He had filed on a mineral claim near the wharf and had built the Empire Newspaper Office. If Charles Hays had hoped that his intended cooperation with John would gain the railroad favor with the "Empire", he must've been sorely disappointed. John began encouraging other people to squat on the mineral claims by the wharf, instead of buying lots in the new GTP townsite, thus creating the community of Knoxville. The Grand Trunk Pacific had had enough. When the lots at Prince Rupert went up for sale in 1909, the land John Houston's "Empire" was on was quietly bought by the railway themselves. John sold his newspaper for $10,000 and left for Fort George. John Houston arrived in Fort George in the fall of 1909 and bought property in South Fort George and began the "Fort George Tribune". The first edition was published on November 6, 1909. Unfortunately, other than land claims notices there was little local news for his paper to report. In 1909, South Fort George was a First Nations village, a sawmill and a Hudson's Bay Store. Less than a dozen new residents lived in the infant town-site in tent shacks. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, John's favorite villain, was still far away: not even across the Alberta/BC border on the eastern end of construction, and the construction from the western end at Prince Rupert had just begun. John's South Fort George articles were often humorous and included notices as to whose cow recently had a calf and what he'd had to pay for eggs that week. He commented in one article about how his socks often froze to the floor while he sat at his printing press and worked on the newspaper. Nevertheless, whether there was little news to report or not, John was a busy man from November 1909 to March 1910. He responded to approximately 300 letters a month, written mostly by parties interested in purchasing land in the area, and he was working on formulating a platform for the Liberal Party. In March 1910, the work and excessively cold caught up with him and John contracted pneumonia and was pulled on a toboggan down the Blackwater Trail to the Quesnel hospital by his friend and fellow pioneer settler, William J Cooke. John died on March 8 at the hospital in Quesnel, but not before he got a chance to read his own obituary, one printed in error by the "Vancouver Province". His nurse, knowing his sense of humor, showed him the article, and he supposedly joked that he respected the paper and that they didn't need to make a correction because he was planning on making good on their story.