Not even a mile north of the Denver Coliseum, where Bayfield High School competed Veterans Day weekend in the 2016 CHSAA Class 3A state volleyball championship, is historic Riverside Cemetery.
The cemetery is now situated in very much a tough, industrial neighborhood - a police vehicle-impound lot, for example, is near the grounds' main entrance off Brighton Boulevard. Among its prominent residents rests a vet of which La Plata County (and to an extent, Montezuma County also) residents may have heard, but may not have heard enough.
David Frakes Day may be most familiar as the fellow who brought his Solid Muldoon newspaper down to Durango in 1892 from Ouray, eventually merging it with the early Durango Herald. The roots of the Herald go back to 1881 and an absorption of the fledgling Durango Record - and later brought into being the oft-controversial Durango Democrat.
In 1928, the Democrat (published 1899 to 1928, after replacing the '97-99 Morning Democrat) and Evening Herald merged to form the Herald-Democrat, which was then published April 6, 1928, to June 13, 1952.
Both it and the competing Durango News (1930-52) were then purchased by Arthur and Morley Cowles Ballantine, combined into the Herald-News until July 25, 1960, when the rag was re-titled the Herald readers throughout southwestern Colorado more or less know today, published by Ballantine Communications, Inc. Since 2014, BCI has been the Pine River Times' parent company.
Long before any of that, however, Day's name and place in history was secured as a private in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War.
Having enlisted from Ohio in early 1862, then aged 14, Day would serve with the 57th Ohio Infantry and first saw action with the Army of the Tennessee in the battles of Shiloh (April 1862) and Stones River (December 1862).
However, willing participation in what was tantamount to a suicide mission would later earn him the nation's most prestigious award for valor: the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Borrowed from the Dutch verloren hoop - literally translated as "lost troop" - Major General William T. Sherman, in whose XV Army Corps the 57th would be included, referred to the task/men as a "forlorn hope" when Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant sought unmarried men, preferably without families, to lead one of the initial assaults on the Confederate forces at Vicksburg, Miss., on May 22, 1863.
Those desired were to first bridge a moat using logs and boards one detachment would lug out of a nearby ravine, then place ladders which another would bring from the same site to help troops following them scale an embankment and quicken the attack.
Promoted from lieutenant colonel to colonel of the 57th on May 24 (two days after the deadly maneuver), Americus Vespucius Rice remembered that when Grant's request - through Sherman - for 150 such soldiers came, "the first...for this hazardous undertaking was David F. Day" of Company D.
Pinned down by enemy fire near the designated ditch to cross, Day - then 16 - was reported to have used his bayonet to dig deeper and survive until a nighttime retreat was possible. Grant soon decided that a swift strike wasn't the way to take the stronghold, and thus the great Siege of Vicksburg began, not to end until victory was achieved on - ironically - the Fourth of July.
But of the volunteers comprising the storming party, nearly half were killed. Having survived, Day would be decorated with the honor for gallantry, as would - at one time or another - 95 others in all for that day's work.
Honorably discharged from the volunteer service at Little Rock, Arkansas, on Aug. 14, 1865, Day had served three years, seven months and twenty-six days, had been wounded, had narrowly escaped being hung as a spy ... and was just 18 years old with a trip West and a wholly different life - compared to either the military or his parents' farming tradition - still awaiting him.
But with recommendations from Rice (promoted May 31, 1865, to brigadier general) and Brevet Brig. Gen. Andrew Hickenlooper - who was also at Shiloh and Vicksburg - corroborating his own reasons for CMH consideration, Day at last received the award January 2, 1895, almost three decades after his last day in uniform.
Born March 7, 1847, in Dallasburg, Ohio, Day died June 22, 1914, in Denver - about seven years, 10 months before his son Roderick (1874-1940) shot and killed Evening Herald editor William L. Wood, once a Democrat employee and a World War I veteran. Day had pseudo-retired from the newspaper industry in 1903.
HOW ABOUT THAT: Essential to David Day's Medal of Honor quest, Andrew Hickenlooper's great-grandson is former Denver mayor and current Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, Jr.
