City, Gazette grew together

Palmer founded both Springs and newspaper

First there were the Utes, who camped in the Garden of the Gods and bathed in the pools of Manitou Springs.

Then there were the forty-niners, who founded Colorado City as a mining-supply center.

Then there was Gen. William Jackson Palmer, who visited the region in 1869 and wrote these prophetic words: ``I am sure there will be a famous summer resort here.''

Palmer was so sure of himself that he bought nearly 10,000 acres of land at the bargain-basement price of 80 cents an acre. By 1872, his Denver and Rio Grande Railroad had reached Pikes Peak, he had founded his dream resort of Colorado Springs, and trainloads of new arrivals were snapping up $50 residential lots, $100 business lots and $250 farms.

Palmer decided the city needed certain refinements, including a newspaper. So he and Dr. William A. Bell -- a British immigrant -- launched the weekly newspaper Out West. The first issue was printed on March 23, 1872, in a two-story frame building at the corner of what is now Tejon Street and Colorado Avenue. The newspaper office occupied the first floor and a public meeting hall occupied the second floor (a Shakespearean troupe once presented ``Henry IV'' there).

Out West's first editor was J. Elsom Liller, a British national. That wasn't unusual in a city where one in five residents was British-born. In ``Little London,'' as early Colorado Springs was nicknamed, police officers were called ``bobbies,'' the Union Jack was flown on Queen Victoria's birthday, and the fashionable set carried umbrellas rain or shine.

But Liller didn't adapt well to frontier life. While he succeeded in promoting Colorado Springs as an excellent place to live -- and move to -- his relentless moralizing annoyed large segments of the population. No one, it seemed, was immune from a rap on the knuckles.

``A lot of unruly lads are continually promoting dog fights on the streets,'' he wrote. ``We wish our Acting Constable would find a means of teaching them better.''

On Jan. 4, 1873, Liller oversaw the transformation of Out West into the Colorado Springs Gazette and El Paso County News.

``We commend it to the hearty support of all who are interested in the Town and Country to which it will be devoted,'' he wrote. ``It rests with them, as much as with ourselves, to make it a good paper.''

But Liller's own support was evaporating. Even the temperance movement grew weary of his divisive attacks on ``druggists'' who defied Palmer's liquor ban by dispensing whiskey for ``medicinal purposes.''

After three depressing years as editor, he died of a laudanum overdose.

In 1876, Colorado Springs gained national attention for a hoax perpetrated by a rival paper, the Mountaineer (later the Telegraph). The story was about a baby girl who was supposedly devoured by rats atop Pikes Peak. An accompanying photograph showed mourners surrounding her rocky grave.

A retraction set the record straight: only a pet cat belonging to the U.S. Army Signal Corps lay buried beneath the stones. Nevertheless, generations of tourists continued to believe the rat story.

In 1877, Benjamin W. Steele became The Gazette's editor. Like one-third of new arrivals in the late 1800s, he had come to Colorado Springs for his health.

The city was fast gaining a reputation as a haven for those suffering from respiratory ailments, especially tuberculosis.

While Steele continued Liller's assault on the city's liquor vendors, he expanded coverage of local and state news. When competitors threatened to start a daily newspaper in Colorado Springs, he responded by turning The Gazette into a six-day daily. Single copies sold for a nickel apiece. A year's subscription was $8.

``We intend the news department of the paper to be equal to that of any other paper in the State,'' Steele wrote in the first daily issue, published May 1, 1878. ``The local news will be as full as reasonable exertion and due deference to public morals can make it. In its editorial columns we shall endeavor to discuss all questions of local or national importance with fairness and with such ability as we may be able to command.''

During Steele's tenure, there was no shortage of news. The commercial districts of Colorado Springs and Manitou Springs were thriving. New institutions dotted the landscape, among them Colorado College, St. Francis Hospital, and the Colorado School for the Education of Mutes (now the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind).

The 1881 opening of the Colorado Springs Opera House signaled the city's arrival as a cultural center. Its first production, the play ``Camille,'' about a tragic, tubercular heroine, might not have been the most appropriate choice. But it representedan improvement over the city's first concert, an amateur affair in 1872 featuring Italian arias warbled by Palmer's wife, Queen.

By 1887, Colorado Springs was big enough to accommodate a nine-bobby police force that included Horace Shelby, the city's first black officer.

But there wasn't much violent crime to contain -- or report. In 1887, it was big news when a man strolling through Acacia Park was mugged and robbed of $20 and a gold watch. The Gazette called it a ``dastardly and daring highway robbery'' and called for the installation of more electric lights in the park.

Some of the most exciting news revolved around the celebrities who flocked to the region, among them President U.S. Grant, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and English author Oscar Wilde.

But the newspaper also had room for feature stories about ordinary people who met extraordinary challenges. An 1887 story saluted Aaron Bailey, a 75-year-old former slave who became a janitor at the El Paso County Courthouse, a member of the Colorado Springs Volunteer Fire Department and a respected Republican orator.

In 1891, The Gazette and its job-printing operation moved to a new, $75,000 four-story brick building on East Pikes Peak Avenue. With 100 workers, it was the region's biggest employer.

But not for long. By the time Steele died on Nov. 11, 1891, gold had been discovered in Cripple Creek. The gold rush brought thousands of prospectors to the region, including the young Charley Tutt and his buddy, Spencer Penrose, who would go on to become Colorado Springs' greatest benefactor.

For the first time, the city was truly part of the Wild West. Colorado City blossomed into Sin City, with rows of saloons, brothels and gambling halls. The Gazette worried that its sons and daughters were turning to lives of drunkenness, prostitution and crime.

Antagonism developed between the old and new rich. The ``Little London'' crowd mistrusted the likes of Winfield Scott Stratton, a $3-a-day carpenter who struck it rich in Cripple Creek.

The new millionaire mine owners built mansions on Wood Avenue and made their own laws. When the Colorado State Militia came to keep order in the gold fields, the mine owners had its pro-miner commander -- Adj. Gen. Thomas J. Tarsney -- kidnapped from his Colorado Springs hotel and taken to Austin Bluffs, where he was tarred and feathered.

In 1893, Colorado Springs police made their first great criminal capture, nabbing two members of the notorious Starr gang. In 1896, the first city police officer was killed in the line of duty.

``Policeman Frank Bish was killed by a burglar, and the assassin when he found that he was about to be taken, blew out his own brains,'' The Gazette reported. ``He (Bish) leaves a wife and one little daughter. His wife quickly learned the news last evening. She hurried to the side of the body but too late to be with him at the end. The grief of the little family was heart-rending.''

By the turn of the century, Palmer had divested himself of the newspaper, competition was heating up between The Gazette and The Telegraph, and Colorado women had gained the right to vote.

The Gazette had long opposed women's suffrage on the grounds that women did not want it. By the time women went to the polls, however, the newspaper reversed its view.

``To say that the women were interested and did their full share is altogether inadequate. They were deeply interested,'' The Gazette wrote after the 1894 municipal election. ``In the preliminary work of the election, the registration, the canvassing, the attendance on the political meetings, yes, and even in the speechmaking, they did their full share and more.

``Many women, no doubt, desired the suffrage, others even more earnestly desired not to have it, but all equally accepted it as a duty, and exercised it with an intelligence and patriotism worthy of the highest praise.''