When 28-year-old William Byers hauled his thousand-pound printing press to Colorado, the dusty settlements along Cherry Creek were perched on the edge of the frontier, their futures in doubt, their possibilities unimagined.

So Byers imagined them - and gave Denver a future.

"You can't separate Byers' history from the early history of Denver. They are one and the same," said David Halaas, chief historian for the Colorado Historical Society. "It was almost as though Denver was his personal creation."

Indeed, Byers did more than found the Rocky Mountain News, Denver's first newspaper, in 1859. He was a kingmaker in a city that needed leaders. A moral authority in a lawless land. A visionary who saw what would Denver could become.

But above all, Byers was Denver's chief promoter, its biggest booster. He believed in the city - and people believed him.

"In the pioneer days of our state every man was an optimist," Byers said late in life. "The people who crossed the plains in prairie schooners . . . did not wait for something to turn up. They believed in action, and in acting at once.

"You know, we might just as well have been on an island in the South Seas or on an oasis in the desert. We didn't belong to anybody. We were like Robinson Crusoe."

His accomplishments are staggering - both in number and in scope.

He was instrumental in bringing telegraph lines to Denver. Then railroads and water and mail delivery and streetcars. He championed statehood and helped write Colorado's first constitution. He helped found the University of Denver, the Colorado Historical Society, the Natural History Society and the city's first library. His land deals shaped Denver's growth and led to the establishment of Longmont, Greeley, Hot Sulphur Springs and Meeker. When famed explorer John Wesley Powell made the first ascent of Longs Peak, Byers, a self-described "mountain tramp," tagged along.

"Byers was a pioneer, an opener, a pass-crosser of a pure American breed," author Wallace Stegner wrote, "one for whom an untrodden peak was a rebuke and a shame to an energetic people."

It was in his blood. William Newton Byers was born Feb. 22, 1831, into a family of pioneers. His grandfather and great-grandfather were veterans of the Revolution, his father one of the first settlers of Ohio.

In 1850, with Ohio filling up, Moses Byers moved his family west of the Mississippi, to Iowa and the new frontier. William Byers would pick up where his father left off. He wandered the West as a surveyor, climbing mountains and laying out cities. Soon, he began looking for a place he could adopt as his own, an empty canvas on which he could make his mark.

That place was Denver, gateway to Colorado's gold rush.

His early days here would become legend. His six-week wagon trip across Nebraska with the printing press. His setting up shop in a leaky attic above a general store. His beating a competitor to the streets by just 20 minutes with the first issue of the News. His surviving a fire and a flood that washed away his building and his press.

A noose and a tree

"An editor is a poor fellow who empties his brain to fill his stomach," Byers said.

Being a journalist was tough in the days when reader complaints were handled not with angry letters but with a noose and a tree. Byers' campaign against lawlessness got him kidnapped and shot at. News employees were hired, in part, on how good they were with a gun.

Byers was a typical editor of his time, a "personal journalist" who saw the News as an extension of himself, a mirror that would reflect his morality and ideas.

Early on, his enthusiastic reports on the early gold strikes got Byers branded the "Rocky Mountain liar" by critics who heard the tales of ruined prospectors returning east.

Byers couldn't stand these "gobacks" and their lack of vision. "Men who have turned back and made their way home howling like whipped curs - creatures who should never have been unloosed from their mothers' apron strings," he called them.

Byers would be vindicated. In June 1859, the News published famed journalist Horace Greeley's first-hand account from Colorado's rich gold fields. The 1859 extra - four columns of type quickly printed on brown grocer's wrapping paper - may have prevented Denver's infanticide.

"He was out to promote Denver, to help make it a permanent thing," Halaas said. "He would do whatever it took - including telling lies."

Byers promoted the Platte as a navigable river and Denver as a port town with a column called "Boat Departures." He wrote that Denver was so safe that people left their doors unlocked when, in fact, the city was awash in violence. He refused to report on the blossoming sport of baseball because he believed the drinking and gambling that went on in the stands made the city look bad.

"This sort of thing was common at the time," said Tom Noel, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. "For every lie in the News there were a thousand truths."

Byers himself seemed to understand his place and time. "Not educated as a journalist, I have not been confined to the straight and narrow path of the profession," Byers wrote in his last editorial after he sold the News in 1878. "My feelings have been those of personal championship for a state in which I have felt a deep personal interest."

But Byers' boosterism not only brought civilization to Denver, it enriched his friends through countless projects and real estate deals. Former territorial governor John Evans, for instance, was part-owner of the Denver Pacific railroad. Byers spearheaded the public campaign to get the railroad built. Evans, in turn, gave his friend money to keep his struggling newspaper afloat.

"The journalistic ethics of today didn't exist then," Halaas said.

They were the movers and shakers of early Colorado, Byers and his friends, and their lives intertwined completely.

In May 1864, as the waters of the Great Flood marooned Byers and his family in their home on the Platte, help arrived in the form of a rescue party led by Col. John Chivington. Chivington was a Civil War hero and leader of a volunteer militia authorized by Gov. Evans to confront Indians threatening homesteaders. Evans took in the homeless Byers family after the flood.

Six months later, the three would become the architects of the massacre of 163 Indians, mostly women and children, who were attacked without provocation in their camp along Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado.

Chivington and his men did the killing. Evans sanctioned it. Byers endorsed it.

"Bully for the Colorado boys," the News wrote when reports of the bloodletting reached Denver.

"Byers helped bring it about by creating hysteria and worry in the population about the Indians," said Duane Smith, a history professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango. "He was as much involved in what happened at Sand Creek as the soldiers."

Three years earlier, Byers seemed more measured - if patronizing - in his view toward the growing conflict between Indians and white settlers.

"In all our dealings with these untutored barbarians, we should be governed by the greatest caution," the News said. "They are naturally, and not without reason, suspicious of their white brethern. They feel that their rights have been invaded, their hunting grounds taken possession of . . . without adequate remuneration."

But with escalating tensions across the plains - and with Evans and Chivington whispering in his ear - Byers' views changed. Later, in the face of congressional investigations that would chastise Evans and Chivington, Byers stood by his friends.

"Among the brilliant feats of arms in Indian warfare, the recent campaign of our Colorado volunteers will stand in history with few rivals," the News wrote.

Byers was right, of course. Yet it wasn't until the late 1950s that the News' role in fomenting the massacre was widely criticized. In a 1995 editorial, the newspaper said that its founder had behaved "abominably."

No regrets

"Byers never voiced any regret," Haalas of the historical society said. "Quite the opposite. To him and most others of the time, there was nothing to regret. They thought they were on the side of the angels. Sand Creek was not a shame out West."

Byers' affair with a young divorcee, though, would shame him. It would also rob him of the Republican nomination for governor and perhaps of his ownership of the News.

Like everything Byers did, his relationship in the mid-1870s with Hattie Sancomb was the talk of the town.

And how could it not have been? When Sancomb shot at her lover during a spat in the street - a block from his house, with Elizabeth Byers watching from her parlor window - Byers walked away unscathed, but with his future wounded.

A Golden newspaper sent word to Byers that it had his love letters to Sancomb and that $500 might prevent their publication. Byers didn't respond. Instead, he broke the story to Denver himself, scooping his competitors on the story of his affair.

Two years later, Byers sold the News. Historians say the scandal not only undercut Byers' standing as a civic leader but squeezed him financially; Byers was constantly borrowing money to keep the News running in the face of numerous competitors.

Noel cites a 1876 credit report on Byers by an eastern bond house. It called Byers "quite slow (to) pay" and said that "credit and reputation suffered from Byers scandals."

"But he didn't get bitter afterward. He didn't withdraw," Noel said.

Instead, Byers kept moving, serving as postmaster, banker, chamber of commerce president. He kept climbing mountains, summiting his namesake peak two years before his death. Kept promoting projects that would make Denver great. Kept looking for the big score.

"He would soon bankrupt us all if we could furnish him with all the money he wanted," Elizabeth Byers once wrote to her son in the post-News years. "He has never been out of debt since I have known him, and you know there has been no excuse for it."

When he died in 1903 at age 72, Byers' estate amounted to $7,286 and change. It's a sobering fact given what he accomplished, but one that hardly matters.

"He didn't come here to get rich quick," Smith said. "He had a longer vision of things. He came out here with a great sense of destiny. And he found it."

In his last years, as the 20th century dawned and nostalgia for the pioneer days bloomed, Byers was often asked to tell the story.

His story. Colorado's story.

"Every time the pioneers had a reunion," former Denver Mayor Wolfe Londoner recalled upon Byer's death, "he was always on hand and invariably told the same story, in which, with his usual modesty, he narrated how he brought his newspaper press across the country and established it here.

"He would wind up with a history of the early settlement of Colorado, occupying about an hour and a half. At the end of his address, nearly all the old pioneers would be asleep."

It didn't bother Byers. He clearly enjoyed his role as one of the last of the '59ers, an unofficial icon, a living piece of history.

"In his old age, he became the keeper of the flame, the keeper of the heritage," Smith said. "He thrived on it. It gave meaning to his life. He had reached his angle of repose. And his angle of repose was simply being William Byers."

COMMENTS BY - AND ABOUT - BYERS

"Men of worth and character have staked their all upon your word and now are left penniless, and now have swor (sic) a fearful vengeance upon the author of all their miseries. You are now organizing a territory. Be careful, the next territory you will occupy will be foreign and called Hell. I don't conceal my name or purpose. Death and vengeance." - W.G. George, letter to the editor to William Byers, published Feb. 8, 1860.

"Hang Byers and D.C. Oakes

For starting this damned Pikes Peak hoax." - Tombstone inscription directed at Byers and author of another guidebook to the Pikes Peak region

"One more unfortunate, weary of breath, rashly importunate, goes to its death. So young and so fair, too! Not a woman, this time, but a newspaper - the Evening Sentinel. Its creditors probably outnumbered its mourners 10 to 5." - Byers, on the death of another competing newspaper, Nov. 3, 1875

"If I have seemed too earnest, it was not with malice, and I crave the pardon of each and every one whom I may have unintentionally offended." - Byers, on selling the News on May 5, 1878

MAKING AN EARLY MARK

Newspapers founded after the Denver Rocky Mountain News:

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 1868

Boston Globe: 1872

The Washington Post: 1877

Los Angeles Times: 1884

The Wall Street Journal: 1889

Houston Chronicle: 1901

Daily News (New York): 1919

Newsday: 1940

Chicago Sun-Times: 194

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