Newspapers in Laramie’s territorial days Eight flourished or floundered before statehood in 1890
Pre-statehood Laramie editors included, among others, an ex-Confederate soldier, a moralizing father of over 20 children, an attorney who owned three failed Laramie papers, a son who idolized his mother, and a writer who refused to take anything seriously. The last-mentioned was Edgar Wilson “Bill” Nye, who edited the Laramie Boomerang for less than two years from its founding in 1881—long enough to draw lasting attention to Laramie.
Spinal meningitis laid low Bill Nye in November of 1882, so editorial duties went to others. While still recuperating, he left Laramie in 1883 with his nationwide reputation as a humorist firmly established. Until his death in 1896 the paper continued to carry Nye’s syndicated columns.
W.E. Chaplin
By 1886, president of the Boomerang Publishing Co. was W.E. Chaplin, who was almost as interesting as Nye. William Edwards Chaplin (1860-1942) had arrived in Laramie in 1873 as a 13-year-old orphan from Nebraska with two older brothers. He went to school in Laramie briefly, but by necessity had to get a job. This and other Chaplin recollections are from a 1920s article he wrote, which was not published until 1946, in Annals of Wyoming.
Chaplin balanced newspapering with other activities. He married in 1882, was elected to Laramie City Council in 1885, and the next year briefly co-owned a shoe store with another Boomerang employee. In 1894 he became mayor of Laramie. From 1898 to 1915 he was registrar of the U.S. Public Land Office in Cheyenne. At first he commuted daily by train, but eventually moved his family to Cheyenne. In retirement they lived in Van Nuys, California, but maintained a summer cabin near Centennial. UW awarded Chaplin an honorary degree in 1940.
Chaplin knew nearly all of the early editors and publishers of Laramie and Cheyenne, and fortunately he wrote about them in several publications. He worked for most as a “printer’s devil” (apprentice) and later became a publisher himself.
The Frontier Index
However, Chaplin didn’t know the editor/publishers of Laramie’s first paper—Virginia natives Frederick “Fred” K. Freeman (1841-?) and Legh “Lee” R. Freeman (1842-1915). Both had been Confederate soldiers, but Legh (yes, his unusual name really was his given name) took an oath to support the Union while a Yankee prisoner of war. Before the Civil War ended, he volunteered to substitute in western forts where experienced soldiers had been taken away for service in Union armies—a little-known footnote to Civil War history. Legh was adventurous and though lame from a childhood accident, he rode his horse far afield when the military no longer needed him.
Legh also was an experienced telegraph operator and acquired a printing press at Fort Kearny, Nebraska Territory. He got the idea to take the press along as the transcontinental railroad was progressing westward, publishing along the way.
But Legh’s wanderlust led him to travel far beyond the end of the railroad—so he recruited his brother Fred to take over the press. The paper was called “The Frontier Index, the Press on Wheels.” Legh published it at Fort Kearny until May 1866. Then Fred was publisher until it reached Laramie. Legh supplied his brother with partly fictitious stories from Yellowstone to Arizona under a pseudonym.
Laramie’s first paper
The first Wyoming issue of the Frontier Index was printed at Fort Sanders on March 6, 1868 and continued until March 24. It took nearly a month for the next edition—issued in Laramie on April 21, 1868. The delay was caused by an accident Fred sustained as the press was being moved to Laramie by ox teams—he was laid up at the Fort for a number of weeks. In Laramie the Frontier Index was printed in the back of the Frontier Hotel that Fred co-owned with someone named Wright, an early investment in Laramie—a town the tracks hadn’t even reached yet.
Thus the first Laramie printing press was where Dodd’s Bootery is today at the corner of Second and Garfield. Fred summoned Legh to return, which he did in the summer of 1868, just as Laramie was becoming a sometimes violent end-of-tracks town.
The Freeman brothers had little to say about the white ruffians, though occasionally they showed their prejudice against anyone of a different race. In late June 1868, Fred departed for Washington, DC to attend the Democratic national convention. Now edited by Legh, in August the paper moved to Benton, between Laramie and Rawlins. Fred had no more involvement with the Index.
Legh Freeman is the subject of a 1979 book titled Moveable Type, by Thomas H. Heuterman. Suffice it to say that Legh’s stories of the frontier helped to create the “myth of the west” as apart from reality, but the western reality that the Freeman brothers lived was dramatic in itself. One of the myths is that their press was moved by rail. In fact, their “wheels” were on the ox wagons that carried the 6,000 lbs. of equipment from place to place, writes Heuterman.
The Laramie Sentinel
The first permanent paper to be established in Laramie was the Laramie Sentinel published from 1869 through 1895 with James. H. Hayford as its continuous editor from 1870 on. Chaplin started working for Hayford in 1876 (his third Laramie newspaper job) just as Bill Nye arrived in Laramie and was hired as the Sentinel assistant editor. Chaplin’s recollections of Nye were that he was “angular in form and awkward in gait, but humorous.”
The Sentinel had been funded by others, but by 1879 Hayford was the sole editor and publisher, allowing him free rein to skewer anyone who displeased him.
About Hayford, Chaplin wrote: “He had pronounced opinions upon all subjects and was free to express his mind.” Chaplin is also the source of the anecdote that Hayford had a lot of children, saying: “One day I happened to be in his office when a little blonde girl came running in. He said to me, ‘That is my twenty-first child.’ He made no money out of the printing business—merely a living—and died a poor man,” said Chaplin.
Hayford supplemented his newspaper income at various times as Laramie’s police judge, postmaster, Territorial Auditor, and District Judge, but curiously he never practiced medicine, for which he was trained. He had access to the newsmakers of Laramie and carried on a running feud with Cheyenne, calling it “Shy Anne.“ (See “Laramie’s most Cantankerous Civic Booster,” on the website wyoachs.com)
The Laramie Independent
A competitor to the Republican-leaning Sentinel was the Independent, the first edition of which was published in Laramie on December 26, 1871. Earlier that month, the publisher and editor, Edward Archibald Slack, had suffered a loss when his South Pass News building burned in South Pass City.
Slack’s mother, Esther Hobart Slack Morris, achieved fame as the first woman in the nation to hold political office when she became a justice of the peace in South Pass City in 1870. Later, editor Slack promoted her as the “Mother of Woman Suffrage,” an overstatement that made her a part of Wyoming mythology.
In introducing himself to his Laramie readers Slack said: “It is the duty of the journalist to narrate current events; to call attention to the advantages of the locality and the wants of the community, and to discuss public measures considerately but with freedom.”
“The good editor,” he continued, “should deal mainly in generalities, not personalities,” an unsubtle reference to Hayford’s style in the competing Sentinel. In 1873 Slack was the first newspaperman to take a chance by hiring Chaplin, the 13-year-old school dropout, as his apprentice.
About Slack, Chaplin said: “He insisted upon good work . . . and kept the newspaper business in Wyoming on a high plane.” However, he added: “He was not a good business manager. His books were kept in a haphazard, careless manner and he never really knew whether he was making or losing money.” Slack, said Chaplin, “believed in running a newspaper for a purpose and not for financial gain.”
Laramie Daily Sun
In the last year of Slack’s residence in Laramie, he acquired a co-owner for the Independent in Charles W. Bramel, an attorney with a fascination for newspapers. The name of the Independent was changed to the Laramie Daily Sun. It survived for less than a year, but was unique in subscribing to the Associated Press (AP) that was established in 1846 and by 1861 a telegraph service. Until then, Laramie newspapers mostly got the news by “exchanging” with papers on both coasts and liberally lifting stories. Hayford also occasionally subscribed to the AP for the Sentinel.
Unfortunately, the first issue of the Sun had only three paid ads and two were for businesses in Rawlins. The issue of February 22, 1886 had many more ads, but by then Bramel had sold out to Slack, who announced this issue would be the last. Former partner Bramel by now was Albany County prosecuting attorney and a delegate to the Wyoming Territorial Council.
Two failed papers
Chaplin says that Bramel had an “incurable addiction to printer’s ink,” as quoted by Elizabeth Keen in her article “Wyoming’s Frontier Newspapers,” published in Annals of Wyoming in 1962. She reports that Bramel founded two other short-lived papers. One was the Laramie Chronicle, which Chaplin worked on for about six months in 1876. That might have been the entire run of the Chronicle—no copies have been located. Chaplin then went to work for Hayford at the Sentinel.
Not discouraged, however, Bramel then started the Laramie Daily Times in 1879. He wrote a scathing article about the Methodist minister, and when the two ran into each other at Second and Garfield, according to Chaplin, “the controversy ended in a street fight.” Bramel was fined for disturbing the peace. There are no copies of the Times publicly available either, but we know it existed because both Chaplin and Hayford refer to the Times. Hayford reports on the incident with Rev. Edmonston with contempt for Bramel in several 1879 Sentinel issues. But the Times folded and Bramel went on to become the District Judge.
Failure again
Another short-lived newspaper called “Wyoming And Its Future” was started in Laramie by F.W. Ott, possibly in 1885 That he was no newspaperman is indicated by its unwieldy name. Only three issues survive. The earliest one extant (December 22, 1886) is Volume II, Number 8, so apparently there were others the year before.
Subscriptions to Wyoming And Its Future were $2 per year, indicating that it was probably a bi-monthly but it did carry a healthy amount of local advertising. When it folded, Ott gave up the newspaper business and opened a Laramie furniture store.
The Boomerang
The Boomerang appeared in 1881, a Republican-leaning paper started by a group of investors who hired Bill Nye as editor—Nye was glad for the work. He had quit the Sentinel in 1877, becoming a lawyer and free-lance journalist, but “out of coal most of the time,” as he said. Nye famously chose the name Boomerang after a mule that would wander away but always came back. Usually the mule was tethered to the outside stairs. The second floor office had an elevator Nye is said to have joked: “Pull Boomerang’s tail and he’ll elevate you.”
Chaplin worked for E.A. Slack on the Cheyenne Leader for a few years but was hired back from Cheyenne in 1881 to become the first foreman at the Boomerang and within five years became the corporation president. “It was successful from the beginning,” said Chaplin, “but Nye was not a businessman.” The hand press the owners bought was quickly outgrown and the quarters over a livery barn were terrible. “No one visited the office unless through sheer necessity and the fumes from the barn carried illness to the employees above.”
Nye’s national fame as a humorist brought in “subscriptions by the score,” but Chaplin said Nye was not in any sense a businessman. “Practically all the money received from the various sources went into Nye’s somewhat capacious pockets and it was an exceedingly difficult matter to get it out in a methodical and accurate manner.” Poor health forced Nye to leave Laramie in 1883, but he left an enduring legacy.
The Boomerang survived and persists today as Laramie’s only local newspaper.
By Judy Knight
Source: Laramie Plains Museum, Boomerang Collection
Caption: Undated photo of W.E. Chaplin, who knew and worked for most of Laramie’s early newspaper editors.