The rise of Colorado’s capital city and the rise of The Rocky, as it affectionately or scornfully became known, were intertwined from the beginning. The city was founded in late 1858, The Rocky the following April, as gold strikes were making the place a destination reports the New York Times.
“Without The Rocky, Denver would not be the city it is today,” said Tom Noel, a professor of history at the University of Colorado in Denver.
On Friday, ashes were mostly all that was left of that legacy as copies of the paper’s final issue, published Friday morning, lay strewn about its newsroom and upon the consciousness of the city. The Rocky’s owner, the E. W. Scripps Company, announced Thursday that the paper, which had been up for sale, had attracted no credible buyers and that its losses – $16 million in 2008 – could not be sustained.
“The shock has passed, the anger is below the surface, and there’s more gallows humor today,” said David Milstead, a reporter in the business section who was packing his desk and responding to e-mail condolences. He said he had hoped the paper would make it to Saturday, his 37th birthday, but it was not to be.
In many ways, Rocky stories and Denver stories are synonymous, partly because the paper’s unabashed mission, especially in its early days, was to help Denver grow and prosper, sometimes even at the expense of the facts.
The first owner and publisher, William Byers, who founded the paper on the second floor of a saloon, decided early on, for example, that Eastern moneyed investors would want Denver to have good steamboat access – a profoundly unrealistic prospect here on the High Plains. So he simply invented it. Shipping news, complete with the made-up names of arriving and departing vessels, heading out on the South Platte River, bound east with made-up loads of freight, became a fictional staple.
When the Union Pacific Railroad bypassed Denver in the 1860s, taking the coast-to-coast route through Cheyenne, Wyo., 100 miles north, The Rocky led the drive to build a rail spur line connecting Denver to the transcontinental system.
The raw shout of The Rocky also meant never avoiding a scoop, even sometimes at the expense of the paper’s dignity and reputation. In April 1876, for example, a woman named Hattie Sancomb, a longtime mistress of the paper’s editor, angrily faced down her lover in the street with a pearl-handled revolver, aiming for revenge.
Read more here: Part of Denver’s Past, The Rocky Says Goodbye