Fifty Years Ago This Week: In what some Republicans saw at the time to be a partisan election stunt, the Colorado Democratic Party issued a scathing “key issue statement,” charging Republican Colorado Attorney General Duke Dunbar with mismanagement of state funds in the operation of his office.

The statement, signed by the Democratic candidate challenging Dunbar for his office, John Metzger, and Colorado Democratic Party chairman Fred Betz, alleged that the operation of the attorney general’s office had been “wasteful and inefficient and its operations are very questionable in terms of political morality.”

Metzger and Betz’s statement said that the doubling of payroll in the 1961-62 fiscal year was evidence that Dunbar was using “large portions of this ‘personal services fund’ to enrich associates and Republican friends of Mr. Dunbar.”

Included in the statement were copies of checks from the fund made out to the Dunbar’s private law firm totaling over $10,000.

Betz told The Colorado Democrat that, “The method of operating the office of attorney general and of using funds to reward and enrich the private law firm of Mr. Dunbar makes a sham and a mockery of the puffed-up pledges Republicans are making on behalf of economy and efficiency of government.”

Metzger reiterated his campaign pledge that he would “restore the office of attorney general to its intended role in the operation of state government.”

A response from Dunbar was not contained in the story appearing in the partisan publication The Colorado Democrat, which was a predecessor publication of Colorado Politics.

Thirty-Five Years Ago: Holding a protest on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus, Richard Castro, executive director of the Agency for Human Rights and Community Relations for the City of Denver, joined Colorado Lt. Governor Mike Callahan, Director of the Denver Indian Center Wallace Coffey, and prominent Native American leader Richard Tallbull outside the Nichols Hall Dormitory.

The hall was named after David Nichols, a successful businessman who in the 1870s helped raise funds for and donated various assets to the university. But while much his financial contributions had helped to grow the university, Nichols’s documented historically horrific actions against members of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe tribes at Sand Creek in 1864 cast a dark shadow over the naming of the facility in his honor.

Captain Nichols, along with 100 other volunteer soldiers, was said to have attacked a peaceful Native American camp of mostly women and children while flying the American flag on November 29, 1864, slaughtering 230 people.

A report by CU Professor Patricia Limerick, sent to the CU Board of Regents, said that Nichols “enthusiastically took part in a massacre on the Nov. 29, 1864, at Sand Creek, in which Indians’ brains were knocked out, children’s ears cut off…”, the letter went on in graphic detail.

Castro told The Colorado Statesman that while the regents who named the hall in 1961, “may not have known about Capt. Nichols’s involvement, today’s regents most assuredly” did. “Some are arguing that they cannot change the name without changing the regents’ bylaws. I say then, change the bylaws.”

Limerick’s report suggested that the Board of Regents strip Nichols’s name from the dormitory and “carefully replace it.”

Castro added that the university should go one step further and allow CU’s International Native Students Association – “which has brought this issue to the forefront” – to make the nomination of the new name.

One of the names that had been suggested by the INSA was White Antelope, the name of one of the chiefs who was murdered at Sand Creek.

Castro said that before he died of several gunshot wounds, he was heard to have sung the death song, “Nothing lives long, only the earth and the mountains.”

Rachael Wright is the author of the Captain Savva Mystery series, with degrees in Political Science and History from Colorado Mesa University and is a contributing writer to Colorado Politics and The Gazette.