Happy Transcript birthday!

The state’s second oldest newspaper and Denver metro area’s oldest media establishment began on Dec. 19, 1866, founded by George West in Golden. With a bit of talk recently on possibly reviving the Rocky Mountain News I thought you folks might be interested in the Transcript’s unique historic connection to Colorado’s first newspaper.

George West first became acquainted with Rocky Mountain News founder William Newton Byers on West’s very first day in Colorado. Here is the story, as told by West in the Transcript in 1883:”On the 10th day of June 1859 the now prosperous state of Colorado was honored by our distinguished arrival upon the sedgy banks of Cherry Creek at the point now known as Holladay street. We was that day acting in the capacity of engineer of one of the bull-teams in the train, it requiring considerable skill to induce the tired oxen to pull the wagon through the foot or more of sand in the bed of the creek. As we pulled out on the western bank and halted a moment to give the oxen a rest the stentorian voice of Uncle Tommy Gibson rang out upon the ambient air from a little foot bridge which then spanned the creek. The words that reached our ears were “Hey, there! Are there any printers in that crowd?”The answer went back to him “yes sir, there are three of us here!”A bright smile spread over the honest phiz of the old man as he shouted back “Good enough! I’ve got an extra to set up, and I wish you would go into camp over here and come in and help us out.”As it was Saturday afternoon and pretty near camping time, we did not object, so Bill Sumner, Mark Blunt now of the Pueblo Land office and the writer proceeded to the old rough-log office of the Rocky Mountain News after investigating the irrigation question at Jack O’Neil’s saloon next door, at Gibson’s expense. Here we found Horace Greeley, Henry Villard and A.D. Richardson, who had just returned from the “Gregory diggings,” preparing their report of what they had seen there.We three pilgrims rolled up our sleeves and “threw in” our cases, while Villard and Richardson prepared the copy from Greeley’s notes and their own. In the course of an hour or two the matter was set up, and the writer worked off the celebrated extra on the hand- ress — the only press then in the office, while Mark Blunt rolled the forms.”This was the first ever Extra edition of the Rocky Mountain News, Horace Greeley’s report on what he had seen in the gold fields, an Extra that helped set the gold rush into full boom. This edition has been preserved and can be read by people on the Internet today. West set up his own newspaper in Golden, the Western Mountaineer, and had a nice rivalry with Rocky Mountain News Junior Editor Ed Bliss. That paper ceased operating in 1860, and West fought in the Civil War. During the war West sent contributing letters to the News, as told by him in 1878:”During ’61, while “skinning mules” upon the plains, and afterwards “for three years or during the war,” it was the medium through which we aired our “vague fancies and fanciful facts,” as the redoubtable Sniktau used to call them, relating in our crude style through its columns many lively incidents of life on the plains, and when we had heard of battles, and followed to the field the warlike Ford, the News seemed always glad to publish our rough sketches of battles and skirmishes we were in.”When the cruel war was over,” and we returned to our mountain home dead broke (we were not a quartermaster) and stopped our old blacktopped ambulance in front of the old News office on Larimer street on that hot afternoon in July ’65 to say “How!” to the boys, we were incontinently bounced by the then proprietors — Byers and Dailey — to take the position of local editor of the News. Did we take it? You bet the last dollar you have got in the world we took it, and stuck to it like a puppy to a root until the fall of ’66, when we started the TRANSCRIPT here in Golden, on our own hook.”Thus it is the case of history that West raised the money he needed to start up the Transcript by working as local editor upon the Rocky Mountain News. Presently the Transcript is now the 3rd longest lived newspaper in Colorado, after the Central City Register-Call (150 this year) and the Rocky (more or less 150). Should the Rocky revive, it would be as if the newspaper was on hiatus, as it actually had been before, after the Flood of 1864 wiped out its office 150 years ago this year (a series of floods that caused major damage in Golden and Jefferson County too). Thus the Transcript could make the claim the News never could, that you have never missed an issue.Now there is one pertinent question to ask, should the News be resurrected a second time: If the Rocky wants Drew Litton back, will the Transcript, like CSU, demand a $ 7.5 million buyout to have him?(Rick Gardner is an avid historian for Golden and Jefferson County.)