There was plenty of blood, sweat and uncertainty involved, to be sure, but there was no mystery, no magic to it.

The blueprint for building a long-lasting community in America - the way camps became towns and towns became cities - was established early.

By the mid-1800s, any ink-splattered, green-eyeshade-wearing printer of gazettes in such frontier jumping-off places as St. Louis or New Orleans or North Platte might have set the type and cranked off a thousand pamphlets titled "How To Build A Town" and sold them for a nickel to every gold digger and homesteader headed west.

Start with a mercantile.

Form a church.

Add a newspaper.

It happened just about that way in Denver 150 years ago. Or just a few editions short of that anniversary.

I wasn't there to witness how it all began, of course. But I worked 30 years for the Rocky, as Colorado came to claim it. I worked for five editors in two different buildings, and I know a little about its skeletons - literally - its heritage and what has been one of the longest newspaper feuds in this nation.

Unfortunately, sadly, I will tell you how it ended.

In 1858, Uncle Dick Wooton's log store was the only two-story structure among the settlements of Denver City, Auraria and St. Charles. Minister William Goode was sowing the seeds of the Denver City Methodist Episcopal Mission, today known as Trinity Church.

When 28-year-old William Newton Byers rolled into town with a printing press in the back of a wagon he had driven from Omaha, he first set up shop on the top floor of Wooton's store.

The night of April 23, 1859, Byers and his crew of three printed the first Rocky Mountain News, a single sheet of four pages.

Denver looked like it was here to stay. No one was quite ready to say the same about the Rocky. Certainly five years later, if some sodden observer, standing on the banks of swollen Cherry Creek watching as the Rocky's building and printing press bobbed past in the tide of less substantial flood debris, dared to wager the newspaper would last so long, he would have been swiftly covered by the umbrellas of bettors stampeding down Market Street.

Scrapping for King Kong status

So how did the newspaper survive its early, impossible years? It was useful.

Shopkeepers and sellers of liver cures had to advertise. Men wanted jobs. Jobs needed men. The new territorial government voted on something every day. Gold begged to be uncovered. The circus was coming. Men were choosing sides for a civil war. Someone had to push the burning garbage dumps out of town. The railroad was coming. Everyone wanted to know what the Indians were doing. Women wanted the vote. People liked to gossip.

Before the end of the century the Rocky's circulation was more than 25,000 - even at a time when Denver was bursting with newspaper competition. By 1890, the city's population had reached 107,000 and it had six dailies, 27 weeklies and 22 monthlies to choose from.

Byers owned the paper only 19 years before selling. Four other owners followed, among them U.S. Sen. Thomas M. Patterson. In 1906, the Scripps-McRae League joined the fray by starting the daily Denver Express. The cost of fighting so many upstarts steadily eroded the Rocky's position of dominance. By the mid-1920s, the paper's circulation was 30,000; its fiercest rival, The Denver Post, was selling 160,000. Scripps-McRae evolved into Scripps- Howard, and in 1926 the chain bought the Rocky. It might have guessed that the real newspaper war was about to begin.

The Cincinnati-based owner merged the Rocky's afternoon stepchild, The Denver Times, with the struggling Express to create the Denver Evening News in order to compete head-on with The Post.

The evening Post counterattacked by launching the Morning Post. In the next two years the two newspaper gorillas spent an estimated $5 million, each trying to claim the title of King Kong. It worked for the Rocky - for a time. Daily circulation climbed to 40,000 daily and 94,000 Sunday.

But the "war" couldn't last, at least not on the business front. The Rocky, which had spent $3 million, killed its evening edition; The Post folded its morning paper. Back then, it was called a truce. Seventy years later, a similar joint business agreement would be called the same thing but would have far greater consequence.

Reborn in tabloid form

In the 1930s, both businesses slipped back into their morning-evening ways, which meant the Rocky went back to losing money. The two editorial staffs, always as different as day and night, fought like mutts for stories every day. Both newspapers were full-size broadsheets. But Scripps-Howard lost another half-million dollars - Great Depression dollars - keeping the paper afloat.

In 1940, Scripps-Howard dispatched a new editor to Denver. The staff believed Jack Foster was coming to close the paper. Instead, the fedora-wearing Foster ordered better comics, more features, resuscitated the paper's local reporting and introduced radio listings.

It wasn't enough. Maybe Foster hadn't come to shut down the paper, but it looked like he might turn off the lights after all.

So how did the newspaper survive its midlife crisis, the impossible years?

It reinvented itself, decades before that became a catchphrase.

Bill Hailey, the Rocky's business manager, had an idea. Maybe it came to him one morning over breakfast, peering through horned-rim spectacles at his newspaper, or riding the bus to work on Welton Street. Make the Rocky a tabloid, Hailey said - smaller, easier to handle. Advertisers would get better display. (We'll come back to this.) And at almost half the size of The Post, it would use much less newsprint.

On April 13, 1942 - 83 years, almost to the day, after Byers' first edition - the Rocky printed its first newspaper similar to present-day size. A boxed headline and note on the front page explained to readers:

HERE WE ARE!

"At 7:30 last night the first edition of this modern-tempo newspaper rolled from the presses, and a new era in Western journalism began. As Denver has moved into the war effort, so has the Rocky Mountain News moved into an accelerated form reflective of the tremendous currents surging within the heart of this nation.

" . . . We shall try - and will - do better."

It worked. Within five months, circulation shot up to 48,000 daily, 53,500 Sunday. By 1950, the Rocky was at 133,000 copies a day and making The Post nervous. Rocky staffers were calling themselves "the wildcats on Welton Street."

By 1977, The Post's once seemingly untouchable daily circulation lead had shrunk to 6,900 copies.

Hailey guided the business side of the newspaper for 15 years more. When he died in 1965 his body was cremated, and his ashes were interred in the main lobby wall of the Rocky's West Colfax Avenue building. When the newspaper moved to its present location at West Colfax and Broadway in 2006, the ashes were removed and interred elsewhere by the family.

A newsroom on spin cycle

I'd like to tell you the rest of the Rocky's history from personal experience. I joined the paper in 1973 and worked the next 34 years for Scripps in Colorado.

I was hired by sports editor Bob Collins. Two years out of San Francisco State College, I had been stalking Collins for more than a year about a job in Denver, my young wife Julie's hometown.

Yes, stalking is the right word for my pursuit of Collins. I pestered him into an initial interview before a Denver Broncos-San Francisco 49ers exhibition game at Candlestick Park. A few months later while on a ski vacation, I dropped in on him at the paper's offices at 400 W. Colfax Ave. I remember Collins introducing me to Michael Balfe Howard, the wunderkind city editor and son of the Scripps-Howard dynasty, and having the feeling this might be a rite of "final approval." I got the job, and two years later Howard was named editor of the "flagship" paper owned by his family.

Only hours into my first shift as a sports copy editor at the paper, I was swept up in the energy of the Rocky. Hey, I wanted to be a big-time sportswriter; the paper was in a city with pro sports; and I had a view of the best skiing in the world from the newsroom window. I was too green and too self-focused to fully grasp the world I had just entered.

I was quickly drilled in the mantra of the newspaper: The Rocky was local, local, local. It covered all of Colorado. But its mission was to own Denver news. The Post could have the story in Ignacio or Peetz.

The newsroom, with some 160 reporters, photographers, editors, copy editors, assistants, artists, copyboys, was like working in the inside of a washing machine - in spin cycle. Eighteen hours a day, it whirred in perpetual motion, every few minutes spitting reporters and photographers out into the city to get "the story."

I've always been the competitive sort. But the newspaper war between Denver's two dailies was a visceral, pulsing thing. The two staffs have never liked each other much. I learned not to talk too loudly in public places about a story we were working on; the guy next to you on the bus might work for The Post. Sources of possible "scoops" were as sought after as pay raises.

In March 1980, the Rocky squeezed ahead of The Post in daily circulation for the first time in nearly 80 years, printing 316,000 papers. The winds of competition in the city seemed electric.

The public understands competition. But some have never really grasped the intensity of the newspapers' rivalry.

In 1982, I was covering the University of Colorado when it hired a new football coach, Bill McCartney. One day McCartney was wailing on me for a story I had scooped The Post on about his team that he didn't like. The football coach said he didn't understand the scrutiny his program was under.

"I look at The Post," I explained to him, "like you look at Nebraska."

McCartney looked like he'd experienced an epiphany. "Ohhhh," he said, smiling. "Now I get it."

Within a year the Rocky, under the leadership of editor Ralph Looney and general manager William "Bill" Fletcher, wrenched away the all-important Sunday lead with nearly 356,000 circulation.

Both papers were on the brink of launching major new offensives in the hottest newspaper war in the country.

The stakes for the two owners, like Colorado's economic potential, were growing exponentially. The boom in tourism, construction, industry, energy and space exploration, and a promising new source of revenue - "high-tech" - made domination of the advertising and circulation markets critical. At almost any cost, or so some newspaper executives thought.

It was as if the papers' owners could see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or in this case, at the foot of the 16th Street Mall.

In the late 1990s, if possible, the pressure spiraled for "reader-friendly" editorial reports, more advertising coups and gaudier circulation audits.

Both papers were already printing so many full-page ads for "big box" accounts that they had to establish a pecking order for major advertisers to line up in the papers. Color availability on only certain pages complicated the exercise. There was mounting concern, though, among execs at the Rocky that because of its smaller tabloid size, it was netting fewer advertising dollars than the broadsheet Post. The big bosses even allowed themselves - for about 10 seconds - to toy with the idea of reverting to Byers' spread-both-arms- wide format.

The Rocky had crashed the 400,000 circulation barrier and The Post wasn't far behind. But there was a growing belief - in Denver and at the Cincinnati headquarters of what was now the multimedia E.W. Scripps Co. - that the trophy circulation came at too great a price.

Loss of classifieds

So how did the newspaper survive its heyday, the improbable years?

As in 1942, the Rocky decided to take a bold step. It was selling hundreds of thousands of copies at bargain subscription rates - many as low as $3.16 per year, less than a penny a day. It announced a new "metro strategy" of dominating advertising and circulation in the Denver area and virtually conceding rural circulation to The Post. It even reached back in history to grab a throwback version of its own name: the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

Scripps traded two of its smaller papers in coastal California, San Luis Obispo and Monterrey, to the Knight-Ridder chain in exchange for its Daily Camera in Boulder to strengthen the Rocky's new metro strategy. Little did I know I was to become, in sports parlance, a "player to be named later" in the deal.

I had moved through a number of editorial and administrative promotions at the Rocky. But in 1999, no one was more surprised than I when publisher Larry Strutton and Scripps sent me to Boulder as general manager.

At the time, everyone in the newspaper industry was jittery over Y2K and how the turn of the century might affect operations (i.e., costs and revenue). The fear was that the long-scheduled alignment of three zeroes, as in 2000, might somehow infect the giant, highly tuned newspaper body clock.

The New Year passed without a hitch. But it quickly became apparent that the new century - the third in the Rocky's existence - was going to prove a challenging one for all newspapers. Maybe there was something to Y2K after all; classified advertising was disappearing.

The second truce - sort of

"Liners," as those little lines of want ads are known in the industry, have historically been the lifeblood of newspaper revenue and profit. The arrival of the Internet, though, provided a generation of savvy entrepreneurs like Monster.com and Craigslist with just the tool to offer classifieds for free. It was as if someone had pulled the plug on Grand Lake.

Newspapers across the U.S. scrambled - are still scrambling - to create and enhance their own online classified models, but the damage was done.

On May 11, 2000, The Post and the Rocky declared the second truce in their history, this time officially and legally. They forged what is known in the industry as a joint operating agreement, or JOA. The objective was for rival newspapers to merge their business and production operations, thereby reducing expenses, and split revenue. The Denver Newspaper Agency was created to perform this function. The two newsrooms, still owned by MediaNews and Scripps, respectively, continued to independently report the news.

This has been the fate of several former two-newspaper cities such as Birmingham, Ala.; Charleston, S.C.; Evansville, Ind.; Detroit; Las Vegas; Miami; Pittsburgh; and Seattle. In half these cities, one of the papers eventually closed.

As part of the Denver JOA, The Post took over printing the Sunday edition, and the Rocky inherited sole Saturday publication. This put the Rocky at a huge disadvantage because historically the Sunday paper dominates overall circulation, plus the Rocky was saddled with printing the Saturday paper in The Post's broadsheet format - not the favorite of Rocky readers - for production reasons.

If good news travels fast, bad news in the newspaper business travels faster than light. It felt like the first words of the JOA pronouncement reached us in Boulder before Scripps' president completed his sentence in Denver.

My other thought in Boulder at the time was the irony of the timing. Only one month earlier, the Rocky had won its first Pulitzer Prize for its photography during the Columbine High School shooting and aftermath, and the paper was still locked in a virtual tie for the circulation lead. In terms of readership, the paper had never been stronger.

It had never been more useful.

'Status quo is not going to work'

Hindsight, though, proves that the backdrop for these events was the beginning of an economic downturn across America. Retail advertising was in a slump, and the ominous roar of a national housing slump was rushing toward Colorado like a Front Range chinook.

Sept. 11, 2001, may not have had the slightest bearing on the outcome of what by comparison was just a newspaper squabble in Denver. But in my mind's eye, I will forever see those smoking towers in New York as one of the bookmarkers in my life. Things changed. We travel differently; we open the mail more carefully; we stand in longer lines; we're content with $3-a-gallon gas. We went on a flag-waving binge; now, not so much.

And, even though such events have nothing to do with it, Denver will now be a one-newspaper city for the first time in more than 100 years.

Executives at Scripps' two Colorado papers used to joke with their corporate counterparts whenever they came to town, chuckling tongue-in-cheek together that it usually didn't mean good news.

When Rich Boehne, president and CEO of Scripps, arrived in town last Dec. 4, he did not come in the role of Jack Foster.

"We're not here today to close the paper," Boehne told the Rocky newsroom. "We're here today to say the status quo is not going to work."

Boehne estimated that the paper would lose $15 million in 2008. Even more shocking, Rocky editor, president and publisher John Temple wrote later, more than $100 million in classified revenue had been lost since the formation of the JOA.

Circulation had been in a tailspin in the industry for at least a decade. However, in 2007, only eight other states reported higher total newspaper circulation than Colorado. On the day of Scripps' announcement, the Rocky reported daily circulation of 210,000 - about 10,000 more than The Post after discounted papers are stripped away.

Nevertheless, Scripps set an unspecified mid-January deadline for a potential buyer to come forward or the newspaper could be closed.

And that's exactly what happened, with today being the very last edition after almost 150 years.

It is fair to say that circumstances similar to those that enabled William Byers to breathe life into his newspaper contributed to its demise: the emergence of a more nimble mass communication system that possesses the 21st century perk of being nearly instantaneous. There's no denying, the Internet is useful.

That takes nothing away from the thousands of employees whose words and vision and craft gave readers in Denver and Colorado, and oftentimes beyond, something to help their lives every morning.

Readers and rivals alike will recognize they have lost something very special Saturday, when they wake to find only one newspaper on doorsteps across Colorado.

* POSTSCRIPT: The highest circulation ever reported by the Rocky Mountain News appeared in the March 2000 Audit Bureau of Circulations - 446,465 daily, 552,085 Sunday. According to the World Association of Newspapers, the Rocky was the 21st oldest newspaper in America.

Michael Madigan is a former assistant managing editor at the Rocky.

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