earlier had made a settlement at the junction of the Platte River and Cherry Creek. On each bank of the river there was a rival town site, so that William N. Byers very wisely dated his paper as published at Cherry Creek, Denver Territory. The first issue of The Rocky Mountain News was printed on brown wrappingpaper. At the start it was published weekly, but later it became a daily. It has been published uninterrupted since its establishment, with a single exception in the early sixties when a flood in Cherry Creek wiped its plant out of existence.
The day The Rocky Mountain News started was one of the most exciting in frontier journalism. When the news of the discovery of gold in the "Pike's Peak Region" had reached as far east as the Missouri, it promptly started two small newspaper plants which had for their motto, figuratively speaking, "A newspaper near Pike's Peak, or bust." One left Omaha and was owned by William N. Byers, Thomas Gibson, and John L. Bailey; the other set out from St. Joseph, Missouri, and consisted of the outfit which John L. Merrick had purchased from The St. Joseph Gazette. Both outfits had to cross the plains by ox teams.
Merrick was the first to arrive. Nob knowing that competitors were on the way, he leisurely commenced preparing for the first issue of The Cherry Creek Pioneer. Ten days later the Omaha plant arrived and the competition for the honor of the first paper in Colorado began. The settlement offered a suitable prize to the winner and appointed a committee of citizens to referee the contest. Both The Rocky Mountain News and The Cherry Creek Pioneer announced their date of first publication April 23, 1859. At ten-thirty o'clock, on the evening of April 23, the first copy of The News, a four-page sheet, was pulled from the old Washington hand-press. Other copies soon circulated among the pioneers surrounding the log cabin print-shop. A little later The Pioneer also appeared on the streets. The decision of the committee, however, was that The News had won by twenty minutes.
Worn out by his efforts and depressed by defeat, Merrick the next morning offered to sell his plant to his rival upon terms which were later accepted. Merrick then set off for the mountains, not to hunt for news, but for gold.
