Article by George Sibley
Local History – April 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
NEWSPAPERS IN THE Upper Gunnison Valley compose a topic that has long interested me, perhaps because I had a brief career as a newspaper publisher in the valley, up in Crested Butte, close to forty years ago; and I was not just the publisher, I was also the managing editor, copy editor, main reporter, compositor and janitor for one of the smallest papers in an illustrious history of small newspapers.
This is an interesting history if only for the sheer volume of newsprint that accompanied the early growth of the Gunnison Valley. From the advent of the first printing press in Lake City in 1875 to 1900, more than 50 newspapers were started, restarted, or merged in new configurations in the Upper Gunnison. After that, things slowed down for most of the 20th century. But during the last third of the 20th century another burst of newspaper activity occurred, with more than a dozen newspapers interacting through start-ups, mergers, and the like. And this all happened in a valley whose resident population never cracked 15,000.
That’s a lot of newspapering. How can we explain it? What was going on? What was the function of all those newspapers? It would be a mistake to impose a modern sense of what a newspaper is on those early times, and assume that, because of this abundance of newspapers, the people of the valley must have been very well informed. That was not necessarily what it was all about.
Before getting into this story, though, I want to say that this is very much an ongoing work-in-progress for me. I will admit from the start that I do not have a complete history of newspapering in the Upper Gunnison, and I’m not sure that it’s possible to compile one. But I’ve found some good resources. Much of what I’ve learned is from a 1932 WSC Master’s Thesis, by Alice Starbuck Spencer, titled “Newspapers in Gunnison County, 1879-1900.” Ms. Spencer was able to contact some of the county’s pioneer journalists, and also apparently made a pilgrimage to the collections of the Kansas Historical Society in Topeka where many of the West’s newspapers seemed to end up. Western’s Savage Library now has microfilms of all the Kansas Historical Society local papers, as well as microfilms of all recent newspapers. Betty Wallace’s History with the Hide Off was another resource, as was Duane Vandenbusche’s Gunnison Country book. I also found a good essay on the pioneer press in the second volume of historian Daniel Boorstin’s trilogy, The Americans; it includes nothing local, but contains some general comments on newspapers in the West that offer incite into why a raw frontier area like the Upper Gunnison in the 19th century would have more than 50 newspapers in a quarter century.
The very first newspaper in the Gunnison Country started in Lake City, which had about a five-year headstart on the other Upper Gunnison communities due to a silver strike and boom in the San Juans in the early 1870s. The Silver World, launched by Henry C. Olney, was, interestingly, the very first newspaper in the valley and the only one to continue under the same name right up to the present — most recently under the longtime editorship of Grant Houston.
In the late 1870s, things started to heat up in the rest of the Upper Gunnison, especially in Taylor Park. Several mining camps were going strong there by 1879, and in the spring of that year, Olney grubstaked another newspaper for the mining camp of Hillerton in Taylor Park. The Hillerton Occident, was under the editorship of J. H. Kellogg, whom Olney hired to run it. And over the hill, Olney was one of the two founders of Salida’s Mountain Mail in 1880.
AT THIS POINT, I WANT TO PAUSE a moment and remind you what it really meant to start up a newspaper in the Upper Gunnison valley in the 1870s. Today, the computer revolution has made it relatively easy to start a newspaper. The whole process is currently electronic right up to the offset lithography plate that goes on the printing press. All the print media in the valley today, except for Jan Badgley’s Hometown Happenings, are printed over in Salida by the Arkansas Valley Publishing Company, a regional printer for most of the Upper Arkansas and Upper Rio Grande valleys as well as the Upper Gunnison. So today, everyone sends their weekly edition electronically to Merle Baranczyk’s press in Salida, but in the 1870s, up until the advent of the railroad late in 1881, getting a newspaper up and running was a laborious and expensive process. It involved bringing in a flatbed printing press — a far cry from the huge presses that roll out our multisection newspapers today, but still several hundred pounds of large but relatively fragile iron machinery.
And that’s just the press that runs the completed newspaper. Newsprint also had to be packed in. For most frontier journalism, this was in “broadsheets” 17×22 inches; the broadsheet folded in half created the tabloid. And if you folded it again, like Colorado Central or Jan Badgley’s Hometown Happenings, it’s called a quarto.
Then there was the type to put the print on the paper. Johannes Gutenberg had created the whole mass-media printing process four centuries earlier with his invention of movable type — but “movable” is a relative term. Everything printed at that time had to be set up for the press by typesetters who picked the letters for every word out of large font trays of little tiny metal “sorts” — individual letters — and set them in tight lines, which were then carefully conveyed to heavy metal forms, that, once the pages were complete, were lugged over to the press and put on the flatbed to roll back and forth under a revolving drum that carried the sheets of paper over the inked letters.
So for every font used in the newspaper — Times, Garamond, Arial, Palatino — and every point size — 10 point, 12 point, 18 to 72 point headline fonts, or the eye-busting 6-point agate for legal notices — the printer had to have a drawer full of the little metal sorts, and at least one person skilled in sorting the individual letters out of trays into words and sentences very quickly. So between font cases, a printing press and paper, we’re talking about a very weighty process — and a pretty expensive one, too. Today starting a publication will cost the would-be journalist the couple of grand necessary to get a good computer and a Quark or InDesign program, and all the necessary equipment, newsprint, and accessories will be delivered right to their door by UPS, FedEx or the local post office. But early newspapermen had to move everything in wagons, over roads that left a lot to be desired.
ALL THAT NEEDS to be kept in mind when we look at starting a newspaper like The Hillerton Occident in a mining camp, which we can’t even find a century later, up in Taylor Park. And the vagaries of the mining boom were such that a town of 1,000 might not only be abandoned but also totally dismantled and moved tomorrow when a richer discovery was made across the valley, or in the next valley. And that’s exactly what happened to Hillerton and The Hillerton Occident. The Occident cranked out its good news beginning in late June about what a wealthy metropolis Hillerton was destined to become, right up through November of 1879 — then it disappeared along with Hillerton. The next spring, Virginia City and Tin Cup were the places to be in Taylor Park.
We can, however, assume that Kellogg and Olney’s press and fonts were sold and put to work elsewhere in the valley because 1880 was a big year for starting newspapers — along with everything else in the Gunnison Country. That’s the year that the boom really got rolling, with prospectors and miners pouring into the valley from the Leadville district to the northeast and the San Juan district to the southwest.
TO UNDERSTAND what went on in Gunnison in the early 1880s, it’s necessary to remember that for a few years, there were actually two Gunnisons — two intersections with destiny on the east-west road through the valley which we now know as Tomichi Avenue or US 50. The first one was what came to be known as West Gunnison, north and south from today’s intersection of Boulevard Street and Tomichi. West Gunnison grew out of the idealistic but tenuous agrarian community started by Sylvester Richardson in the mid-1870s. The other Gunnison — called just “Gunnison” — grew north and south from the intersection of Tomichi and Main Street in the late 1870s, and was your typical wide-open, heavy-drinking, dancing, and brawling mining camp.
West Gunnison got many early businesses, especially after plans for the LaVeta Hotel were unveiled, but East Gunnison seized the journalistic high ground with the first newspaper, as the newspaper history of the valley began in seriousness in 1880.
Already in the valley with journalistic dreams was one of those many Kentucky colonels from the old south, Col. W.H.F. Hall. I remember somebody saying if the Confederacy actually had as many colonels as showed up in the West, it’s no wonder they lost the war; there couldn’t have been any privates left to command. Hall was financially well connected in both Chicago and New York; he arrived in the Upper Gunnison in 1878 to line up some investment properties, and apparently brought in a printing set-up in 1879, because he was ready to go in April well before wagons were coming over the passes into the valley.
Ready to go, that is, except for the fact that Col. Hall didn’t know how to run his printing press. But Hall was a man of a certain faith; he built a building for the press and got it all set up, in the apparent expectation that somebody would show up who would be able to run it. And sure enough: over the hill that month came John E. Phillips, a journeyman printer from the Front Range, where he’d borrowed enough money from the editor of the El Paso Herald in Colorado Springs to buy a printing press to set up in Irwin, in the Ruby District, which he’d heard was the up and coming place.
But in April there was still too much snow to get his press over the pass and into Irwin, so Phillips went to work for the Colonel, and on April 17 they pulled the first edition of Gunnison’s first newspaper, The Gunnison News. This paper has a distinct genealogy that, as we’ll see, traces down to today’s Gunnison Country Times, even though the name is no longer on the flag.
A short note in the second issue of the News indicates something about the relationship between Gunnison and West Gunnison. Here is the Colonel on West Gunnison:
For many days it has been rumored on our streets that quite a number of lots had been sold in West Gunnison, to parties who intended at an early day, to erect thereon, hotels, business houses, residences, etc. We did not know whether the rumor was true or not. We applied, therefore, through a friend, to Capt. Mullen, the president of the West Gunnison Land Company (such, we believe, is the name by which the company is called) to give us such facts in relation to his town that would be interesting to the public, and that the same would, with pleasure, be given a place in this paper. To this request of ours, made in the utmost sincerity and with the best of feelings, a promise was made to comply, but it may be that it was forgotten, as no information has been furnished either verbally or in writing, directly or indirectly; therefore, the omission to give any news in this issue in relation to our neighbor is not our fault.
Remember, we are talking about two towns whose main streets were five blocks apart and where residences were overlapping. An intrepid News reporter could have been at Captain Mullen’s office in five minutes. But the West Gunnisonites weren’t wasting any time; barely a month after the first issue of the News, on May 15, editor Frank Root, in partnership with the ubiquitous media baron, Henry C. Olney of Lake City, brought out the first edition of The Gunnison Review.
The Review exhibited serious frontier journalism; Frank Root had walked in from Saguache with his son, and they set up in a raw-lumber shack with an unshingled roof. According to Root, the roof leaked in about fifty places, but he noted that the shrinking raw-lumber floor boards leaked too so most of what came in went out.
FRONTIER INCONVENIENCES notwithstanding, they got the paper out, and the two Gunnisons, with only a few hundred people, but with high expectations, had two newspapers ready for the summer rush. The first copy of each paper was auctioned off on the street, the first News brought $56, but the inaugural Review, with Sylvester Richardson himself conducting the auction, went for $100, which was immediately dedicated to the building fund for a Methodist church.
Two other ground-floor printers showed up that spring, champing at the bit. A man named Willis Sweet headed for the Gothic mining camp with a printing setup, and had the Elk Mountain Bonanza up and running by mid-June; and an F.P. Sheafor headed for Pitkin, where he pulled the first issue of the Pitkin Independent on July 17.
But our best record of the adventure of pioneer journalism in the Upper Gunnison is John Phillips’ account of getting the Elk Mountain Pilot going in Irwin during the spring of 1880. After he’d gotten Col. Hall’s paper up and running in April, with some fast on-the-job training of replacements for himself, his press arrived and, despite what we all know about the amount of snow still lurking around the Kebler region in May, he headed for Irwin.
According to the News, the wagon road to Crested Butte still wasn’t open, and even today the Kebler Pass road past Irwin isn’t opened until late May. But none of this daunted John Phillips. He hauled his outfit as far up the valley as he could by ox team and wagon. Then he hired some fellows from Crested Butte — just a few shacks and tents awaiting the summer rush — and they proceeded to pack the outfit all the way to Irwin by snowshoe — the upvalley name then for ten-foot skis. Crofutt’s Grip-Sack Guide to Colorado describes the journey:
“When each was provided with shoes, the printing material was distributed among the persons, when, with type in pockets, parts of hand press under each arm, cases and paper strapped on their backs, the journey across the great mountain range commenced. [Here the truth gets stretched a little.] The ascent was made, many times at an angle of 45 degrees, and the descent commenced, the typos gliding gracefully down on their snow shoes over an unknown depth of snow, in a style peculiarly western, evincing pluck, energy, and perseverance, American in the extreme….”
Well, there’s a little exaggeration there, but it is hardly needed: extreme enough is the mere thought of packing a printing press into Irwin on your back.
ONCE THERE, Phillips’ situation did not get much better. There was no food for sale in Irwin, where there was probably still about five feet of snow; neither was there any lumber to be had. “For many weeks,” said Phillips, “we were without shelter other than a log hut without windows or roof.” No roof? In Irwin in May?
But he did finally find some tarpaper for a temporary roof, and under that, John Phillips set up his press and, hard as it is to believe, had the first issue of the Elk Mountain Pilot out on June 16, 1880, just in time for the rush. It is also worth remembering that the entire Irwin and Ruby camps were totally illegal invasions of the Ute Indian reservation.
Meanwhile, back in Gunnison, county attorney Frank McMaster decided that two papers were not enough for that burgeoning city, and he started The Gunnison Democrat in August, a paper that wore its national politics on its sleeve but promised “in local and home matters to be reasonably honest.”
And up in Lake City, The Silver World was joined in competition by the Lake City Mining Record. So by the end of the summer of 1880, the Upper Gunnison had eight newspapers for a population of less than 10,000 at the summer peak, and a year-round population that still counted in the high hundreds. In the winter, all of the papers tended to cut back their pages and even their physical size, and some missed a few numbers. But all eight papers emerged from the winter ready for another boom in the summer in 1881. And six more new papers were born that year.
Taylor Park came back onto the news map with not one but two newspapers: the Tin Cup Record in May; and late in the summer, with U.S. President James Garfield lingering near death from an assassin’s bullet, the Garfield Banner came out, not in Garfield but also in Tin Cup. Later, its name was changed to the Tin Cup Banner.
Up in Pitkin (which has always been a kind of crazy town, I guess), Sheafor sold his Pitkin Independent to a newcomer, J.B. Graham. Sheafor signed the usual non-competition agreement, but violated it shortly thereafter, coming out as editor of the new Pitkin Mining News. This launched a year-long running battle of the editors, which at the very least gave the other editors in the valley something to talk about on the slow days, since a review of everybody else’s journalism was one of the responsibilities assumed by most of the valley’s numerous editors.
Two other camps appeared in print for the first time in 1881: the White Pine Journal came out in White Pine way up in the Tomichi headwaters; and Crested Butte finally entered the record in October with the birth of the Crested Butte Republican, just in time for the arrival of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad in November. The Gothic Miner also appeared upvalley, but that was just the old Elk Mountain Bonanza under a new name.
Meanwhile, back in Gunnison — with the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad already in town, and the South Park Railroad pushing through the Alpine Tunnel into the valley, things looked so good in 1881 that The Gunnison News and The Gunnison Democrat decided to throw in together and go daily. This was accomplished in mid-June: West Gunnison might have had the railroad terminal and the La Veta Hotel under construction, but Gunnison had that epitome of urbanity, the daily newspaper.
West Gunnison wasn’t about to take that lying down, though. In September of that year, another West Gunnison weekly, The Gunnison Free Press, came into being; and the following summer, in July 1882, it joined with Frank Root’s Gunnison Review and also went daily. So by 1882, Gunnison not only had two railroads, it also had two daily newspapers — for a year-round population that still figured in the hundreds.
BEFORE GOING ON, it’s time to take a look at what was really going on here, at a time when eastern cities with ten times the valley’s population might only have had three or four newspapers.
Daniel Boorstin gave insights on this phenomenon in his history, The Americans: The National Experience. He called it “the booster press” — a phenomenon nowhere in American history any more evident than in this chapter of the Gunnison Country’s history. Unlike European newspapers, which more frequently had literary origins rather than commercial ones and were more controlled by government, American newspapers, according to Boorstin, had first political, then economic, rationales, and existed basically without controls. The newspapers that accompanied the westward movement in America were different from the papers of the settled East. In the East the newspaper was produced, in Boorstin’s words, “to satisfy the interests of the people already there. But the pioneer newspaper of the upstart city,” he continued, “like the western railroad, had to call into being the very population it aimed to serve.”
From the establishing of the first trans-Appalachian press in Pittsburgh in 1786, a newspaper was regarded as essential to an envisioned community, not so much to inform the people as to lend a kind of authenticity to their dreams. It was tangible evidence of the existence of something which could be sent to everyone from the folks back home to the “London money” and New York financiers whose decision to invest in a place could make the difference between fabulous prosperity and a quick demise on the frontier.
Boorstin says, in effect, that in a somewhat literate civilization, the newspaper played as important a role in building a new community as did the sawmill or the saloon. A town didn’t know it existed until a newspaper — or better yet, two or three or five newspapers — told it it did, and told the rest of the world what a great place it was.
THE LAST THING in the world anyone wanted in one of those raw-lumber, canvas, mud and dust towns like Gunnison or Irwin in 1881 was a distanced, objective journalistic view based on “just the facts, ma’m.” The facts tended to be pretty plain in such places; only the dreams seemed interesting.
Certainly, this led to some abuse of what some stodgy modern journalists might regard as the truth. One early editor cited by Boorstin conceded that these early editors, in their enthusiasm, “sometimes represented as reality things that had not yet gone through the formality of taking place.” But the editor excused this, noting that “the eggs were in the basket all right, and it was only a matter of waiting for them to be hatched. It was permissible to mix visions and prophecies with current and negotiable realities when it was all certain to come true.”
This might put a new light on The Gunnison Democrat’s initial pledge to be “in local and home matters reasonably honest.” The operational word there is clearly what is “reasonable” in the situation. And by 1882, Gunnison’s two daily newspapers knew they were fighting for the continued life of the town and, by extension, their own livelihoods — circumstances that considerably stretch the bounds of what’s reasonable. One of the dailies, for example, advertised free space for mine promoters to describe their properties for potential investors: We can imagine how objective those reports were.
And it worked — sort of. Some combination of news about the mines, the palatial La Veta Hotel under construction, and a burgeoning city with two dailies did in fact attract the eye of a coterie of potential investors from St. Louis in 1882, led by Benjamin Lewis, president of the Kansas City and Great Northern Railroads. Lewis heard about the coal, and suggested a smelter for Gunnison. Immediately, in the local papers, Gunnison became the future “Pittsburgh of the West,” an industrial giant destined to seize primacy in the state from Denver and to eventually be an equal of Chicago. Never mind that there were no significant deposits of iron ore nearby. Never mind that the thin mountain air would have become hopelessly poisoned with an iron industry a fraction the extent of Pittsburgh’s. In a town struggling to come alive, such depressing facts are merely accurate, not reasonable.
THE SUMMER OF 1882 was a busy summer in “the Pittsburgh of the West.” Real estate values quadrupled (at least in asking prices), and a number of new businesses went up in both Gunnison and West Gunnison — although by then, the true character of both communities was beginning to emerge. West Gunnison, under the patriarchy of Sylvester Richardson, had cultural aspirations, while Gunnison had a lot of saloons. West Gunnison had the West Gunnison Literary while East Gunnison had Fat Jack’s Dance Hall. West Gunnison had a Sunday School and the bulk of the church-going crowd, while the only spiritual fodder Fat Jack’s Gunnison could promise was “sacred music to dance to on Sundays.” Given these circumstances, it is only natural that Gunnison would thrive as the main business district while — despite the La Veta Hotel and the train stations — West Gunnison would subside into residential tranquility.
At the end of the summer, despite the continued influx, things remained precarious. A small smelter was being built on the hill above the town, but not much else was happening in or near Gunnison proper, and it all looked a long way from “the Pittsburgh of the West.” Coal was moving regularly out of the valley from Crested Butte, but coal was not very exciting for a population with dreams of gold and silver.
While no one wanted to say it in so many words, it was evident that Gunnison was still awaiting a real boom, and no other well-heeled angels appeared in the near economic atmosphere, despite the hooks baited and set by more than a dozen newspapers and the La Veta Hotel. When all was said and done — a lot more had been said than done.
There were three notable exceptions to the general tenor of boosterism in the valley media prior to 1900. In 1883, the founder of West Gunnison, Sylvester Richardson — generally known as “the Professor” — started a paper called The Sun. Richardson had a strong streak of Jeffersonian and Protestant idealism in him, and he was less than happy with the wide-open materialistic bent of the town.
So he came out with his own newspaper, and often irritated the boosters of Gunnison and West Gunnison alike by presenting stories about things that were actually happening in town, rather than prophesies and pipedreams about things people only wished were happening. In one of his editorials, Richardson came up with some economic analysis showing that the town and county were only charging $300 for liquor licenses, but were laying out tens of thousands of dollars to deal with the legal and criminal consequences of liquor in the community. He printed the otherwise lost masterpieces — some of them deservedly so — of the West Gunnison Literary. He carried a page of “Popular Science and Agriculture” written by a local graduate of the University of Michigan.
In short, the Professor was publishing a newspaper by, for, and about the people of Gunnison, rather than a paper of dreams to send off to the gods of finance. His editorial philosophy was the title I chose for this article: “Independent in all things, neutral in none” — a different stance from the “reasonable honesty” of the Democrat.
The Sun ran for about a year. That may have been the price of independence in Gunnison, but it was more likely just the consequence of the Professor finding something that interested him more, for he seemed to be the kind of person who had to try everything once.
A SECOND NOTABLE EXCEPTION to the all-out boosterism was a politically motivated newspaper, rather than an economic booster. The People’s Champion was closely associated with the populist reaction to the plutocratic concentration of wealth after the Civil War and the 1890s silver-money issue that was killing so much of the western economy. Started in 1894 by George C. Rhode, a populist and local organizer of the People’s Party in the valley, The People’s Champion persevered through the two unsuccessful efforts by the People’s Party and the Democrats combined, in 1896 and 1900, to break the plutocratic Republican hold on American politics. After the second defeat of William Jennings Bryan in 1900, The People’s Champion gave up that good fight, and the paper was sold that year to Henry F. Lake Jr.
And the third exception to the all-out boosterism came upvalley, with the advent of the valley’s first woman publisher. This was a big, red-headed woman named Sylvia Smith who, if you can imagine it, had opened a millinery shop in Crested Butte in the late 1890s. For some undiscovered reason, she decided to start a newspaper, even though Crested Butte still had at least two. One theory which has filtered down through history holds that she liked to travel, and the D&RG gave free train passes to all editors then.
At any rate, Sylvia Smith started the Crested Butte Weekly Citizen in 1900. She had a reputation as a fighter — editorially speaking, of course — but seemed to stay out of trouble in the Butte, which was settling into its fifty years as a coal-mining town with few remaining delusions of grandeur. In 1906, Smith decided to move to Marble, where she started another paper, The Marble Miner. There, she began to attack the Yule Marble Co., stridently and relentlessly, for labor policies, safety practices, and a lot of other causes that were not yet generally popular. After one particularly virulent attack on the company — hitting it when it was down, in a sense, by crowing about an avalanche that had wiped out part of the mill — a committee of company people escorted her forcibly to the train and insisted that she indulge her love of travel immediately. She sued the company for damages, and collected either $7,000 or $15,000, depending on which historians you believe.
BY THE TURN of the century it was clear to most people that the good old days of waiting for fabulous wealth to fall on all were passing, and with them the need for a booster press to publish eggs not yet hatched to the uncaring world.
Residual dreams of a big strike persevered in the valley for another decade or so, with one mining camp or another briefly flaring into being with enough promise to bring a couple of new booster papers into being with visions of fabulous prosperity for all. Some of the papers that emerged in the camps had lives as short as or shorter than the five-month tenure of The Hillerton Occident. One, The Cochetopa Gold Belt, ran from August 23, 1895, to September 6 of the same year. From the time that the federal government ceased the bi-metal standard for currency in 1893, and the price of silver went to the bottom, the media of the Upper Gunnison were moving into what might be called “the downsizing era” journalistically.
The Gunnison News-Democrat hung on as a daily into the late 1880s, at which time it was briefly suspended and then revived in 1891 as just The Gunnison News, a weekly again. The Review-Press dropped back to a tri-weekly in the mid-1880s, and in 1891 one Charles Adams bought it and brought it out as a weekly called The Gunnison Tribune.
So Gunnison passed the turn of the century with three newspapers: The Gunnison Tribune, which was the old Review-Press, owned and edited by Charles Adams; The People’s Champion, then owned by Henry Lake Jr. but edited by former owner C. J. Rawalt; and The Gunnison News, also owned by Henry Lake but apparently leased in 1899 with an option to buy to E. R. Lore, a newspaperman from Pitkin looking to move up in the world. Crested Butte had three papers in 1900: The Crested Butte Republican, The Elk Mountain Pilot, and Smith’s new Crested Butte Weekly Citizen. Lake City still had three newspapers: The Silver World, The Lake City Phonograph, and The Lake City Times.
AT THIS POINT, YOU ARE probably getting a little nervous — he’s been going on for pages and pages, and he’s only up to 1900. But things moved along a little faster after that, with the silver boom all but gone, and Gunnison settling in as a ranching town, Crested Butte as a coal-mining town, and Lake City all but disappearing. By the time the Great Depression arrived full force nationally, many of the people in the mountain valleys hardly noticed the difference. There were three papers left in the valley by then: The Gunnison News-Champion in Gunnison and The Elk Mountain Pilot in Crested Butte, both owned by the Lake family; and The Silver World up in Lake City.
In 1901, the Gunnison newspaper scene had gotten a little murky. In 1899 E. R. Lore, a journalist from Pitkin, tried to buy The News from Henry Lake, but missed a couple of winter payments after two years of plowing his money into upgrading the paper, and Lake took the paper, plus improvements, back from Lore. Lore proceeded to start up a new newspaper, The Gunnison Republican, in which he charged that all three of the other papers were engaged in a “newspaper trust” to raise the price of county legal publishing higher than it should be, splitting the profit between the Tribune and the News and Champion shops. How that worked out, I frankly don’t know yet, but eventually both the Tribune and the Republican were outlasted by the News-Champion.
The only enduring start-up prior to World War II was a little pro-Roosevelt Democrat quarto paper, The Gunnison Echo, started in 1932 by Wayne Lickiss Sr. In 1935 he took on Willis Gillaspey as editor and expanded it into a full tabloid called The Gunnison Courier. In 1946, Sandy Mark’s father Jim Smidl and his partner Ken Bundy bought the Courier from Lickiss and ran it till Smidl was called back to his first love, flying, with America’s new Air Force.
It’s also worth noting that in 1921, Western State College students started up The Top O’the World, a student-funded and student run newspaper for campus and community news that continues today.
The Lake family had tried several times prior to World War II to sell The Gunnison News-Champion and Elk Mountain Pilot, separately or together, but always ended up having to take them back. Finally in 1948, Wallace Foster came to town and bought those two papers, and eventually also The Courier, and ran the two Gunnison papers successfully for close to three decades. When the coal mines and railroad abandoned Crested Butte, he terminated The Elk Mountain Pilot, leaving that end of the valley paperless until 1962, when skiing promised to revive the town, and Crested Butte’s second woman journalist, Helen Mann, began the Crested Butte Chronicle.
TOO MANY PEOPLE AROUND HERE still remember Wally Foster for me to say anything bad about him, but I never heard anything bad to say anyway. There are a couple of short stories worth telling. One was about the time that he was congratulating a new business in Montrose, a stud mill turning out 2x4s and other forest products, but Wally’s story indicated that he thought it was a stud farm that was starting up — horses. Another story referred to his tendency to never throw away a piece of paper, including some uncashed checks that got buried in the piles. During a routine inspection, the city’s fire chief told Wally that if he didn’t clean up his office this time, then the fire department would just walk to the fire if or when he called it in.
In the 1950s, Fred Budy and Bruce Bye, two Nebraska printers, opened a shop in Gunnison and decided to give Wally a little competition. They started The Gunnison Globe in 1957, with Charles Page as editor. Page eventually went on to start the Gunnison Country Chamber of Commerce, for which he is most remembered by people here, and B&B Printers is still with us, although with no newspaper.
The advent here of what might be called “destination resortism” brought on an influx of newspapering that had some of the seemingly mindless robustness of the first era of newspapering in the valley. This began in Crested Butte with the aforementioned Helen Mann and her Crested Butte Chronicle. The fortunes of that paper flowed and ebbed with the fortunes of the ski area. When the ski area went through financial reorganization in 1965, the Chronicle passed into the hands of B&B Printers due to lack of payment. B&B kept the paper alive as a saleable item, filling it up with news from their own Globe newspaper. But when I came along, a gullible sucker but with good advisors, Fred Budy was glad enough to let the newspaper go to me for $1 and a six-month printing contract — so someone else would pay the printing cost for a while.
I eventually sold the Chronicle to Myles Arber, a New Yorker who proceeded to offend nearly everyone in the valley in one way or another. An example: to avoid a libel suit, he had to print an apology after stating that a local restaurant had apparently changed its no-hippies policy, saying, So-and-so “seems to be serving longhairs now; I found one in my soup yesterday.”
Arber’s growing unpopularity led longtime newcomer Sandy Cortner to start up The Crested Butte Pilot in 1972, a less confrontational and more newsy paper. She ran that on a typical Crested Butte margin until 1977, at which point she sold it to someone who eventually sold it to someone who, in 1985, sold it to Arber, who by then had wisely retreated to Boulder, leaving the newspaper in the hands of people who better understood the nuances of the community.
Lee Ervin edited the combined Chronicle & Pilot for Arber until the summer of 2000, at which time the staff, tired of the out-of-town ownership, made Arber an offer for the paper. When Arber rejected their offer, the whole staff walked, and published one issue of a new paper, The Crested Butte Standard, which had the shortest recorded tenure of any newspaper in a valley noted for newspapers coming and going. But it was basically a bluff, and it worked; the next week, faced with no staff, Arber sold them The Chronicle & Pilot.
MEANWHILE, back in Gunnison. In 1975, a Texas couple with a lot of oil money, Perkins and Bradley Sams, bought up all of the Gunnison newspapers — the New-Champion, Courier and Globe — and after a chaotic summer of hiring, firing, rehiring, naming and renaming, brought out the combined product as The Gunnison Country Times in August 1975. Bradley Sams was the guiding force in this whole process. Joanne Williams, currently the Gunnison County Planner Director, eventually became editor of the Times, more than once, as she recounts it; she says she “got fired and rehired by Bradley several times.” But Bradley Sams died in automobile accident in 1976, and her husband Perkins took over the publisher role with a political ideology that caused Williams to leave the paper. The Times was kind of rudderless for a few years, edited by what Williams categorized as “a series of questionable Texans,” who were friends of Perkins.
In the mid-1980s, Jerry Brock, a Longmont newspaperman, bought the Times and didn’t really do much better with it. In the early 1990s he made an attempt to do a daily newspaper that didn’t work. He also thought he saw an opportunity for a less liberal-progressive newspaper in Crested Butte, and started The Mountain Sun there, but it was not so large a niche as he had anticipated.
By the mid-1990s, people in Gunnison were sufficiently out of sorts with The Times so that some locals, led by Western Professor Mark Todd, local entrepreneur T.L. Livermore, and recent Western graduate Chris Dickey, decided to start up a competing paper in 1995, The Gunnison Telegraph.
A YEAR EARLIER, this might have flown. But that same year, a couple of newspaper-savvy entrepreneurs from Telluride, Mike Ritchey and Tony Daranyi, bought the Times — mostly to get the big printing press in the Times building, which they moved to Montrose to print their Telluride papers as well as the Gunnison paper. Two years later, Ritchey and Daranyi also bought the Crested Butte Chronicle & Pilot, thus bringing all of the major print media in the valley together under a single ownership for the first time — except for the Gunnison Country Shopper (started in 1974) and the college paper.
In Gunnison, they replaced a clueless editor with Steve Reed, a newspaper friend of Ritchey’s from Texas, who made it a serious community newspaper again. In Crested Butte, they wisely did nothing to the Chronicle & Pilot, but they eventually closed down The Mountain Sun. The Gunnison Telegraph hung on for a year, but surrendered the Gunnison field in 1996, and the Times hired Telegraph editor Chris Dickey as a reporter, until he left for an editorial position in Salida.
In the spring of 1999, Ritchey and Daranyi sold all their newspaper holdings to American Consolidated Media, Inc. — ACM — a parasitic Texas firm that was trying to buy small-town newspapers to milk. ACM made the mistake of sending in their own manager to run the valley’s newspapers. In Crested Butte, longtime photographer Mark Reaman left that year to start up The Crested Butte Weekly. And within a year ACM’s manager had so alienated the majority of the staff of the Chronicle & Pilot that all but a couple of them quit in the summer of 2000 and created another new paper, The Crested Butte News. The Chronicle & Pilot limped along for a while, but after a year or so the new News bought it from ACM.
In Gunnison, ACM fared no better with the Times. Their manager ran through a couple of editors, then they basically gave the paper back to Mike Ritchey, who didn’t particularly want it, but saw that there was probably a better way to get out than selling out to one of the parasitic outfits looking for small-town papers to milk. He lured Chris Dickey, former Telegraph editor back to Gunnison journalism as editor of the Times, and paired him up with Stephen Pierotti, a creative young artist who understands computers, then sold them the Times in 2006. Thus far, it is a working combination that has captured the Colorado Press Association’s award for General Excellence two years in a row, along with some other state level recognition.
And that is where the history of newspapers in the Upper Gunnison has brought us today. Lake City is where it was in 1875, with The Silver World. Crested Butte has two papers, the News and the Weekly. Gunnison has the Times, which has a long genealogy that incorporates the first two Gunnison newspapers, the News from Gunnison and the Review from West Gunnison.
Is journalism different today? I would say yes in some respects; it does reflect a greater commitment to accuracy and fairness in reporting than was the custom before journalism became a profession rather than a passion. But in one basic respect, it is the same, and that’s its commitment to the community. Daniel Boorstin saw this attribute emerging as a distinctive American growth; it came out of the “booster press,” but went beyond that; he called it “community-ism.” I gradually learned it — occasionally the hard way — in my newspapering years in Crested Butte. Accuracy, fairness and some sense of consensual local truth are important, but the most important thing in community journalism is that the community survive — preferably with its honor and dignity intact (but at least with lessons learned if honor gets sacrificed). Above all, the community must continue, developing its strengths and addressing its shortcomings, because if the community disappears, as so many did around here, the paper disappears too.
This is adapted from a presentation George Sibley made in Gunnison earlier this year.
