Denver's two newspapers were locked in a struggle only one would survive. Townsfolk laid bets on which one would win. Every minute counted in the race to beat the competition.

The Rocky Mountain News won that battle, despite a spring snowstorm and a leaky roof that kept water dripping on the press and on the candles that provided the light by which the type was set. The first issue of the News came off the press about 10 p.m. on April 22, 1859 - a good 20 minutes ahead of the Cherry Creek Pioneer.

Some things haven't changed in 140 years. A copy of the News still costs a quarter, just as it did in 1859, and the newspaper war in Denver still rages.

What's different today is the News' rival - The Denver Post - and the fact that head-to-head newspaper competition as practiced in Denver has almost gone the way of the dinosaur. Newspaper wars in larger cities - among them Detroit, Dallas and Houston - have ended in the last decade. Only a handful of newspaper wars like Denver's remain.

State's second-oldest business

As the Denver Rocky Mountain News enters its 141st year of publication this week, its ties to the city's earliest days remain unbroken. It's Colorado's second-oldest continuously operating business. The oldest is a family-owned grocery store in the San Luis Valley.

Denver City and the neighboring community of Auraria were little more than rowdy gold camps when 28-year-old William Byers hauled his press into town on a wagon and set up shop in the top floor of the only two-story building in town, Uncle Dick Wootton's log store. Byers later wrote that he selected Wootton's store, near the present intersection of Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway, because it had a plank floor and the only glass windows in town.

It took six weeks for Byers' party to cross the Great Plains from Omaha. Eight days before they reached Denver, "Jolly" Jack Merrick arrived, also with a printing press. While Merrick did a little prospecting and socializing before setting up his press, Byers wasted no time.

Both papers worked furiously throughout the day on Friday, April 22, in an effort to claim the honor of being Denver's first newspaper.

Publisher heads for the hills

The runner-up Cherry Creek Pioneer printed only one issue before the good-natured Merrick sold his press and other equipment for $30 worth of food and prospecting equipment and headed to the hills in search of gold. But the News kept printing. The second edition came out May 7, the third May 14, the fourth May 28.

The News' status as Denver's sole newspaper didn't last long. Byers' first great rival was his former business partner, Thomas Gibson, who on May 1, 1860, launched the city's first daily newspaper, the Herald. In August of that year, the News also began publishing daily, and the war was on.

"Gibson had a problem," says newspaper historian David Halaas, chief historian at the Colorado Historical Society and author of Boomtown Newspapers. "He was British, and Byers could attack that. It was a time of personal journalism, and the Byers-Gibson feud is a classic in these great newspaper wars. Everything you see in other places happened first here in that great duel of two battling editors. They went at each other, hands at each other's throats. They didn't back off and Byers eventually won, primarily because of Gibson's British accent."

Gibson sold his Herald in 1864, and its name was changed to the Daily Commonwealth and Republican.

Stilted building washes away

That same year, the News was nearly wiped out by a flash flood - and ironically, only the cooperation of the Commonwealth kept it afloat.

The News had moved into an odd little building on stilts in the middle of Cherry Creek - the better to impartially serve both Denver, on one side of the creek, and Auraria on the other. Since Cherry Creek was normally no more than a trickle, Byers ignored an old Arapaho man's warnings that building in the creek was foolish.

All was well until a cloudburst near midnight on May 20, 1864, swelled Cherry Creek into a niagara.

The flood swept down the creek, taking much of Denver with it. City Hall was gone. So were homes and churches. Twelve people died.

And the newspaper disappeared, "lock, stock and hell box," wrote News historian and staff writer Robert L. Perkin, in a 1952 series of articles. "Its new building, proudly neutral on its stilts, was flotsam; its 3,000-pound cylinder press, first power press in the West, was swept a half-mile downstream and wrecked. Type was strewn through the sands of the creek and the river, and bits of it would be found from time to time well into the next century."

Byers lost not only his newspaper but his home that night. Territorial Gov. John Evans - a silent partner in the Commonwealth - invited the Byers family to live in his house until they could find other shelter. And the Commonwealth, which survived the flood, threw open its columns to Byers.

Within six weeks, Byers and his business partner, John L. Dailey, scraped together $4,000 to buy the Commonwealth outright. On June 27, 1864, the Rocky Mountain News was back on the streets, and the Commonwealth ceased publication.

If there's a will, there's a way

The News has never again been absent from Denver - though at times it was printed on brown wrapping paper, wallpaper or even tissue paper, when fears of Indian attack delayed supplies of newsprint.

A few weeks after the close of the Civil War, another daily newspaper, the Denver Daily Gazette, appeared on the scene. No cozy relationship developed between Byers and Gazette owner Frederick J. Stanton. Stanton was a staunch Democrat and Byers a loyal Republican.

"Byers described Stanton as a Copperhead," Perkin reported, which at the time was a derogatory term for a Northerner who sympathized with the Southern cause in the Civil War. "One day in September 1865, Stanton accosted Byers on the street and pounded his head with a cane. Byers survived the crowning, but Stanton's paper didn't. It dwindled away, distributed free at the end and finally gave up its ghost in May 1869."

This wouldn't be the last time a News editor would be bonked on the head by a rival newsman . . . but we're getting ahead of ourselves. As for Byers: "they dragged him out for necktie parties quite regularly," Denver historian Thomas J. Noel says.

Denver continued to attract would-be newspaper editors, though few were able to challenge the News for dominance. By 1890, Denver's population had swelled to 107,000 people - served by six daily newspapers, 27 weeklies and 22 monthlies.

"The number of newspapers in early Denver was exceptional," Noel says. "Of course, the folklore is that it takes at least three papers to keep a town like that alive."

Newspapers were boosters

With no radio and no television, newspapers were the only mass medium available to promote a town.

"People would send these papers back east to boost the town, to show that this would be the next San Francisco. All of them were outdoing each other, bragging about the good things here," Noel says.

"If you lived in Denver, the editors would shout at you that you had a civic obligation not only to buy a newspaper but to buy extra copies and send them to friends in the East," Halaas says. "And people did that."

Byers eventually was ousted by News stockholders following an embarrassing incident in which a jilted lover shot at him on a Denver street. She missed, but Byers' days at the News were numbered. The paper was sold in 1878 to railroad magnate W.A.H. Loveland.

Under Loveland, a Democrat, the News became an outspoken supporter of Democratic political positions - a policy that continued under U.S. Sen. Thomas M. Patterson, a Democrat, who bought the paper in 1890.

The News' most worthy and long-lasting opponent didn't appear until August 1892, when a little weekly, The Denver Post, printed its first edition. The newspaper didn't stay afloat long but reopened in 1894.

The Post continued to struggle until Oct. 18, 1895, when it was bought by Harry Tammen and Frederick G. Bonfils.

That's when the real fun began.

Tammen and Bonfils spiced up Denver journalism with editorial crusades and stunts. These were the days of "yellow journalism," when the truth rarely stood in the way of a good story.

"Bonfils was anathema to ethical journalism," says Halaas, who noted that The Post once was kicked out of the American Society of Newspaper Editors for its behavior. "It was outrageous - but it was read."

Bonfils gets physical

The newspaper war got physical again on Christmas morning 1907. Two days earlier the News had skewered Bonfils, calling him a "blackmailer" and portraying him as Captain Kidd in an editorial cartoon. The two papers often sniped at each other, but Bonfils apparently felt this was too much.

As the 67-year-old Patterson strolled through Capitol Hill that morning, near where First Baptist Church is now, he heard someone greet him from behind.

"The senator was about to turn in reply when a fist descended on the side of his head," writes Gene Fowler in Timberline, his 1933 biography of Tammen and Bonfils. "Then a second wallop. The senator fell, stunned, among the weeds. He received yet other fistic tattooings as he lay prone . . . Bystanders at length rescued him, lifted him to his feet, and it was then that he recognized Fred G. Bonfils. The Post partner was cursing like a 20 mule-team driver and threatening the senator with further mayhem."

Bonfils vowed to shoot Patterson if his name ever again appeared in the pages of the Rocky Mountain News.

Bonfils eventually was fined $50 for the assault - and the details were, of course, carried in the News for weeks.

Patterson sold the News to John C. Shaffer in 1913. Shaffer also bought the Republican and folded it into the News. That left three papers serving Denver: the News, The Post and the Express, founded in 1906 and owned by Scripps-McRae League, the predecessor of the Scripps Howard newspapers.

Shaffer, an upright man, disapproved of the antics of Tammen and Bonfils. He allegedly told Tammen that he intended to run the News "as Jesus Christ would run it."

Pious as this determination was, it lost readership. News circulation plummeted while The Post's soared.

"Shaffer wobbled out of Denver with a pair of editorial tin ears and chronic pains in his financial solar plexus," Fowler wrote in Timberline. "All his prayers, hymns and timid decencies had failed to stop The Post's bull-like rushes."

Scripps Howard enters picture

Shaffer sold the News in 1926 to Scripps Howard, which owns it still. New publisher Roy Howard merged it with the struggling Denver Express and created an evening paper, the Denver Evening News, to supplement the morning Rocky Mountain News.

Soon after, the afternoon Post launched the Morning Post. Thus, both newspapers went head-to-head morning and afternoon. Over the next two years, they spent an estimated $5 million - an astronomical sum at the time - trying to put each other out of business.

The News dispatched a small army of paper boys onto the streets one afternoon a week to pass out free peach-colored copies of the Evening News, just before the main edition of The Post came off the presses. The Post never knew on which day this would occur, but whenever it happened, they found readers unwilling to buy a Post when they could get a News for free.

Both papers sponsored extravagant contests, including one in which the News paid for a free round-the-world trip for the person voted "most popular schoolteacher."

Competition reached its height during the "great gasoline war" of February 1927. It began when the News offered two free gallons of gas with every classified ad placed in the Sunday paper. Soon, The Post began offering four gallons. So the News offered five. The lines of ad buyers got so long the papers began serving coffee and doughnuts to hardy souls who formed lines that snaked around the buildings.

Eventually, the papers declared a truce. The News bought out the Morning Post and The Post bought the Evening News. The expensive circulation promotions were halted for a time, but the editorial rivalry continued.

A sublime scoop

Cle Cervi Symons, longtime Denver journalist and daughter of Eugene Cervi - who worked for the News and The Post - recalls one story from family lore: how the News beat The Post reporting the death of Bonfils.

It was 1933, and Bonfils was on his deathbed. Eugene Cervi, then a reporter for the News, was assigned to stake out Bonfils' house for the deathwatch.

In his final days, Bonfils had converted to Catholicism, so when the Rev. Hugh McMenamin, rector of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, arrived at the house, reporters outside assumed the end was near. But when the priest emerged from the house, he refused to confirm or deny Bonfils' death.

"My father ran to his house, which was about two blocks away," Symons says. "He started calling the mortuaries, saying, `This is the Bonfils house. Where's the hearse?' Finally he hit pay dirt and someone told him, `It's on the way.' This was confirmation that Bonfils was dead and the News had the story. That's how the News scooped The Post on the death of Bonfils."

But the News' fortunes, which began to slip under Shaffer, continued to decline. When Jack Foster, the former managing editor of the New York World-Telegram, arrived to take over the editorship in November 1940, it was widely believed he had come to close a dying newspaper.

Instead, he came to save it. On April 13, 1942, the Rocky Mountain News changed its appearance dramatically. It became a tabloid.

That same morning, Molly Mayfield appeared in the News. Molly's advice-to-the-lovelorn column, written by Foster's wife, Frances M. Foster, became an instant hit.

The scrappy News slowly climbed back from the brink of extinction and in March 1980 passed The Post in circulation. The News got a further circulation boost in 1982 when The Post switched from an afternoon to a morning edition.

The great Garfield joke

The papers remain locked in a death struggle today, dueling feverishly with aggressive circulation, advertising and news strategies. But the war has not been without its lighter moments - witness the great Garfield caper.

A newspaper war is fought on many fronts: advertising, circulation, news, the comics pages. Especially the comics pages. Thus, it was with great excitement that the News announced in 1988 that it had outbid The Post for the rights to publish Garfield, one of the most popular comic strips in the country.

Champagne flowed in the News newsroom that day. Garfield was defecting from The Post to the News, beginning Jan. 1, 1989.

Eleven months later, the News holiday decorations went up, and there was the big orange cat and his pal, Odie, dispensing holiday greetings from atop the the News building.

Post reporter Jim Carrier sat at his desk by the window and looked out. Every day he saw that cat on the News building, and it ate at him. This was in-your-face taunting - like when The Post rented the billboard outside then-News editor Ralph Looney's office window to tout its 1984 and 1986 Pulitzer Prizes.

Carrier and three cohorts - reporters Pat O'Driscoll, Michelle Fulcher and Jennifer Gavin - hit upon a scheme. They strolled over to the News one afternoon and walked up to the third-floor newsroom without anyone stopping them.

"We cased the joint," recalls O'Driscoll, now with USA Today. "We discovered that there was an unlocked door out to the patio. We realized we could do something."

O'Driscoll's wife, artist Paula Pence, created a giant rolled-up Denver Post from a 4-by-8-foot foam board. Then, early the morning of Dec. 18, the foursome struck.

Carrier and O'Driscoll dressed in workmen's coveralls and carried a ladder and a toolbox. "We marched into the lobby, waved at the guards and headed right onto the elevator. We went to the third floor and marched unseen onto the patio deck," O'Driscoll recalls. A couple of minutes later, Gavin, carrying the foam newspaper, wrapped in brown butcher paper with a big red bow around it, joined them. "Big Christmas card for the party today," she told the guards, who then helped her through the doorway with her enormous package.

The men climbed the ladder to the fourth floor, then hoisted the big Denver Post and duct-taped it into Odie's panting mouth. They took pictures for posterity, then quietly sneaked back out of the building.

The Post remained in Odie's mouth nearly an hour before the prank was discovered.

"It was good to have some old-fashioned high jinks as opposed to stuffy corporate stuff," O'Driscoll says.

So here we are today, one of the few American cities with two fiercely competing daily newspapers. In October, the News added Denver to its name to become the Denver Rocky Mountain News, to better reflect its deep hometown roots.

"It's fascinating to watch the different strategies the two newspapers use," Halaas says. "They still put out numbers showing how much they are read. And the raids on each other's staffs, and the price wars. Today, it's done with gloves on, but you can sense the intensity of it.

"Eventually, one of those is going to have to give way."

WHAT THEY SAID

"A train of wagons, taking out the press, etc., of The Rocky Mountain News, left yesterday for the gold regions with a large party, all in the best of spirits, with banners flying, W.N. Byers in command." -- Chicago Press and Tribune, 1859

"With our hat in our hand and our best bow we this week make our first appearance upon the stage in the capacity of editor.

. . . Our course is marked out. We will adhere to it with steadfast and fixed determination, to speak, write and publish the truth and nothing but the truth, let it work us weal or woe."

Fondly looking forward to a long and pleasant acquaintance with our readers, hoping well to act our part, we send forth to the world the first number of The Rocky Mountain News." -- William Byers, founder, Rocky Mountain News, first edition, April 23, 1859

"We are coming to Denver with neither a tin cup nor a lead pipe. We will live with and in this community, and not on or off it. We are nobody's big brother, wayward sister or poor relation. We come simply as news merchants." -- Roy W. Howard, Scripps Howard president, in speech to the Denver Chamber of Commerce after his company acquired the News on Nov. 23, 1926

"This issue contains the last red headline which will be printed in the Rocky Mountain News. There is a touch of pathos in informing Mr. Red Ink that his services are no longer needed. But thousands of subscribers demanded that he be banned. He is, therefore, crowded from the first page of the News by the march of civilization." -- Announcement in the News, Nov. 25, 1933

"Colorado's first newspaper today becomes its youngest. Like Denver, it keeps step with the times." -- Announcement in the News, April 13, 1942, explaining the paper's switch from broadsheet to tabloid format

LEADING THE NEWS

Owners

William Byers, founder, April 23, 1859-May 5, 1878

Gen. W.A.H Loveland, 1878-1886

John Arkins, part-owner, 1880-1886; owner, with brothers, 1886-1894

Sen. Thomas M. Patterson, part owner, 1890-1894, full owner, 1894-1913

John Shaffer, 1913-Nov. 23, 1926

Scripps Howard, E.W. Scripps Co., Nov. 23, 1926

Editors

William Byers, 1859-1878

Kemp Cooper, May-July 1878

James T. Smith, July-December 1878

John M. Barret, December 1878-1883

William F. Stapleton, 1883-1886

John Arkins, 1886-1890

Sen. Thomas M. Patterson, 1890-1913

William L. Chenery, 1913-1926

Edward T. Leech, 1927-1931

Charles E. Lounsberry, 1931-1935

Charles B. McCabe, 1935-1936

Forrest Davis, 1936-1937

Aubrey Graves, April-September 1937

Walter Morrow, September 1937-1938

Lee Casey (acting), 1938-1940

Jack Foster, 1940-1970

Vince Dwyer, 1971-1974

Michael Balfe Howard, 1975-1980

Ralph Looney, 1980-1989

Jay Ambrose, 1989-1995

Robert W. Burdick, 1995-1998

John Temple, 1998-

Business Managers

J.L. Cauthorn, 1928-1929

Merritt P. Riblett, 1930-1937

C.A. Moore, 1938-1941

Bill Hailey, 1941-1957

B.W. (Wally) Lewis, 1957-1964

Edward W. Estlow, 1964-1970

William Fletcher, 1970-1990

President, General Manager

Robert W. Burdick, 1998 -

Publisher

Larry D. Strutton, 1990 -

HOMES OF THE NEWS

1. April 1859 - attic of Uncle Dick Wootton's general store, 1413-15 11th St.

2. September 1859 - log cabin, northeast corner, 14th and Market streets

3. December 1859 - log cabin, northwest corner of 13th and Walnut streets

4. August 1860 - Building on stilts on a patch of sand in the middle of Cherry Creek near what is now 13th and Market Streets. Destroyed by Cherry Creek flood May 19, 1864.

5. June 1864 - Commonwealth building, southeast corner, 13th and Larimer streets

6. July 1864 - Building near corner of 15th and Larimer streets

7. October 1866 - The News Block, brick building, near corner of 16th and Larimer streets

8. December 1887 - Patterson & Thomas block, southwest corner, 17th and Curtis streets

9. March 27, 1897 - Markham Hotel, southeast corner, 17th and Lawrence streets

10. 1901 - 1720 Welton St. (Site now occupied by Hyatt Regency Denver. News staff members took great delight in being called "the wildcats of Welton Street.")

11. June 1952 - 400 W. Colfax Ave. Building has undergone major expansions and renovations.

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