This Week in Colorado History: baseball, burglars, and weather

Although the Colorado Rockies were still eighty-three years away from existing, residents of Jefferson County were able to enjoy a little September baseball in the early fall of 1910. According to the September 11 edition of “The Colorado Transcript,” the Golden baseball team defeated the Lakeside baseball team 2 to 1 “in a special post-season game for the benefit of the Jefferson county fair.”

The game was a pitchers’ duel, with no score until the sixth inning when Golden scored two runs off of three hits. Lakeside added a run of their own in the eighth to cut the deficit to one, but it was too little too late as they fell to Golden in the end. “The Colorado Transcript” also alleged the game was so “red hot” and tempers flared so much so that “[the manager] went out so fast his clothes caught fire,” and noted that “The Denver Post’s” Arvada correspondent neglected to report on the Lakeside loss.
That same day, “The Colorado Transcript” reported that not long after dark, Homer Myers, alone at his uncle’s house in Golden, was approached by “a tall man, wearing a black slouch hat, a mask over his face, and carrying a big six shooter.” When the stranger asked who was home, Myers honestly replied that he was alone. The burglar entered the house and ordered Myers to put up his hands. But Myers did not comply and instead reached for revolver and fired a shot at the burglar. The intruder fled, and returned a shot of his own in retreat. He was pursued briefly by Myers who fired twice more. The sheriff was promptly notified, but the stranger was never caught. As Myers’ uncle was the superintendent at the local smelters, the motive was believed to be smelter funds.

Colorado reported its first snowfall of the 1910-1911 season this week in 1910. In the Medicine Bow mountains near Fort Collins and on the continental divide, snow fell while most of the land from Golden to Cheyenne, Wyoming, experienced a mixture of rain, snow, and hail. “The Colorado Transcript” welcomed the precipitation, saying that the “moisture is needed to put the ground in condition for fall plowing and for late irrigation.”