I’ve been thinking about local news a lot lately. You have probably heard about a lot of newspapers closing across the country or being bought out by media conglomerates that slash the newsroom staff and mostly just want to show us ads instead of actual news.
For many years now, my stepmother has been helping out with proofreading the Lake City Silver World newspaper in Colorado. Every Wednesday night, she gets a hard copy draft of the paper and checks it for spelling, grammar, and typos. The work of keeping this small-town weekly paper going has been a true labor of love by several people in Lake City, and most of all, by Grant Houston, who founded the paper in 1978 and still keeps it going to this day. Grant has done an enormous amount of work over his career documenting the history of the town as it happens and also preserving the past through his work at the Hinsdale County Historical Society. Usually, he’s the one doing the interviewing, but I really wanted to hear his own stories about his life and work documenting a small town every single day.
Recent Issues of the Lake City Silver World
Kate: Okay, I'm here with Grant Houston, who is the editor and publisher of the Silver World newspaper in Lake City, Colorado. Today, we're going to talk a little bit about his early life, how he got into the newspaper business, which I'm really curious about. So welcome to the podcast, Grant.
Grant: Thank you for the invite.
Kate: I know you were born and raised here, right, in Lake City?
Grant: Born in Gunnison and came here when I was six weeks old.
Kate: Oh really? Okay. So, your parents were from Gunnison?
Grant: No, dad was a game warden and was stationed in Gunnison.
Kate: I see, okay.
Grant: And they were so lawless in Lake City that they said we better transfer you from Gunnison to Lake City.
Kate: Lawless? Okay.
Grant: All those Texans and some Arizonans were catching too many fish and poaching animals regardless of whether it was hunting season or not. I think it's interesting because dad was in on that cusp as Lake City changed from a backwater mining community to a tourist town.
Kate: I see, that was in the 50s right?
Grant: Right, and the population was increasing.
Kate: So, then the mining. I know that that declined. Did it decline in the ‘30s?
Grant: Probably declined after 1900. By 1910, we were pretty well over with. I think I've told you, Lake City had great expectations in the 1870s. But they weren't realized. We didn't live up to those expectations. The ore here wasn't as pronounced or readily mineable as they thought. So, a lot of that in the 1870s was pure promotion, and we didn't live up to it. So, a brief period in the 1870s when …
Kate: Like a boomtown?
Grant: When we were the boomtown.
Kate: Bust immediately?
Grant: But we never lived up to expectations.
Kate: Okay, I see. By then, the 50s, I've heard stories about, you know, I guess it was would have been pretty cheap for people to move here then, land and property.
Grant: Abandoned houses. You could have just picked a house along Main Street.
Kate: You could have just grabbed whatever you wanted. So, your parents moved here when you were a baby.
Grant: 1955.
Kate: 1955. Did they move into this house? I heard you grew up in this house.
Grant: No. there was a game warden’s house. It's where Wee Care is today on Henson Street.
Kate: Oh yeah, I know where that is.
Grant: But they've torn that down. None of that exists now. But there was a cabin there that was seasonally occupied by game wardens and then enlarged for my dad and his family, and that became his year-round residence starting in 19, probably, 56.
Kate: What was it like for you as a kid to be here?
Grant: The local kids had their parents were those who were poaching year-round. It was more the visitors from Texas that were catching too many fish, but the locals tended to get subsist throughout the year by poaching. So, in first grade, I came home and asked my parents, “What does fuzz mean?” Because they were calling me the fuzz's son. They correlated that with law enforcement, when in fact, Dad was a game warden. He had a lot of empathy. If a family really needed that meat, he would look the other way. But if they were just trophy for an antler or a head, he didn't have much patience for that
Kate: So he would go after them.
You can see the transformation that's going on. Lake City never had a resident game warden until my dad. So, look at the transition that's taking place at that point. Population’s increasing. Summer is increasingly popular with visitors from Texas and adjoining states. So, a game warden was a necessary component of that.
Kate: Yeah, that makes sense.
Grant: They started the school here. My mom started the first kindergarten. They hadn't had a kindergarten until then. So my mom, Betty, was the kindergarten teacher. I think there was probably seven of us in that initial kindergarten class in 1960s. I would have been five.
Kate: Did she have a background in teaching?
Grant: Yeah, she had some, a degree in it eventually. But at that point, I think she had just a lot of classes. It was a bit of a radical concept. It was held in the old schoolhouse, which they've now torn down. They made room in part of the high school room. One of Mom's first deals was to take empty cans, and we played supermarket and were not very quiet.
So, she immediately had problems with the other teachers about us rambunctious kids.
Kate: You were too loud.
Grant: But again, don't you see that as the change in Lake City that was going on, the very first kindergarten. They may have had one at the turn of the century, but certainly nothing generations prior to my mom suggesting that, and now it's an essential part of the school program. You have preschool and kindergarten. It's just taken for granted now, but it was a little bit radical at that time.
Kate: Where was the school then?
Grant: Same location that it is today, that's 6th and Gunnison Avenue, is where that's located.
Kate: I guess at some point, didn't the high school was that moved or they made the kids go to Gunnison?
Grant: Right. At that time, though, it was a first through 12th grade, and there were all of 19 students, so, a very, very small school at that rate. As the school grew, and they outgrew that space, they began sending kids to Gunnison, and they would commute. It started with high school in about 1967, and then it was increased to also include middle school, and there was a bus route at that point. A bus went from Lake City and picked up students along the way and ended up in Gunnison and then brought them back.
Kate: That would be a long day, I guess.
Grant: That would be a long day.
Kate: You did that too when you were in high school?
Grant: Yeah, minimally, not a lot. My folks then,nDad stayed as the game warden here. They were eventually divorced, my parents. Dad stayed as the game warden, and Mom and I would move to Gunnison in the winter.
Kate: So, you just lived there?
Grant: I was a Gunnison student from the seventh grade through high school. My first, kindergarten through sixth, though, was a product of the Lake City schools.
Kate: Was that like a big change to move up there?
Grant: Yeah, tremendous. I was just used to the small town.
Kate: New kids,
Grant: Right. it's so
Kate: I didn't realize it's so much colder up there than it is here.
Grant: You see what it is lately?
Kate: Yeah, it's crazy how cold it is up there.
Grant: My cat has missed me while I was in Montana.
Kate: Clearly, yeah.
Grant: You are the nicest cat.
Kate: You graduated in the 60s, I guess, or no, 70s?
Grant: 1973.
Kate: What did you do after that?
Grant: So, I edited the school newspaper in my high school year, La Remuda, and that came out once a month, and it seemed like an hellacious amount of work, Kate, to put out maybe an eight-page paper once a month. I said, “How would you ever do anything bigger than that?”
So then, after high school, I entered Western State, which was a college at that point in Gunnison. They immediately drafted me to edit the paper there. So, I was the youngest newspaper student at school. I had only just started, and so for my sophomore and junior years, I was the editor of this Top of the World, which had a long history. It was 50. We had the 50th anniversary while I was down there.
Kate: How did you get interested in doing the newspaper stuff in high school?
Grant: Even here, we had a newsletter that was put out when I was in sixth grade. They asked me to write a story, and I enjoyed writing that story so much. So really, my journalistic career dates back to sixth grade in Lake City, and they were doing it on a mimeograph thing. You remember that?
Kate: Just for the school or for the whole town?
Grant: Just the school, and that was the Slumgullion Gazette.
Kate: That’s a great name.
Grant: So, look at my trajectory: Slumgullion Gazette, La Remuta in Gunnison, Top of the World at the college.
Kate: You just kept going.
Grant: So, you can see I've done this the majority of my life.
Kate: That makes sense. I heard that there was no newspaper here for quite a while.
Grant: The last the newspaper went out in 1938, and that was the Silver World. It had started in 1875 and was the oldest newspaper on the Western Slope.
Kate: Oh wow, okay.
Grant: So, that's quite a loss when that happened. But look how low we dipped. If I told you that, you know, that mining was pretty much over by 1910, that paper struggled along until ’38 but saw the beginning of tourism, though. It was reporting on tourist events by the time it went out of business.
And then, there were several short revivals. There was a short revival of the Lake City Tribune in 1946, and that may have lasted a year or two. Then a guy by the name of Jim Bishop started the Lake City Pioneer, and that would have been in July of 1976. It was weekly, and it operated until 1979. So, say, there was two papers there for a while. I had started the upstart Silver World in 1978.
Kate: What made you want to do that?
Grant: Well, I think it's part in history. There was a need to document how the town was changing, and it was an important time in the town. Those ‘70s, we saw a big influx of capital, and there was a fair amount of investment going on here. I was interested in documenting that.
Kate: This other paper that was going, how was it different than what you wanted to do? The Pioneer, I guess?
Grant: They primarily promoted history in that, which I do too. I like history as well as the next person. But I thought I could cover better the current events that were going on. It was a big deal to become the county, the official county newspaper, so then you get legals. So, I did that after a year. You had to be in publication for a full year, and I accomplished that in 1978.
Kate: Where did you work out of here? Was it the same place you are now? The same spot?
Grant: Yeah, I started that paper in the exact same, I've expanded a little bit now, we're a two-office outfit. It was a one office for a long time. So, what you would do, you'd have a manual typewriter, not even electric at that point. Type out those stories, rip out that page, and throw it on the floor. I can remember the floor just covered with crumpled papers. Type it up, hand type that article, whether it was a local items, or a report on a commissioner's meeting, or a town meeting, or a flood that had occurred.
Then on schedule, every Thursday, you'd truck it, you'd go down yourself to Gunnison. The Gunnison Country Times allowed me a space down there, and they had people that typed up the articles into a printable format. We'd wax it. It was a hand wax deal. I never got in on hot lead. I never did that at all. I've always been on the cold, paste-up deal. You'd have a separate machine for the headlines. You'd have halftones that the pictures were turned into.
So, it was a long day. Imagine this. You show up with your sheaf of papers. You'll hand it to the typesetters. You start the layout. You've got your blank pages. You send off the halftones. You think about the headlines you're going to do and then use hot wax to paste it onto those pages.
Kate: Wow, okay.
Grant: Then you get it done, and they turn it into a negative the whole pages then they I'm not even sure what that process was. But then it was onto metal plates that went on to the press. You print, how many, ever a thousand? Fifteen hundred? Then you've got a stack of it, and then you've got the address a graph and the papers are individually addressed to Stewart in Lake City at P.O. Box whatever.
So, look at the long day from the start when it was just the sheaf of papers to it getting labeled and bundled.
Kate: All that process in one day.
Grant: One day.
Kate: What day was that still Thursday?
Grant: Thursday, and I think we were always a Friday publication. It's phenomenal what we could accomplish in one day. That was a long day, and I'd be back after dark. Then you mail them the next day and distribute them.
I had paper boys when I first started the paper, but that didn't last very long. The post office did a good job, and we also had over-the-counter sales.
Kate: You were doing this basically all by yourself? You were writing everything yourself?
Grant: Pretty much. My mom was alive at that point, and she was very dedicated. She would do the proofing for me down there. I've still got the stool that she would sit on down there and then as the paper grew, then I had an associate or two and some reporters.
Kate: When you were first starting, I guess you were really young, right? You were just right out of college.
Grant: Yeah, I was 23.
Kate: But everybody knew you here, I guess.
Grant: Because you'd grown up here.
Kate: Did anybody, did you have any problems when you first started, or were people excited to have another paper?
Grant: I think they were relieved to have a paper here. I was a bit naïve, and I didn't realize the tensions that would result from covering meetings that were contentious meetings. I was probably a little bit naive in that sense, but you just learn as you go.
Kate: I'm curious about being that you grew up here and people know you, but you have to go report on these political, like the town council and those kind of meetings.
Grant: And try to be impartial.
Kate: Did you ever make anybody mad?
Grant: Oh yeah, constantly mad.
Kate: All the time?
Grant: But I was a little bit used to that from the college paper.
Kate: You dealt with that too.
Grant: So see, I had some experience.
Kate: Yeah, and you worked really hard to be impartial and nonpartisan,
Grant: Get both sides of the picture.
Kate: Well, what in those early days? Were there any big stories that happened that you were really proud of?
Grant: We won a lot of awards right from the beginning in that small newspaper category.
Kate: I saw that in the office along the wall.
Grant: If you ask me what are the biggest ones that I've ever covered. When our sheriff was killed. He was shot in 1993.
Kate: Wow, I didn't know that. I don't think I've heard that story.
Grant: Obviously, that was big, and then the people that shot him, there was a big search. They searched all the houses, and they later found them dead.
Kate: That sounds like a huge story.
Grant: I'm thinking about other big stories that I covered. Alunite, there was a proposal that they were going to mine alunite in Red Mountain, which would have essentially leveled that 13,000-foot peak down to nothing. So, there was a big controversy there, and we came out against that. That's one of the few where I didn't try to be either way, although we would report the meetings regardless. But there was a huge citizen effort to not to have that, and yet there were people in Lake City that looked at it as a promising economics on a year-round basis. That was a bit controversial. Environmentally, it would have been a catastrophe. Can you imagine mining that, building, and that whole mountain down?
Kate: That would be terrible.
Grant: So, that was a big event as well. Our bank opened in 1982. We hadn't had a bank since 1914.
Kate: Wow. Did people have to go up to Gunnison? Oh my gosh.
Grant: But see again, the trajectory that things were increasing. That was the need for a newspaper is to cover all that. The old school was quickly outgrown. There was a controversy, and I was in on that, that we ought to preserve that old school building where I went to school. That was ultimately rejected, and they tore it down and they built the new school at that location. It's been enlarged at least two or three times since then, most recently with a gymnasium.
Kate: It's a great school now. It’s really nice.
Grant: See how important it is to have a paper that we can look back on any of those years? We can look back through the stacks, and that we hopefully have adequately covered those big changes that have been happening here.
Kate: It's true. It's amazing how detailed your paper is for a town of this size. I know that's because you work so hard on it.
Grant: I'm kind of an historian.
Kate: You are.
Grant: You're trying to get all the facts in there.
Kate: Does that ever kind of wear you out to write so much? I mean, I find writing to be kind of, I love it, but it's exhausting, you know?
Grant: Yeah, I genuinely like it. There's some things I enjoy more than others, and I like these personality features a great deal.
Kate: You always do such a good job with all that, and then local items.
Grant: It's kind of a science in itself. Local items is easy to write because it's just snippets. It doesn't have to have a beginning, and a middle part, and an ending. You get, for the amount of space, you can throw in a lot of material there, provided you're inquisitive and you go out and try to round this up. So, if Lorie Stewart burned her pot roast, see, that could end up.
Kate: It could be news.
Grant: It could be in the local items right there.
Kate: I know, I think it's really fun to read through those and to see what people are doing.
Grant: No great literary talent there
Kate: But they’re fun.
Grant: But you pack in a lot in a minimal amount of space.
Kate: Let's see, when did you start using computers and stuff to do the paper?
Grant: Okay, so up to that point, you know, I've been going to Gunnison with my sheaf of hand-typed articles. We had to because we were just aping what the Gunnison paper was doing. I want to say that was about 1986 that they switched to Macs. So, we got a Mac then.
Kate: Yeah, you just did what they did.
Grant: So, I think from about 1986. Of course, there's been revolutions in computers since then.
Kate: That made it easier to do for you.
Grant: Yeah. Although it came with its own challenges.
Kate: Issues, yeah. There’s still a lot to learn.
Grant: When the computer doesn't work, the program gets contaminated. To the point where we could also scan in photos, so no more PMTs of a photo, that's turned into dots. Now, we're scanning it on the computer and building copy, flowing it around it. Revolutionary, great fun. We do all that stuff that we would have normally gone to Gunnison to do.
Kate: Yeah, and you just send it there now electronically and just go pick it up.
Grant: We haven't figured out how to electronically, to have the hard copies delivered. So, we still, and in fact.
Kate: It still takes some human power.
Grant: That's why I scheduled my return yesterday. I was just right on time that I could bring the papers back.
Kate: Yeah, that makes sense.
Grant. But you have some scary road conditions at times.
Kate: Have there been times when you haven’t been able to get it because of a storm or something?
Grant: I think they shut the road once. I can remember one time, and that would have been about 1980s. But no, they have good road maintenance here.
Kate: They do.
Grant: You just have to take it slow.
Kate: Well, what do you think is the hardest part of running the paper for you?
Grant: Economically, a lot of times, the ads don't equate to making a money-making event. But again, if you're set in your mind that you're doing a service and recording things for history, that's almost secondary. But finances have always been a challenge, how to make that paper pay for itself. Subscribers have always been very loyal to us. We've never had any trouble with subscribers. But the ads, that can be pretty hard to come by. We run papers that may have as little as 17 % ads. Whereas, I think if it was a money-making outfit, you ought to have probably half. But we would rarely, and I don't like the looks of that, if it was half ads and half pictures and articles, it doesn't come out very good. It looks like a shopper to me.
Kate: I can see that being a struggle because this town is so small, but I guess what I'm kind of curious is like the percentage of people who subscribe from out of town. Is that quite a lot?
Grant: A good percentage. Of course, now we do it online, so there's people that want it instantaneously. If you like the hard copy and the smell of ink, it could take two weeks for it to get to a place like Phoenix or Tucson or heaven forbid even further afield. We have a fair number, maybe. This is off the top of my head, maybe seven or eight hundred that are mailed hard copies. We did that this morning. We labeled those. The labels are now produced in the office, and then maybe three or four hundred that are electronic that are sent out, and then over-the-counter sales as well.
Summer residents have always been very loyal to the paper. If you were here for two weeks or three months in the summer, they invariably would want to get the newspaper. That was important to me at an early point that I could count on subscribers. I think we were only charging ten dollars, eight dollars a year.
Kate: In the beginning?
Grant: And now we're up to like fifty. But look at the cost of postage.
Kate: You should probably be raising it.
Grant: No comparison to what it was in 1978.
Kate: It's much more expensive. Yeah, there's so much work to be done to make it happen. There's a lot of angles to it. What's your favorite part of doing this?
Grant: Getting to know people, and you can be nosy and ask questions.
Kate: It’s a good excuse to be nosy?
Grant: And think about the variety of what running a paper is. Now, tomorrow there's a basketball game in our new gymnasium. So, A, It's good to encourage those kids. B, It's fun to have a sporting event to cover. All those years, I didn't have any experience in college or high school. I had sportswriters, so I'm not I'm not a good sportswriter, but I'm a tolerable sports photographer.
Kate: You still go and do it?
Grant: I'll have that camera out and make some rough notes and then maybe ask the coach to help me as far as writing what the, who did a spectacular, I don't even know what you call the various jumps that they're doing. But I never had any reason to, and even in high school, I had a sportswriter. One of my best friends was my sports editor, and he made a bad estimate once in which he said that our local Gunnison team was going to lose, and the coach was so outraged. This is where you're getting beginning to get education on how to run a newspaper. So outraged that he asked, he demanded that my sports editor stand in front of the school and eat that piece of paper.
Kate: Really?
Grant: They did lose that game, as I recall it. He and I were the best of friends, and we often recalled that. But those coaches who were godlike at that time, you didn't question it. He was a good sport. He ate that piece of paper with the estimate that we were going to lose, so see, that that's a learning experience. I've learned the hard way on how to, so we don't usually make estimates on who's going to win or who's going to lose.
Kate: Did you have to take a photo of it and put it in the next issue?
Grant: I think we did. I think we were in that picture.
Kate: That’s funny.
Grant: All education, Kate, are you learning from all these experiences?
Kate: Let's talk about the Historical Society. This is, it's the County Historical Society, right?
Grant: And town.
Kate: And town. Okay. When did you get involved in that?
Grant: Well, not me personally, but in the ‘50s, we began to see an outflow of historic artifacts. The one that broke the camel's back was the old Silver World printing press. The one that was used for that very first paper in 1875 was sold or bartered to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.
Kate: Really?
Grant: It had managed to stay here from 1875 until about 19, maybe, 60 or 59. Old timers in Lake City were outraged. We were losing our heritage. So, I kind of grew up hearing the bemoaning about the fact that our heritage was disappearing. The Women's Club, even in the 1950s, started a small museum. It didn't go through because that's contingent on who's the officer at the time. So, old-timers talked us into starting that Historical Society in 1973, which is kind of late. They should have done it much earlier than that. Another fellow and I, Tom Ortenburger, we were the co-founders of the Historical Society.
Again, very naive and just pennies. Didn't have any revenue really coming in. So, you start collecting, and then you start begging for a space where you display it. Real estate, even at that time, was hard to come by, and we really blossomed in about 1988 when we bought, we were able to through a fundraising drive, to buy our current location, which is a stone historic building. So, not only is it a roof over your head, but you're preserving a worthwhile artifact.
So, it gives me a lot of satisfaction. Things that wouldn't be here now, Kate, are because we tend to be hoarders.
Kate: Yes. It's true. You have to be.
Grant: Whole households, we've out whole rooms and taken it over to that museum. Paperwork, think archives, think of newspapers. We've got collections of everything that you can name, mining machinery.
Kate: Did you ever get anything back that had gone away outside of town?
Grant: Occasionally, but then that's harder.
Kate: Once it’s gone, it’s gone.
Grant: There's no way to get that printing press back. We still salivate over that. But it's pleasing to know that we've saved things that wouldn't be otherwise, and I've had a lot of support. I can't take any credit for it. I've kind of directed how it should grow and enlarge. But great citizen support, primarily not from the year-rounders as much as the summer people.
Kate: They like to help out there?
Grant: They volunteer to run the museum. They volunteer to catalog things. They set up exhibits.
Kate: What are they interested in? I'm curious, the out-of-town people, what are their favorite parts of the history?
Grant: Things that they like to focus on, mining, obviously. They like the mining history. They like the boom days in Lake City when there were 37 saloons. There are people that were probably watching Gunsmoke as kids or even as adults. So, they're reliving what they had seen on television, only being able to touch it. There's a tactile aspect to it here.
Kate: Yeah, for sure.
We bought and traded to buy that original building, the stone building we're in now for less than $100,000. That would have been about 1988, and we've grown to the point now we're restoring this railroad car.
Kate: Yeah, I saw that.
Grant: That was used on the Lake City line, and it's probably going to cost close to half a million dollars. Just that one artifact. Look how we've grown in those years.
Kate: You have no trouble raising the money?
Grant: It's always a challenge. Yeah, it is. But again, those summer people.
Kate: They bring in the funds.
Grant: They tend to be the funds. We've also spearheaded preservation efforts outside of the town. If there was a falling down mining building, we've jumped in and done that. So, there's a number of buildings, not only in Lake City, but on the outskirts and further afield in remote areas of the county that wouldn't be there now if it wasn't for those early preservation efforts.
We've encouraged publications. There are publications on historic homes of Lake City, recipes of pioneers, cemeteries, who's buried in our cemeteries. We've sponsored those publications. So that's the literary aspect of it.
Kate: Yeah, that’s great. I feel like the most famous story here is Al Packer.
Grant: Which we get tired of actually.
Kate: Everybody knows that.
Grant: We get tired of that. Although we have an exhibit that's year-round on just Al Packer.
Kate: I'm curious, what are your favorite more obscure stories or history moments in Lake City?
Grant: Well, Susan B. Anthony was here. She came trooping through here in September 1877 because this was a promising mining town and actually spent the night and lectured the next day on the importance of giving the women the right to vote.
Kate: To the miners?
Grant: It went to election in 1877 and was defeated. It was a little bit,\
Kate: It was a statewide thing about women getting the right to vote?
Grant: All the counties in the state in 1877 voted on it. Can you guess the county that the sole county Kate that passed, that women ought to get the right to vote?
Kate: Was it here?
Grant: No.
Kate: Where?
Grant: Boulder.
Kate: Boulder. Well, that makes sense. I should have guessed that.
Grant: Which is traditionally the most liberal county in the state. Don't you think even in 1877 that was the case?
Kate: I have a question. I thought maybe you might know this. I was walking a few years ago around the Pete’s Lake area, and I saw there's like a little road, and it's called Slaughter Gulch.
Grant: Slaughterhouse.
Kate: I just wondered how did they get that name? There was an actual, there was a slaughterhouse?
Grant: There was a slaughterhouse down there. You had the ranchers selling their cattle in Lake City. They had to be processed before they went to the market. So, we had a number of slaughterhouses, and they all ended up toward that end of town. That Gulch recalls that.
Kate: I was curious because I thought it just said Slaughter Gulch, and I was wondering if it was somebody's name or actual slaughtering happening there.
Grant: Going back to fascinating newspaper stories that I've been involved in when they dug up the remains of Packer's victims.
Kate: When did that happen?
Grant: So that would have been 19 ... Don't get old, Kate. ’89, I want to say. There was no consensus that they were actually buried there. There had been a memorial since 1923, but some of the locals said, “Oh, there's nobody buried there. That stone is just on a vacant spot of property.”
So, an archaeologist, a forensic expert from George Washington University, Dr. Starrs, came up with a crew of archaeologists that summer dug down four feet and found large flat stones covering a shallow grave with the remains of those men.
Kate: So, they were there.
Grant: Under there. Five, four skulls, all with multiple insults from either a hatchet or a knife, and arm bones and leg bones where the skin had systematically been scraped off. No teeth marks, Kate, in case you were wondering whether it showed teeth marks, like an ear of corn. But the flesh was systematically removed.
Kate: Well, what did they do with the bones?
Grant: They were reburied. They analyzed those and they could tell the age and their health. Then after that, they were returned and reburied at the same spot.
Kate: Wow, you know, that must have been when I started coming out here as a kid was in ‘80s, and I remember there was this big interest in Al Packer. There were Al Packer t-shirts at the store.
Grant: And there still are probably.
Kate: I'm wondering if that was why, it was because that happened.
Grant: I think it probably was an outgrowth of that. We have a collection of t-shirts at the museum just for modern history.
Kate: Good, I'm glad you saved those.
Grant: Some of them were quite clever.
Kate: We had some of then. They were funny. One was like a cereal box, I don’t know if it was Wheaties or something like that.
Grant: We had Packer Days at that point. That was a Chamber of Commerce event where you would eat hamburgers fashioned in the shape of a human being, and there would be a coffin race. See, but.
Kate: Why did they stopped doing that?
Grant: The interest is waning. So, it's interesting how, and maybe it'll come back again in the future. But after that exhumation of those victims, it was a wildfire.
Kate: Well, so what do you, I mean, there's been a lot of changes in this town. Do you think have been? I mean besides the tourism stuff, are there any other big things that you think are important that have happened?
Grant: Well, the water and sewer system has been totally revamped. We had a very inadequate sewer plant for years. It's marvelous to look at the improvements that have taken place in that length of time. There's going to be a separate addition to the courthouse that will be breaking ground, and we'll have a picture of the commissioners with their shovels. But you'd like to think there's a trajectory of improvement, and I'm always the optimist.
Kate: Okay, that’s good.
Grant: Not the pessimist, Kate.
Kate: Have you thought much about the future of the paper, and what would you like to see happen with it?
Grant: I'd hope it would be continued.
Kate: Yeah. You want to be on that? Do you have any thoughts?
Grant: I don't. I don't have any thoughts beyond that.
Kate: You just want to see it going strong.
Grant: I turned 70 in April. I can't do this forever, Kate.
Kate: I know. I heard you kind of want to retire.
Grant: Other things I'd like to do.
Kate: What would you like to do ideally?
Grant: Well, spend more time in Montana for one.
Kate: You want to be up there?
Grant: I have a good feeling with my dad and I weren't really close. See, they were divorced. I stayed here in Lake City.
Kate: When did he move up there?
Grant: He moved there in the mid-90s and had a good retirement and really enjoyed that. So, the fact I didn't spend a lot of time with him as an adult, I kind of enjoy being immersed by his house and surroundings up there. I don't know how long that will last, even this past week I enjoyed that.
Kate: Even though it was cold. I guess you're used to that.
Grant: And the fire, you always have a fire going on.
Kate: Well, is there anything else you want to tell us?
Grant: No, I hope I haven't rattled on too long.
Kate: No, that was a good run.
Grant: Did we cover enough that you can come up with something?
Kate: It's nice to learn all about the early days of the paper. That's what I was curious about.
Grant: That gives you a taste for what I've been focused on all these years.
Kate: Well, thank you.
Grant: The other thing is, okay, so the paper goes out in 1938, and then there's a couple of brief revivals. Then if, as an historian, what you want to be aware of is there was a Lake City News column in the Gunnison paper. Every week, there would be, and it was kind of a coup to be asked to write the Lake City News column, and they paid a moderate amount for that. But those women who wrote that, that's our only good history now is to look back at Lake City news columns.
Kate: Just that one column. That was weekly?
Grant: That was weekly, and it was real folksy, even more so than anything I would do here. That's an important historical research element now.
Kate: I didn’t know that.
Grant: I've got a pretty much a full collection of Lake City news columns that were written.
Kate: You’ve been collecting them.
Grant: They talk of a mine was opening, or a house burned down, or a family moved in, or a family moved out, or you can trace the summer residents as they begin to show up.
Kate: I do have one more question. I've been curious. Do you know how the Texas people started coming here? Is there somebody from Texas who first came? Or what the draw is, why so many people from Texas like to come here? I'm just kind of curious why that is.
Grant: So, you have a guy by the name of Richard Wupperman, and Hildegard is his wife. They're well-to-do Texans. They live in Seguin, and they started coming up, and they bring their Pierce Arrow in the 1920s. The roads were so bad, they had to strap that Pierce Arrow onto a flatbed of the train and then offload it.
The roads were so bad, he just stayed around Lake City, and he loved the fishing, so he would go on the train. The train was in such poor shape at that point and didn't have much customers that it would drop him off at a certain spot and then agree to pick him up that evening with his mess of fish and bring him back to Lake City. They brought their maid from Seguin with them, and they’d cook up large messes of fish, and then they invited their Texas friends.
Kate: I see. That’s how it all started.
Grant: So, you get the idea. That may be a little oversimplification but that's the one I would point to.
Kate: He was the first.
Grant: And they bought an old derelict Victorian house, fixed it up. It was the start of a number of people that hadn't thought old houses had any future. But Wuppermans did, and so there's Wupperman Campground at Lake San Cristobal named for that couple. He died in 1949, and she continued, died in the 1970s. But I think there's your start of Texas predominating here.
Kate: Yeah, that's interesting. It seems like predominantly Texas, and I mean for my people I know, Oklahoma.
Grant: And fairly easy to get here, I guess, or maybe the roads allowed it. I think the challenge was Slumgullion Pass probably because that wasn't even paved until then.
Kate: Yeah, they would have been coming from that direction.
Grant: Yeah, they came over Slum and that wasn't paved until the 1980s, entirely.
Kate: Maybe they went all the way around. That's interesting,
Grant: In the ‘40s, would have had gambling was going on here. You would have had slot machines. The state hadn't extended its laws to remote places like Lake City. I think that was an attraction. You were coming back to a very remote part of the Old West here that you wouldn't have gotten in Colorado Springs or Pueblo or any of these others. But these small little remote towns, it took a while for society to get here.
Kate: I'm curious too about when did that,is there an official rule that there cannot be any chain businesses here? Or it just never happened?
Grant: I just don't think it's ever happened. I don't think there's a
Kate: For some reason I thought that there was like a local law or something.
Grant: No, I don't think so. I just don't think the money's to be made here. It wouldn't appeal to a franchise.
Kate: Why do you think Lake City hasn't quite had the same boom and development that other places?
Grant: I don't think we can take credit.
Kate: Is it just the geography?
Grant: It's 97 % public land, the county. You can only develop 3 % of this land. That's the whole thing.
Kate: That’s a really tiny amount.
Grant: We can't take any credit for no sprawl here. The land doesn't exist. That's the whole reason, so it's just the geography and the land distribution. That's very important to who we are in the past and who we are today.
Kate: I also read that Hinsdale County is the most remote county in the 48 states. Have you heard that?
Grant: Yeah, I have.
Kate: Do you know how they figured that out?
Grant: I think we reported on that. Distance to a major metropolitan area. That may be oversimplified. I can't remember. We reported on that at the time.
Kate: Did they mean Gunnison, is that the nearest? Or do they mean Denver?
Grant: Or Grand Junction.
Kate: Something like that. Okay, that makes sense. I thought it maybe had something to do with the fact that there were no, there's no stoplights in the county, right?
Grant: I think it might have something to do about areas that don't have a single road in them, the amount of remote, open land, and there's no roads there.
Kate: There's a lot of that here.
Grant: Yeah, a lot of that.
Grant: So you could see why we'd be in the top of the list.
Kate: Did you do a lot of hiking and all that stuff?
Grant: Yeah, as a kid. As a newspaper type, I don't have the time.
Kate: When you were younger, what were your favorite places to go out?
Grant: I like digging old bottles. So I got, there's the history element again. That that was really early. I liked to innertube, where you'd have an innertube in the river, and you'd go down to the bridge that you're going to cross. You didn't want to go under that, ideally.
Kate: Wow. That water must have been really cold.
Grant: Yeah, that was real refreshing, and you'd start up right below the falls. There's an upper falls here, you know.
Kate: That sounds fun.
Grant: Then very shocking when you hit Henson Creek because you can imagine how cold the water in Henson Creek is, and when that meets the Lake Fork, that was very exhilarating. That was a big thing for us as kids. We had all had innertubes, multiple inner tubes.
Kate: That’s funny. That sounds like a great childhood you probably had running around here.
Grant: Yeah, it was good.
Kate: Very idyllic.
Grant: A little bit of a challenge once I went to Gunnison. That was a lot more people than I was used to. Yeah, didn't get to go out much in the winter.
Kate: I'd come back up here on the weekends even when I lived in Gunnison.
Kate: You did, to see your dad.
Grant: Okay, Kate. I hope I haven't chatted on too long.
Kate: Oh, you haven’t.
Grant: You were very gracious.
Kate: Thank you. Thank you so much.
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