Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman
Writing
any novel is challenging, but historical fiction adds a few layers of
difficulty. A writer has to research the times in which his or her
story is set.
Despite
such due diligence, a mistake is apt to occur, and some readers are
notoriously unforgiving about such errors. Quite rightly, they
expect their Westerns to have the ring of truth, especially in regard
to facts. How much did a sewing machine cost in 1863? What type of
blacksmith's tools were available in Gold Hill, Nevada, in 1863?
Readers
sometimes boost their own enjoyment of the genre by doing what
writers do: researching topics that are unfamiliar or somewhat
forgotten. Learning historical, linguistic, cultural, technological,
and other details of the latter half of nineteenth-century America
makes fiction more rewarding and fun to read.
In
this post, for readers and writers alike, I offer a few resources to
add to their browser's favorites.
Maps
Knowing
what a trail, a route, a town, a state, or the country itself looked
like at a particular time in history is invaluable for readers and
writers of the Western genre.
Click the image to enlarge it.
When
did a territory become a state? What historical sites existed in
Washington, DC, in 1881? What was the White House called, or the Oval
Office, before these terms became commonplace? What was the exact
route of the Pony Express, the transcontinental railroad, or the
cattle trails? What hotels existed in Tombstone, during Wyatt Earp's
residency in the famous Western town? What were the names of the
streets in Deadwood? Was there really a Long Branch Saloon in Dodge
City? Maps answer these questions and many others, accurately and
definitively.
Click the image to enlarge it.
A
great resource for historical maps is Old
Maps Online.
This
resource allows users to “Find a place” or “Browse old maps.”
Instructions make the process easy, and an “Exact Area tool”
allows users to focus on precise regions of the map. A zoom feature
allows up-close looks at specific sites. Advanced features let users
select a timeline, a specific publisher, and more. Search results are
shown in a panel at the right side of the screen, complete with
identifications of the maps thus displayed.
Old
Maps Online is an invaluable tool for both readers and writers
alike—and it's FREE!
Newspapers
There's
nothing like vintage newspapers to mine pertinent and intriguing
facts about the life and times of a past year, decade, or century,
and the Library of Congress's Historic
American Newspapers provides just this service—and it's FREE!
States
are listed alphabetically, down the left side of the screen, and
newspapers related to each state's cities, towns, and other sites are
listed, by state, down the center of the screen—and not just a
newspaper or two, but bunches and bunches of them!
The
index also provides information about the number of issues available
for each newspaper, its earliest issue, and its latest issue. With a
click of a button, users can access the newspaper or newspapers of
their choice.
Click the image to order.
My
series, An
Adventure of the Old West, is set in Nevada, after the Civil War,
so Nevada newspapers of this period have been especially useful to
me. The database contains thirty-two Nevada newspapers, including
Carson City's Daily Appeal,
Morning Appeal,
and Daily State
Register; Elko's Daily
Independent, Weekly
Elko Independent, and
Weekly Independent;
Pioche's Ely Record and
Pioche tri-Weekly Record;
Eureka's Eureka Weekly Daily Sentinel;
Gold Hill's Gold Hill Daily News;
and Unionville's The Silver State.
(The newspaper of record in my series is the fictitious Excelsior
Times).
When
a newspaper is accessed, further information appears: alternative
title(s), place of publication, geographic coverage, publisher, dates
of publication, description, frequency of publication, language,
subjects, notes, related links, holdings, and views.
When
reading the papers themselves, users can magnify the text, toggle to
full page (which can also be enlarged several times simply by
clicking it), locate all issues, and access text, .pdf, and .jpeg
files.
The
newspapers are also introduced with a detailed summary of their
origins and histories. This one is for the Gold Hill Daily
News:
Gold
Hill, Nevada, was one of the first settlements in the Comstock mining
district after the discovery of a rich deposit of free gold on a hill
above Gold Canyon in January 1859. Soon, silver supplanted gold in
yield throughout the Comstock, and Virginia City quickly overshadowed
Gold Hill in size and sophistication. The population of Gold Hill
reached 8,000 at its peak, primarily working-class residents,
including many Cornish miners.
On
October 12, 1863, the Gold
Hill Daily News was
established as a Republican newspaper by Philip Lynch and his stepson
John H. Mundall, former publishers of the Placer
Courier in
Forest Hill, California. They hired as their editor Hiram R. Hawkins,
an acquaintance and fellow publisher. When Hawkins left in 1865,
Lynch bought out Mundall, becoming the sole editor and publisher.
According to the Nevada historian Myron Angel, under Lynch the Gold
Hill Daily News gained
a reputation as "the best-printed [paper] of any on the Pacific
Coast."
Click the image to enlarge it.
On
November 14, 1867, Alf Doten left his job as a local reporter for the
Virginia
City Territorial Enterprise
to become the associate editor and reporter for the Gold
Hill Daily News. Doten
held that position until Lynch's death on February 13, 1872. A Nevada
journalist who is now best known for his diaries chronicling the
daily life of Gold Rush California and the Comstock, Doten laid claim
to the position of sole proprietor and editor of the News
in the paper's masthead, securing the title on the paper March 9th
when he purchased it from Lynch's widow for $10,000. That same year
John P. Jones, the co-developer of the Crown Point Mine, and William
Sharon, a Comstock banker made wealthy through foreclosures on loans
through the Bank of California, were vying for the U.S. Senate seat
in Nevada held by James Nye. Doten first approached Jones, asking him
either to buy the News
or to provide him with a loan. When Jones declined, Doten went to his
rival Sharon, who agreed to lend him $7,000.
Sharon
withdrew withdrew from the Senatorial battle during a contentious
campaign. When another seat in the Senate opened up in 1874, he was
successful in attaining it. During that campaign Sharon purchased the
Territorial
Enterprise and fired
its longtime editor, Joe Goodman, who had written unfavorable
editorials about him in 1872. Although Sharon maintained tight
editorial control over the
Enterprise, he did
not seem to actively exert his influence over the Gold
Hill Daily News; however,
the newspaper did strongly endorse Sharon and savaged his opponent,
Adolph Sutro, in the 1874 race. Comstock newspapers did not claim to
be non-partisan.
Wells
Drury, who worked as a reporter for the Gold
Hill Daily News from
1876 to 1880 wrote in An
Editor on the Comstock Lode
that Doten bore an honorable part in Nevada journalism: "While
he sought to produce a neat and workmanlike sheet, and succeeded
admirably, he always recognized the primacy of news in the making of
a paper, and did what few proprietors would do these days - that is,
cut out column after column of advertisements to make room for good
live news."
Faced
with debts, Doten was forced to turn over the ownership of the Gold
Hill Daily News to
Charles C. Stevenson (doing business as the News Publishing Company)
in February 1879. Doten remained the paper's managing editor until
December 1881 when he moved to Austin, Nevada, to edit the Reese
River Reveille.
On April 8, 1882, the Gold
Hill Daily News
printed its last issue, with this statement appearing at the head of
the editorial column: "Owing to the great depression in business
interests of this town, the stagnation of mining industries in the
district and unfavorable prospects for the near future, the News
Publishing Company has decided to suspend further publication of the
Gold Hill Daily News until July next." July 1882 came and went,
and no more issues of the paper were published. The boom times of the
Comstock were long gone.
Provided
by: University
of Nevada Las Vegas University Libraries
Videos
YouTube
is another invaluable resource for Western readers and writers. It
offers videos that explain and demonstrate just about everything:
Colt .45 six-shooters, Gatling guns, a fantastic variety of Western
terrain, ghost towns, locomotive engines and trains, gold mining
equipment and procedures, tracking techniques, procedures for
handling horses, historical sites, military tactics, and much, much
more, all for FREE!
Books
Another
website that offers a whole library of resource material is Google
Books. Some are FREE to download, but others, available only
online (unless a user wants to buy a copy) provide “previews” of
their contents which is often all a reader or a writer needs to bone
up on a particular topic.
Click the image to enlarge it.
The
number and variety of books is amazing. The few examples listed here
aren't even the tip of the iceberg:
The Donner Party: A Doomed Journey
The Pony Express - Volumes 16-18
The Last Gunfight: The Real Story of the Shootout at the ...
Annie Oakley: Wild West Sharpshooter
Internet
Archives
Internet
Archives doesn't contain everything that's ever been uploaded to
the Internet, but it is a huge depository of the World Wide Web's
glorious past—and it offers many FREE resources that can be read or
viewed or listened to online or downloaded.
Click the image to enlarge it.
Resources
include Web articles, videos, television shows and documentaries,
Hollywood and independent movies, audio, software, images, books,
magazines, and more. In addition to the many FREE offerings, there's
a huge supply of items that can be borrowed from libraries.
The
array and multitude of the resources on Internet
Archives is so huge that the site has to be viewed to be
appreciated. It contains:
- 330 billion web pages
- 20 million books and texts
- 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts)
- 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs)
- 3 million images
- 200,000 software programs
Online
Etymology
Words
we take for granted seem always to have been in use. Of course,
that's not the case; like everything else, they have origins and
histories—often interesting in themselves. An excellent source for
determining just when a word was recorded (for example, in a
newspaper, magazine, journal, or book) as having been first used is
the Online
Etymology Dictionary.
Click the image to enlarge it.
The
dictionary is easy to use. A search window appears, centered, at the
top of the screen. Simply type the term in the window and press the
Enter key on the keyboard or click the image of the magnifying glass
to the right of the search window. The etymology of the term will
appear on the screen below the search window.
If
there are additional pages regarding a word, the page numbers will be
shown at the bottom of the screen; by clicking them, a user advances
to the related page.
For
many words, “related entries & more,” shown as a link at the
bottom of the screen will apply. For example, for the term “chuck
wagon,” “wain” appears, once the link is clicked:
wain
(n). Old English wægn “wheeled vehicle, wagon, cart,” from
Proto-Germanic *wagna, from PIE *wogh-no-, suffixed form of root
*wegh-
“to go, move, transport in a vehicle” (source also of Latin
vehiculum). A doublet of wagon.
Largely fallen from use by c. 1600, but kept alive by poets, who
found it easier to rhyme on than wagon. As a name for the Big
Dipper/Plough, it is from Old English (see Charles's
Wain).”
Although
some of these related entries won't pertain to Westerns, many do.
Click the image to enlarge it.
Suppose
you were reading or writing a Western novel concerning a cattle
drive, during the course of which you encountered or planned to use
these words:
“barbed
wire”
“brand”
“branding
iron”
“chuck
wagon”
“cowboy”
“drover”
“mustang”
“open
range”
“rustler”
“stampede”
“stockyard”
“wrangler”
Click the image to enlarge it.
A
reader might want the lowdown on one or more of these words, or a
writer might want to make sure the word was in use at the time his or
her novel or short story is set. No worries: the Online
Etymology Dictionary
will let you know!
Consulting
this FREE source, we find that the first recorded uses of these words
were:
“barbed
wire”: 1863
“brand”:
1550s
“branding
iron”: 1828
“chuck
wagon”: 1880
“cowboy”:
1849 (“cowhand”: 1852)
“drover”:
mid-1500s
“mustang”:
1808
“open
range”: not listed, but “free range” dates to 1821
“rustler”:
1882
“stampede”:
1844, from the 1839 term “stampedo”
“stockyard”:
1802
“wrangler”:
1888
Finally,
for writers, research itself may suggest plot ideas—and another
book! That's what happened for me, when reading about the marvel of
the transcontinental railroad and the history and politics related to
this vast enterprise, I conceived the idea, and eventually the plot,
for my forthcoming novel On
the Track of Vengeance,
book four in An
Adventure of the Old West.
In
a future post, I'll provide another list of great research sources
for readers and writers of Wild West adventures.
