For centuries, newspapers have been the prime source of history, recording details of even the smallest communities and ethnic groups. That point is well made in a new 432 page book, “Colorado Newspapers: A History & Inventory, 1859-2000,” published by the Colorado Press Association and the Center for Colorado and the West at the Auraria Library.
The work briefly sketches some 3,000 Colorado newspapers listed by county and town. Sadly, some 90 percent of them have disappeared, according to History Colorado librarians. Most small-town papers, often issued for less than a year or two, have vanished.
Newspapers are the first draft of history and our most thorough, reliable look into the past.
Of course, there have been some in the Fourth Estate who have stretched the truth. William N. Byers, editor of Colorado’s first newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, declared on Sept. 10, 1859, that steamboats were traveling the South Platte as far upstream as Denver. Like any good editor, Byers was only trying to boost his community, hoping to convince folks back east that Denver was the transportation hub of the Rocky Mountain region. With his tireless promotion of real railroads as well as imaginary steamboats, Byers and the News did much to make Denver a regional transit center.
Although the Rocky died in 2009, vintage survivors include the Alamosa Valley Courier, The Aspen Times, Boulder Daily Camera, The Denver Post, the Durango Herald, Fort Collins Coloradoan, Greeley Tribune, Grand Junction Sentinel, Pueblo Chieftain, Steamboat Pilot, and Summit County Journal. The owners, editors, and ups and downs of these and other papers are captured in “Colorado Newspapers.”
This tome is the culmination of the vision and years of hard work of Jane C. Harper, a veteran Colorado journalist. Her dying wish was to have someone finish her encyclopedic work. Bob Sweeney, Wilbur Flachman, Sandy Birkey, Mary Somerville, Craig Leavitt and myself spent the last year wrapping up loose ends and trimming some 700,000 words down to 275,000.
Harper worked for the Walsenburg World-Independent, the Gunnison News-Champion, the Aurora Star and the Colorado Trumpet. A president of Colorado Press Women in 1960, she worked with the Colorado Press Association for many years where she pursued this labor of love, heavily based on her interviews with journalists in every nook of the state. She skipped Denver and El Paso County to focus on the small town newspapers she loved.
The book celebrates such wonders as the Saguache Crescent, which claims to be the last newspaper in the world printed with hot lead type, and the editor of the Buena Vista Record, who died as “the result of having been poisoned by holding type in his mouth.”
Herein you will find the late, great and lamented Ed Quillen, the Post’s Empire Magazine, and a wonderful array of colorfully named gazettes: The Brighton Blade, the Como Headlight, the Creede Candle, the Fairplay Flume, the Granite Pay-Streak and the Rifle Sharpshooter.
No matter how small, tattered and plagued by errors, these sheets struggled to instill a sense of community, of civic betterment into diverse and footloose populations. Editors and their staffs strove for law and order and to boost local economies and pride.
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