As the pioneer settlement grew into a larger town, The News always led in a movement for law and regulation. In his attempts to clear the town of its rougher element, Editor Byers often wrote his editorials and news with a rifle across his knee while armed men guarded his printers. For nineteen years Byers conducted The News.
Under difficulties seldom equaled, and never surpassed, he brought out his paper. When the Indian outbreak caused an embargo on traffic over the Western plains in 1864-65, he frequently ran out of white paper, and in such emergencies he printed the news on wrapping-paper, gathered from Denver stores. That he might have the news before the mails from the East arrived in Denver, he established an overland pony express. By means of a relay of horseback riders he had brought the news from the nearest express lines with a speed which to-day almost seems incredible. Of course, it was expensive to run such a private pony express, but The News in those days cost forty-four dollars a year and single copies sold for one dollar and twenty-five cents apiece. In 1878 the paper was sold to the Rocky Mountain News Printing Company, with W. A. H. Loveland as editor and principal owner.
Two papers were established in Denver in 1867: the first of these was The Daily Argus, begun on October 25; the second, The Rocky Mountain Star, begun on December 8. A third attempt was made by N. A. Baker, who, after bringing out a few issues of The Colorado Leader, left Denver, to go to Cheyenne, where he founded the first paper in Wyoming.
INFANCY OF IDAHO JOURNALISM
While there was a paper called The Golden Age, published at Lewiston, by Frank Kenyon in 1862, the first paper to be published in Idaho after the Territory was created on March 3, 1863, was The Boise News, started on September 30, 1863, at Bannock City now called Idaho City. It was published by T. J. and J. S. Butler. J. S. Butler had left Auburn, Oregon, in the fall of 1862 to look after a band of cattle in the Powder River Valley. Later, he organized a pack-train to take goods to Walla Walla, Washington, and still later he ran a pack-train to Bannock
