Colorado’s Historic Amendment 64

By Mike Rosso

Election day in Salida was unusually bright and sunny. Since I’d already voted by mail, I decided to spend some time sipping coffee in the sun outside Café Dawn, chatting up some of the customers and passersby.

I started asking random folks how they voted, not on the general election – around which there was much anxiety – but how they voted on Amendment 64. “Which one was that?” was a common response, and when I mentioned it was about the statewide legalization of marijuana, most relaxed and their answers came as a surprise.

Read more

Bat Masterson; Buena Vista Marshal?

by Charles F. Price

One of the standard histories of Salida, Eleanor Fry’s Salida: The Early Years, asserts that famed Western lawman and gambler W.B. (“Bat”) Masterson once acted, albeit briefly, as town marshal of Salida’s upriver neighbor, Buena Vista.

Wrote Fry, “Town fathers needed to rid the place of ruffians who ran off peace officers as fast as they could be hired. Masterson’s presence, at $30 per week for three weeks, apparently accomplished what local officers couldn’t. It didn’t hurt that Masterson had posters printed warning outlaws he would shoot them on sight.” No source is cited for this assertion and Fry, now in retirement in Pueblo, can only recall gleaning the story from old Salida newspapers.

Read more

The War on Shoes

Brief by Don Olsen

Law – September 1998 – Colorado Central Magazine

Last spring I bought a pair of Nikes down at the mall, thinking they would be my summer work shoes.

But in about two weeks, the Nikes fell apart, literally, right before my eyes. I vowed never to buy such rotten shoes again, and found a pair of canvas sneakers in a catalog that were advertised to last much longer than other shoes because they were made with hemp.

Read more