Postcard from the Past: Hard Liquor and Morphine Kills Editor

by Dick Perue

Dear readers, in a past Postcard we explored the copper mining town of Dillon, which was built on booze, and a few of its colorful characters. 

This week, we relate the sad tale of a famous weekly newspaper writer and editor who met his tragic death because of hard liquor and drugs.

Journalist Grant Jones 

Grant Jones was a daily newspaper writer from the Midwest who came to south-central Wyoming in 1901 to promote the Grand Encampment mining district and eventually established a weekly newspaper called the Dillon Doublejack high atop the Sierra Madre Mountains in Carbon County.

Jones, writer and editor of the Dillon Doublejack in 1902-03, was noted for his wit in both his reporting and his column “Grant Jones’ Anvil.”

He was also famous for leaving the mountain mining town of Dillon to “go on one of his running drunks” for several days. 

Legend has it he left his newspaper office shortly after putting out the weekly paper to visit the towns of Encampment, Saratoga, Rawlins, Battle and other bergs for a liquid refreshment. 

He returned to the DoubleJack office a week later – just before deadline – and announced to his printer he had visited many towns throughout the region and “the patrons loved last week’s paper so much, this week we’ll just change the date and run it again.” 

We can’t vouch for the truth of this tale, but the files of the DoubleJack contain two issues with the same news, just different dates.

Jones is best remembered for his good nature, humor and stories of mythical creatures which inhabited the Rocky Mountains, such as “Googly Woo” which brought laughter throughout the land.

The career of Jones in the town of Dillon was unfortunately short, and his tragic death in June of 1903 reads almost like a melodrama.

As Jones was recovering from one of his supposedly frequent “running drunks,” a cabin mate who was addicted to morphine attempted to ease Jones’ trembling by administering a shot of the drug. 

The combined effect of the liquor and the drug killed the 31-year-old journalist, thus ending the Dillon DoubleJack and its most colorful editor.

The name of the paper was a tribute to the miners of the region with the moniker “doublejack” being the term used to describe the “star drill” and the heaviest sledgehammer wielded by the miners in their work. See illustration on masthead.

In his original dedication of the paper to the miners, Jones wrote:

Boys of drill and pan 

To the  brotherhood whose members see the word “welcome” on fewer doormats and know more about hospitality, travel over more miles of land and see fewer railroad tracks, eat more bacon and see fewer hogs, drink more milk – condensed – and see fewer cows, worship nature more and see fewer churches, regard women with more chivalry and see fewer of them, judge men better and wear fewer starched shirts, undergo more hardships and make fewer complaints, meet more disappointments and retain more hope than any other class of men in the whole wide world. To the brotherhood of quartz and placer prospectors and miners, I dedicate the Dillon Doublejack – Grant Jones