Available NOW on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited!: On the Track of Vengeance

 

The runaway action never stops in On the Track of Vengeance, the fourth book in An Adventure of the Old West series.
 
When outlaw gangs sabotage railroads, resulting in the deaths of innocent passengers and crew members, the president of the United States becomes directly involved, appointing Bane Messenger a U.S. marshal answerable to him alone.
 
Teamed with trustworthy deputies, Bane takes on the desperate men, who care only for vengeance and are willing to do anything to strike back at the railroads and the government they blame for their misfortunes.
 
But the stakes soar when Bane learns that the outlaws plan to sabotage a train carrying his wife and father. With their lives hanging in the balance and no way to warn them, Bane races to the scene. Can he stop the outlaws in time or will Pamela and Bradford become the latest victims of the cruel men who care for nothing but vengeance?

Wild West Humorists Lincoln Loved

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

 

It's hard to say whether the Wild West brought out the humor in some men or whether the humor in these men found gold in the shenanigans of those whom they met on the American frontier, but one thing is clear: the Old West produced a number of Wild West humorists, one of whom President Abraham Lincoln (no slouch as a humorist himself) considered his favorite writer.

NOTE: Click the red links (below) to access websites on which you can read these authors' works free online.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835-1910)

 

 Although Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or Mark Twain, as he is better known, is the most famous author among the Wild West humorists, he wasn't Lincoln's favorite writer.

In many ways, however, Clemens embodied the Wild West.

His years as a riverboat pilot gave him much of the material for Life on the Mississippi.

His stagecoach trip west and his experiences there, prospecting for silver and gold and writing for The Territorial Enterprise newspaper, supplied him with material for Roughing It (1872).

Recently, the University of California at Berkeley recovered 65,000 words (about one fourth) of the columns Clemens wrote for the Enterprise in 1865-1866 (he worked for the newspaper for three years, from 1862-1865) and plans to publish this correspondence.

Among Clemens's output that was never missing are such articles as the “Petrified Man” hoax, “A Bloody Massacre near Carson” (also known as the “Empire City Massacre Hoax”), and “A Scene at Rawhide Ranch.”

It was one of his short stories, however, that brought Clemens to national attention: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865).

David Ross Locke (Petroleum V. Nasby) (1833-1888)

 David Ross Locke delighted readers with the ironic, intentionally semi-literate letters he wrote under the pen name Petroleum V. Nasby in support of the Union during the Civil War. After the war ended, he targeted Reconstruction with his wry sense of humor.

Before beginning his career in journalism, Lock (like Clemens) served as a printer's devil, or apprentice. After seven years in this capacity, Locke became an itinerant journalist, before purchasing The Jefferson newspaper, of Findlay, Ohio.

It was as owner of this newspaper that he began to write his Nasby letters, adopting a persona described by John M. Harrison, author of The Man Who Made Nasby, as “a supreme opportunist, bigoted, work-shy, often half-drunk, and willing to say or do anything to get a [cushy] Postmaster's job” (85).

A Democrat who opposed the Civil War, Nasby was drafted into the Union Army. He deserted and joined the Confederates' (fictitious) Pelican Brigade, but soon deserted it as well, finding it not to his liking. A civilian again, he devoted his life to pursuing the elusive position of Postmaster. Meanwhile, Nasby worked as a preacher who used Bible verses to show that God had ordained slavery.

Lincoln greatly enjoyed Locke's Nasby letters, quoting from them frequently, and, writes Alexander K. McClure, in Abe Lincoln's Yarns and Stories, the president reportedly declared, “I intend to tell him if he will communicate his talent to me, I will swap places with him.”

Robert Henry Newell (Orpheus C. Kerr) (1836-1901)

 The Civil War was also a topic of humor for Robert Henry Newell, the editor of the New York Sunday Mercury, who wrote as Orpheus C. Kerr (a play on words suggesting that he was an “Office Seeker,” by which he implied his fictional stand-in was a lazy man who'd like to secure a political appointment to an office requiring minimal work at high pay).

As the literary editor of the New York Sunday Mercury, Newell penned widely popular articles lampooning society and aspects of the Civil War.

Lincoln was one of Newell's fans. When the president asked General Montgomery C. Miegs whether he'd read The Orpheus C. Kerr Papers and the general said no, Lincoln contended that “anyone who has not read them is a heathen” (Benjamin P. Thomas, Lincoln's Humor: An Analysis, 3.)

By the way, Newell was married to the famous actress, painter, and poet Ada Issacs Menken, whose performance in Mazeppa scandalized New York and London audiences!

 

 Charles Farrar Browne (Artemus Ward) (1834-1867)

A member of the audience during one of Browne's performances another Wild West humorist, Francis Brett Hart, or Bret Harte, as he was known professionally, observed that Browne, in his portrayal of Ward, perfectly showcased American frontier “humor that belongs to the country of boundless prairies, limitless rivers, and stupendous cataracts—that fun which overlies the surface of our national life, which is met in the stage, rail-car, canal and flat-boat, which bursts out over camp-fires and around bar-room stoves.”

“Artemis Ward” met Clemens when he and “Mark Twain” performed in Virginia City, Nevada, and the two humorists became lifelong friends.

 
Browne also proved enormously popular when he toured England as a lecturer and contributed humorous pieces to the British humor magazine Punch.

Although Lincoln enjoyed the writings of both Locke and Kerr, the chief executive absolutely loved Browne's humor. Not Nasby, nor Kerr, nor even Clemens, but Browne, has the honor of being President Lincoln's favorite author.

Indeed, as Benjamin Tarnof relates in The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, before Lincoln shared “The Gettysburg Address” with his cabinet, he regaled them with a reading of Browne's latest essay, “Outrage in Utiky,” which was also known as High-Handed Outrage at Utica.

  

Other Wild West Humorists

Other Wild West humorists you may enjoy include Francis Brett Hart (Bret Harte) (1836-1902), William Wright (Dan DeQuille) (1829-1898), and Seba Smith (Major Jack Downing) (1792-1868).

The Transcontinental Railroad: The Greatest American Achievement of the 19th Century!

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Active Member of the Western Writers Association

Click the image to enlarge it.

In 1862, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, authorizing and funding the construction of the transcontinental railroad.

Two companies would lay the track, surveying routes, constructing trestles and bridges, blasting tunnels through mountains or ledges out of sheer mountainsides, fighting Native Americans who resisted whites' encroachment upon their ancestral lands, and, of course, laying track. The Cheyenne removed sections of track and cut telegraph lines and attacked repairmen.[1] The Sioux and Arapaho joined them in attacking settlers, stealing from them, removing surveyors's stakes, derailing trains, and killing railroad workers.[2]

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Along the way, the companies' workers also strung hundreds of miles of telegraph lines, connecting the western and the eastern halves of the nation both by both rail and wire and making transportation and communication available across the continental United States.

It was a huge enterprise, the biggest of the nineteenth century, and enormously expensive, costing between $96 million and $111.5 million[3] and requiring 10,000 horses and as many workers for the Union Pacific Railroad alone[4], Irish (on the Union Pacific railroad's crews). Chinese made up 80 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad's workers, and Civil War veterans and 1,000 freed African-American slaves worked for both railroads.[5] Whites were paid $35 per month, Chinese $30 per month; Chinese workers were also provided food, including special items that had to be brought by railroad from the east.[6] In Utah, Mormon laborers also helped to build the railroad.[7]

UPRR workers who took their meals aboard the company's supply train ate in a dining car, which sat 125 men per shift. Their tin plates were nailed to the tabletop, and between meals consisting of beef, hard bread, boiled beans, and black coffee, kitchen workers "cleaned" the plates with hand-help "mops."[8]

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Workers had to contend with blizzards, landslides, thunderstorms, mountains, and Native Americans who sought to defend their lands from the iron horse and the settlements of whites the railroad inevitably brought.

The men who built the transcontinental railroad lived under harsh conditions. Quarters aboard the UPRR's supply train were crowded and infested with lice, so many men preferred to sleep in tents.[9] Bathing occurred rarely, and most camps smelled of sweat and worse, as drinking water was contaminated with bacteria that caused diarrhea.[10]

Click the image to enlarge it.

As much as possible, construction followed a set pattern: surveyors, operating as much as 100 miles in advance of other work crews[11], selected the path and marked it with stakes.

Then, grading crews leveled the pathway, building a raised bed, 12-feet wide (wide enough to accommodate two sets of side-by-side tracks), to lay track on. The graders' bosses leveled the bed with shovels or a heavy scraper haled by horses or oxen. When graders ran into rocks they couldn't move, they used explosives to blast them. Additional crews built bridges or blasted tunnels as needed.[12]

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 Next, a work crew laid ties (six-foot-long, split logs or planks) on the bed. The men then laid 28-foot-long, 500-pound iron rails[13] on the ties, securing them in place by hammering iron spikes through the rails and into the wood. The track layers worked in pairs, five on each side of a rail.[14]

The construction of the transcontinental railroad took about six years. The CPRR broke ground in Omaha, Nebraska, on January 8, 1863, and its railroad joined the UPRR's line at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

There's much more to the story, including the solutions engineers developed for the tremendous problems they encountered due to adverse weather and seemingly insurmountable obstacles that certain terrain features presented. Greed and immorality also caused complications and significant cost overruns. Look for these stories in future posts!

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[1]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[2]The Transcontinental Railroad by Christine Zuchora-Walske

[3]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[4]Ibid.

[5]The Transcontinental Railroad by Christine Zuchora-Walske

[6]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[7]The Incredible Transcontinental Railroad by Conrad Stein.

[8]Ibid.

[9]Ibid.

[10]The Transcontinental Railroad by Christine Zuchora-Walske

[11]The Incredible Transcontinental Railroad by Conrad Stein.

[12]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes

[13]The Incredible Transcontinental Railroad by Conrad Stein.

[14]The Building of the Transcontinental Railroad by Peggy Caravantes