The incredibly loud Denver Post blared out last week with the biggest news story of its career. Streaming across eight columns, three big, black banner lines roared: FREDERICK G. BONFILS, EDITOR<BR> AND PUBLISHER OF THE POST,<BR> DIES AT HOME EARLY THURSDAY<BR> Wide black rules bordered every column. The whole front page except one column, which carried the weather report and Arthur Brisbane, was crammed with news of the death, surrounding a large picture of Publisher Bonfils. PRESIDENT HOOVER DEEPLY GRIEVED . . . BONFILS MADE POST A GREAT PAPER. . . . COLORADO HAS LOST ITS GREATEST CITIZEN. There were six more pages of pictures and testimonials.
Frederick Gilmer Bonfils, 72, had visited the Post office on Champa Street for the last time a week before. Troubled by pain in his left ear, he went home to his ornate white stone house on East Tenth Avenue. To the house came doctors, then nurses. Few days later an oxygen tent was brought. That night came a Catholic priest. Before dawn Publisher Bonfils, baptized on his deathbed, succumbed to encephalitis (brain inflammation), result of the ear infection.
Not everyone in Denver mourned. But everyone in Denver and the Rocky Mountain States had something to talk about in the death of the amazing Bonfils, the "Desperate Desmond" of Western journalism, the swaggering, handsome gambler who blew into town after the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 with the Hotel Windsor's amiable bartender, Harry H. Tammen; who rode to power astride the Denver Post which he imbued with his own traits of boldness, flamboyance, unscrupulousness.
From Butte to Albuquerque and from Kansas City to Salt Lake—the territory claimed for the Post's 150,000 circulation—the Bonfils career is epic. Everyone knows that he boasted Corsican descent (his father, a Troy, Mo. judge, changed the name from Buonfiglio) and kinship to Napoleon. Handsome, swarthy, he quit West Point in 1881 and tried his hand at land-trading in the Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas booms. His rough-&-tumble methods brought him, if not friends, a neat pot of money with which he started a lottery in Kansas. Bonfils had taken $800,000 out of Kansas when he bumped into the late Bartender Tammen and was persuaded that Denver was ripe for a killing.
Not because of any journalistic ambition, but because they sought an instrument for power, Bonfils & Tammen bought the doddering Post for $12,500, imported Hearstlings, doctors of yellow journalism, to rake the town for scandal, dish it up in dripping, juicy gobs. As it had for Hearst, the formula worked richly for Gambler Bonfils & Bartender Tammen.