In July I assisted my old boss, Dick Perue, at the Battle Miner Print Shop located at the Grand Encampment Museum for Living History Day. In addition to telling visitors about the newspaper and printing history of the area, we operated the letterpress that Dick donated to the museum some 40 years ago.
During our day, he told me he started pumping that press 73 years ago, when he was just a teenager. He and his four brothers and two cousins had regular boxing matches and Dick would write up and report the results to the local newspaper, The Saratoga Sun. He was also doing some other odd jobs for Saratoga Sun owner Bob Martin.
One day Dick went in to report the boxing match results and learned that the letterpress operator, Johnny Freeburg, tried to oil the press when it was running. According to Dick, “He threw press parts and oil can all over the place. Johnny decided to pursue a different career and Bob Martin said to me, ‘You looking for a job?’”
That was in 1951 and Perue not only got the job as press operator, but also landed a career that led him to eventually own the Saratoga Sun.
I first met Dick Perue on top of Bridger Peak in 1972 when the Encampment-Riverside Lions Club was dismantling three of the original towers of the Grand Encampment Copper District’s 16-mile-long aerial tramway to move them to the Grand Encampment Museum.
I was a high school student and my dad was involved with the Lions who undertook that historic project. Dick was there taking photographs and writing down the details of the operation in his little pocket notebook for an article he would later publish in the Sun.
That was my first exposure to Dick and to journalism and led to my own career when he asked me to write a column about high school news. We’ve been working together in one way or another for the past 52 years.
He taught me to run the letterpress when I first worked at the Sun, and we pumped it together at the museum this summer, as he has done every year since he moved that press to the museum. He is almost certainly the longest-working letterpress printer in the state of Wyoming.
He donated other newspaper equipment to the Encampment Museum including a linotype – that he learned to operate as a teenager – and the old Babcock Reliance press that was last used to print the Saratoga Sun in the year before I started working there myself.
Perue began writing for the Saratoga Sun as a student. He attended the University of Wyoming where he obtained a degree in journalism, then in 1958 he returned to Saratoga where he became the editor of the Saratoga Sun. Working under the tutelage of R. I. Martin and R. D. Martin, Dick was quickly exposed to the “collecting” of historical material.
For more than 70 years Dick has been gathering and publishing Wyoming historical articles. During those decades of writing and gathering he has amassed a unique and exemplary collection that highlights the Upper North Platte Valley – Saratoga and Encampment – and extends across Carbon County.
For his longstanding work, Dick is the 2024 recipient of the Mabel Brown Cumulative Contributions Award for the Wyoming State Historical Society. The award was presented during the WHS Annual Conference Saturday in Newcastle.
In addition to his writing and publishing, Dick was present and a part of the formation of the Grand Encampment Museum, serving as a board member during the museum’s earliest years in the 1960s. When the Saratoga Historical and Cultural Association was formed well more than a decade later, he was there as well, providing expertise in not only forming the museum, but also developing their collection.
The number of historical talks and treks Dick has given and led is not actually known but imagine 70 years of involvement with museums throughout Carbon County and the fact that he has taken part in, sometimes organized and led, and often provided published booklets outlining the history of a trek area, or a topic of interest, and you get an idea of his contributions.
In 1982 he sold the Saratoga Sun and formed a new business, Historical Reproductions by Perue. This “retirement gig” has led him down a path of collecting, preserving, and printing historic photographs and writing his own brand of history books that include (among many other topics) short histories of Grand Encampment’s Mining District, Riverside, Saratoga, and stagecoaches. For many years he has also written a column for the Wyoming Livestock Roundup – based on historical topics in Wyoming.
Perue received the Martin Collection of historical documents, photographs, and artifacts when he purchased the Saratoga Sun. He later – and literally – salvaged other Saratoga Sun photographs and materials when a subsequent owner set the boxes out back of the business for pickup by trash collectors. (You know what they say about one man’s trash being another’s treasure!)
Perue has his own collection and many residents in Carbon County have entrusted their photographs and materials to his care and conservation as well. While he still holds some of these materials, many others have been donated to such archival institutions as the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Wyoming State Archives, and museums in Carbon County. This ensures that they will be preserved and available for future historical research.
Dick’s interest in history rubbed off on many people and certainly it inspired me. He’s been my boss and a mentor all of my writing life. I congratulate him on the Mabel Brown Award and thank him for all the red ink he has spilled across pages I’ve written in our many years of working together.
He recruited me as a writer when we were standing on top of Bridger Peak. He hired C. J. Box (we know him as Chuck) to work for the Saratoga Sun (I was the editor at the time) by taking him on a fishing-floating trip on the North Platte River. He gave both Chuck and me our start in journalism and an understanding that the job was not in the office…but out on the land (or river), finding the stories to tell.
Candy Moulton can be reached at Candy.L.Moulton@gmail.com
