A Year in the Life of the Ivinsons by Kim Viner

Nye, already nationally famous for his humorous columns, left Laramie after seven years Hayford stayed on, fiercely pursuing his causes. Nye’s backers felt Laramie still needed a daily Republican paper.

People probably subscribed to the paper mainly to read them, even when his former assistant, Bill Nye, set up the rival Laramie Boomerang after Hayford had made the Sentinel a weekly. On the Sentinel’s sixth anniversary, May 1, 1875, Hayford cheerfully told his readers he kept on his desk the “monstrous, grinning skull” of Ed “Big Ned” Beeston, one of four local toughs hanged by vigilantes in Laramie in October 1868. Another historian describes it as “pietism.” The anti-vice coalition Hayford later led in Wyoming politics became known in newspapers as the “goody-goody” faction.īut Hayford was no bleeding heart. He had grown up in Abolitionist circles and was driven by a strong Protestant moralism. Hayford was at heart a reformer, determined to protect people from their vices. Affectionately known as “Doc,” “Deacon,” or “Judge” Hayford, this moralistic Presbyterian was called “one of Laramie’s most colorful characters” by no less an authority than Wyoming historian Dr. Nine of his children are known to have survived him. He had two, perhaps three wives and from 18-25 children, according to various sources. Click to enlarge.īorn around 1827, Hayford obtained a medical degree from the University of Michigan and was also approved to practice law. The paper lasted until 1895 when it finally folded as a weekly.īy 1875, the front page of James Hayford’s Laramie Daily Sentinel offered seven columns of advertising and one column of musings. Gates moved from Cheyenne to Laramie in May 1869 to take over a new paper, the Laramie Daily Sentinel. The New York state native Hayford and his printing partner John E. Slack of the Cheyenne Daily Leader, wrote “We never knew a newspaper man … more a master of ridicule or sarcasm … the longer we knew him the more we appreciated his fearless advocacy of what he believed to be right.”

In a 1902 eulogy for the 75-year old Hayford, rival newspaper editor, E.A. “He could sling more mud with a teaspoon than I could with a scoop shovel.” So said a colleague of Laramie’s early newspaper editor, Dr.

A Year in the Life of the Ivinsons by Kim Viner