The citizens of Irvington [a town east of Lafayette along Coal Creek] are to be congratulated. Their petitions against the establishment of a saloon in their territory last spring went unheeded by the [Boulder] county commissioners, and their desire for a clean moral atmosphere about their residences near the coal mines were set at naught. They were derided as puritanical for their efforts to shield their children from contamination so far as lay in their power.
The saloon was established. All the evils they had predicted came true, as a matter of course. The wages that should have gone into many homes were wasted in drink. Carousals that made nights hideous and out of door life insecure followed each pay-time. Complaints were apparently ignored, and matters went from bad to worse. Not content with the patronage from the regular drinking element of the floating population about the mines, the saloonists, as is the usual custom in that business, cast about for bait to entrap the unwary youth of both sexes. Women from Denver, of the class whose “footsteps take hold in hell,” were imported to entice and fleece the patrons. Being unmolested, the orgies became open and unprintable.
Continue reading “Reprints: 1908 — We Congratulate Irvington”