80 years ago

Taken from the pages of the Dolores Star, Friday, Dec. 6, 1935

Clemency denied

Otis McDaniel saw hope fade as he faced death in the state’s lethal gas chamber at the state prison. The 30-year old slayer of two men is sentenced to die for the slaying of Sheriff W.W. Dunlap last July. His brother Herbert, 20, is under life imprisonment for the same slaying. Both brothers, once hunted as southwestern Colorado’s most dangerous badmen, are under another sentence of life imprisonment for the “starvation slaying” of James Westfall, aged Lewis sheepman who was robbed and left to die in his lonely cabin.

Quartette performs

The Dixie Jubilee quartette arrived in Dolores Thursday and will give a full hour and twenty-minute program at Memorial Hall Friday. The quartette performed for school students as part of a preview. The singers are extra good and well worth coming to hear. Their program consists of southern melodies. There will be solos, readings, and a very fine strain of light comedy.

Escalante journey

Father Escalante explored this region in 1776, the year this country declared its independence from England and made a record of his travels. On Aug. 13 the diary entry states that “we made a stopping place here, so that we ascertain the latitude of this location and the plain of the river Dolores. “There is everything here requisite for the establishment of a good town, the land only needing irrigation, with pasturage, wood and timber. On the southern bend of the river, on a rise above the ground, there appears to have been anciently a small town.”

Building collapses

The Tucker Warehouse decided it had about all the barbed wire it could stand and caved in, or rather caved out. A large section of the north wall and a part of the floor collapsed, spilling beans and wire onto the railroad. An overload of government barbed wire was the cause of the trouble.

Mild winter predicted

E.L. Manaugh says we are likely to have a mild or no winter if the old rule is a criterion. He says there is an old belief that the first three days of December indicate what sort of weather there will be during the winter months which follow. The first three days of December were exceedingly mild, so that means this winter will be mild.