Estes News Stories

"Journalism is history told in a hurry."
—unknown

Estes Park has had a rich and varied newspaper history, ranging from 1908 to the current day. While the reporting may have been imperfect, at least in the 20-20 of hindsight, it was provided by people with direct contact with their times.

The days, whether they were 1908 or 1941 or 1981 wasn't "way back when," it was right now, immediate and it was modern... at least, it seemed modern at the time.

While many of today's conveniences such as computers and cell phones may not have been around in 1908, it's at the same time revealing how many of today's concerns were just as prevalent at the time, from attracting tourists to the town to dealing with parking to conservation and promotion of wildlife and the scenery.

As rich as the history was, it's painfully incomplete. The biggest example is that there were no newspapers in Estes Park in 1917 during the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park (and, obviously, there were decades before then in which the town simply wasn't large enough to support a newspaper). Another example is the omission of what would seem to be important news stories, not told because of the editors and publishers at the time choosing to refrain from such things as controversy (definitely not the case throughout the newspaper era) or because the writers at the time were simply too close to the stories to get what we would perceive to be proper perspective.

Again, those times are rare and are more than made up for by that very closeness and by the wealth of stories available.

The EstesHistory.com goal

While the traditional history books on Estes Park do refer to newspaper stories, for the most part only the "major" stories are focused on. It's our belief that much is lost by only looking at the larger tales, on the broader trends. History is the small stories as well the large. For every F.O. Stanley, there are countless W.J. Terrilans. While it would be truly (and unfortunately) impossible for us to tell all of their stories, we'll be able to make progress into that direction through the use of newspaper articles, the history as it was happening.

We will be slowly making our way through the volumes of newspapers, generally from the oldest on, reproducing some articles in whole when we can and making use of excerpts and synopsis when we need to. There's a great number of pages to go through, so the transcription process will take some time (we can only type so fast), so please bear with us. When possible, we will be adding annotations at the bottom of the pages.

Unfortunately, as much as it pains us, we have to make cuts ourselves in not reproducing everything from the newspapers. The early newspapers, as with many small town newspapers, would list columns of so-and-so visiting someone else and include news briefs from across the state and around the globe. These, nationally syndicated columns and some of the very small items of import we will not be including in the interests of expediency. (The first Estes Park Trail will seem very shorted for these reasons.)

Acknowledment

We're highly indebted to the Estes Park Trail-Gazette and the Estes Park Public Library for their bound collections of newspapers, enabling us to bring them to you. Thanks.

News stories reproduced herein are believed to be in the public domain. Other stories, either copywritten by individuals within 75 years of their lives or printed after 1950 are represented with synopsises and brief quotes.

When given in full, the text is produced nearly verbatim--slight editing when errors are clearly typographical in nature, but otherwise most of the quirks and odd turns of phrasing, spelling or capitalization belong to the original authors.