was probably more of a soldier than he was a newspaper man,” said Barnard, author of a Kellogg biography and other books on the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
The State Historical Society of North Dakota preserves Kellogg’s diary and various belongings, including eyeglasses, tobacco, clothing and a mosquito head net. The fragile diary, now digitized online, documents weather, distances covered, who was riding in front and in back, how many antelope they saw and other day-to-day operations, Deputy State Archivist Lindsay Meidinger said. The diary ends before the battle.
“It’s a primary source of the historical event,” Barnard said, “that not many other primary sources remain from that time period related to the Seventh Cavalry and Custer.”
“While his record as a journalist might be very small compared to modern reporters who go into combat, he certainly was doing exactly what they are doing,” she said.
Others who have perished while reporting for AP in war zones include:
– Mariam Dagga, a freelance visual journalist who was killed in an Israeli strike on a hospital in the Gaza Strip last August;
– Anja Niedringhaus, a photographer shot by a police officer as she sat in her car in Afghanistan in 2014;
– Myles Tierney, a videojournalist killed while traveling in a convoy that came under fire in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1999;
– Joseph Morton, a war correspondent who was the only U.S. reporter known to have been executed by the Nazis following his capture alongside Slovakian partisans in 1944.
___
Associated Press corporate archivist Sarit Hand in New York and Jack Dura in Bismarck, North Dakota, contributed to this report.
