Into this civilization of the mining camp and smelter, just emerging into that of the railway, political, and financial centre of a vast and wealthy territory, came Eugene Field at the age of thirty-one, as free from care, warm-hearted, and open-handed as the most reckless adventurer in Colorado.  Although a husband and a father, devoted as ever to his family, he threw himself into the bohemian life of Denver with the abandon of a youth of twenty.  It is almost inconceivable where Field found the time and strength for the whirl of work and play in which there was no let up during his two years’ stay in Denver.  His duties as managing editor of the Tribune would have taxed the energies and resources of the strongest man, for he did not spare himself to fulfil the purpose of his engagement—­to make the paper “hum.”  He mapped out and directed the work of the staff with a comprehensive shrewdness and keen appreciation of what his public, as well as his employers, wanted that left no room for criticism.  He kept the whole city guessing what sensation or reputation would be exploded next in the Tribune.

But he did not confine himself to the duties of directing the work of others.  He started a column headed “Odds and Ends,” to which he was the principal and, by all odds, the most frequent contributor.  He had not been in the city many months before he began the occasional publication of those skits which, under the title of “The Tribune Primer,” were gathered into his first unpretentious book of forty-eight pages, and which in its original form is now one of the most sought after quarries of the American bibliomaniac.  Writing of these sketches in 1894, he said: 

The little sketches appeared in the Denver Tribune in the Fall of 1881 and winter of 1882.  The whole number did not exceed fifty.  I quit writing them because all the other newspapers in the country began imitating the project.

In fact the series began October 10th, 1881, and ended December 19th of the same year.  Edward B. Morgan, of Denver, in an introductory note to a few of the sketches omitted from the original “Tribune Primer,” printed in the Cornhill Booklet for January, 1901, gives the following version of how the skits began: 

Of the origin of these sketches a story is told—­although the writer cannot vouch for it—­that on the Sunday evening preceding their first publication the “printer’s devil” was dispatched post-haste to Field’s home for copy which his happy-go-lucky manner of working had not produced.  We may perhaps picture him engaged in what was always nearest and dearest to his heart, the amusement of his children, and perhaps reading to them or more likely composing for them primer sketches which he on the spur of the moment parodied for older readers.  He has probably expressed his own feelings in the third one of the skits which he then wrote: 

  THE REPORTER ON SUNDAY