Denver

Newspaper History

Gold, guns, and gamblers dominated Denver's newspaper history. The first issue of the Rocky Mountain News rolled off the press on the snowy morning of April 23, 1859, in a room over Wootton's saloon, where local prospectors placed bets on whether it would beat rival Cherry Creek Pioneer to be first in print. The News won by 20 minutes. Its publisher, William N. Byers, a surveyor and author of a guidebook for prospectors rushing to the newly discovered Colorado gold-fields, became the fledging city's biggest booster. He occasionally veered toward the fantastic, as when printing sailing schedules between Denver and New York, but mostly he stuck to the paper's pledge to publish “reliable information” about the gold fields and “to dissuade from disorder [and] assist to organize with dignity and order” a great community (Perkin 1959, 54–55).

By the time a group of disgruntled Democrats launched the Denver Post in 1892, the city already boasted five dailies, 37 weeklies, and 22 monthly publications, including three published in German, [Page 393]three in Italian and two in Swedish. In 1895, Frederick Gilmer Bonfils, a transplant from Kansas City and reputed lottery con man, and Harry Heye Tammen, a former bartender and owner of a curio shop, bought the floundering paper for $12,500, publishing their first edition on October 28, 1895. They inaugurated a new kind of journalism, fueled by sensationalism, entertainment, stunts, and giveaways. Among the Post's outlandish exploits was an incident during which reporters loosed a barrel of monkeys in the State Capitol that “climbed inside the dome, unscrewed light bulbs and peppered onlookers five floors below” (Perkin 464). Such stunts were profitable, and circulation soared, surpassing the News in the early 1900s. But its publishers also employed questionable tactics, including threatening merchants with exposes if they did not advertise with the Post.

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