Arthur C. Johnson papers

Arthur Chilion Johnson was born in Denver July 13, 1847. He attended public school in Denver and in Boulder, and later attended the University of Colorado. He received a degree of LLB in 1914 from George Washington University, Washington D. C., and was admitted to the bar in Washington and in Colorado.

Meanwhile he did newspaper work, a carrier he was to follow through most of his life in the early nineties on The Rocky Mountain News. Preceding his work on the News he taught school for a short period in the San Luis Valley.

He Served in the 1st Colorado infantry in the war with Spain in 1898, and supplies correspondence to the News from manila, where he was stationed. Discharged in the Orient, he engaged in correspondence work for the New York Sun, Chicago Record, Collier’s Weekly and the Manila America. He was New York Sun correspondence on the boxer campaign in China in 1900, and traveled in India and Europe on the way home to America after an absence of three years.

For six year he was secretary in Washington to his uncle, Senator Thomas M. Patterson, Colorado, and for 14 years worked in the press gallery at Washington. I t was during these years he studies law. Mr. Johnson was a member of the Delta tau college fraternity and phi Delta Phi, legal fraternity.

Mr. Johnson worked on the Washington post, Washington Herald and Associated press bureau at Washington; also for a period on the Washington bureau of the Chicago Tribune. His Writing activities won him the distinction of the being elected secretary of the National Press Association from 1908 to 1911. He wrote an extensive series of articles on Alaska in 1903, during a visit to that area with a senatorial committee.

He returned to Denver in 1915, after marrying Maude Taylor McIntosh in the New Jersey in 1912, and engaged in publicity work for the chamber of Commerce, edited the Denver Civic & Commercial for four years. He purchased an interest in The Denver Daily record Stockman in 1919 and continues as editor and publisher in partnership with his brother Fred.

In 1931 he accepted appointment as secretary of the Denver Livestock Exchange, and also enters the practice of the law in the stockyard, continuing his association with the Record Stockman.

He was counsel for the livestock exchange in the famous sale- in-transit case before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and represented the exchange in Washington in negotiation leading up to the establishment of one of the branches of the Regional Agricultural Credit Corporation in Denver.

Mr. Johnson had attained national prominence as a war correspondent and later as a political commentator, but his keenest interest was the cattle industry of the west and particularly the Denver stockyard. He died Ja.10, 1937 one week before the opening of the National Western Stock Show in which, as second vice president of the western Stock Show Association, he had long been a dominant figure.