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Skagit River JournalSubscribers Edition Stories & Photos The most in-depth, comprehensive site about Skagit County Covers from British Columbia to Puget Sound. Counties covered: Skagit, Whatcom, Island, San Juan, Snohomish & BC. An evolving history dedicated to committing random acts of historical kindness |
Home of the Tarheel Stomp Mortimer Cook slept here & named the town Bug |
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The first chronicler of the Pony Express was Colonel William Lightfoot Visscher, a peripatetic newspaperman (but not a colonel) who drifted across the American West in the late 19th century. He is, on reflection, a perfect chronicler for such a tale. He never let the facts get in the way of anything he wrote. Visscher's book, A Thrilling and Truthful History of the Pony Express, was published in 1908, nearly half a century after the Pony Express went out of business. Anyone wondering how the story of the Pony Express became muddled need only consider that it took half a century to write a book about the subject, and its author was a dubious chronicler. Much of Visscher's research appears to have been conducted at the bar of the Chicago Press Club, his legal address for many years. A terrible liar, a drunkard, a bad poet and a rascal, Visscher bore an amazing resemblance to comedian W.C. Fields. The colonel was a delightful if completely unreliable historian. We have no idea where he got most of his information, although he appears to have cribbed a fair bit of it from the few early attempts to set down some facts about the Central Overland. Historians of the Pony, such as there have been, have always ignored this jolly old lush, who drank two quarts of gin a day for much of his life but lived to be 82.In fairness to Visscher, however, the above is just one opinion, that of Christopher Corbett, who researched the Pony Express extensively and wrote his book, Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express (Random House 2004), a century after Visscher wrote the first nationally recognized book on the same subject. Nowadays, Visscher is merely a footnote in Pony Express research, and often dismissed by serious historians. The Colonel's peers, especially his fellow humorists, were more tolerant and certainly more respectful, even if they sometimes wrote about him with tongue in cheek. Four of the humorists, including Visscher, entertained readers and theater-goers for 40 years. For instance, Opie Percival Read (1852-1939), Visscher's close friend since their days in Chicago in the mid-1880s and author of Arkansas Traveler and A Kentucky Colonel, described him as "truly a poet. . . . Read recalled an instance in a Chicago store when Visscher, concluding that some young women were giggling about his nose, rebuked them in this fashion: "I've owned better people than you are — owned them, sold them and spent the money for liquor, by God." Visscher looked like W.C. Fields, , and he often acted like him.
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. . . then it would come out with a beautiful compliment to the ostensible author, and the Journal would have another pet poet and Mr. Prentice another pupil in versification. Frequently this would result in these bread and butter poetesses imagining they were great, and often they would acquire fame by bringing to the warm hearted and gentle old man their hideous skeletons of poetry which he would enlive and round up and beautify. When he died many a muse fell sick and the poetesses who had lived a lie brought no more music from their lyres.
It was about daylight one morning in June that I arrive in Kansas City. The great bridge over the Missouri had just been completed and dedicated, and the town was growing a rapidly as a new mining camp. Only a few months before, the place had been known as Westport Landing, and consisted of a few houses under the bluffs, alongside of the river, but by this time it had climbed to the top of the hills, and was rapidly spreading over them. It had about 10,000 inhabitants then, and during the seventeen or eighteen months following, I saw it grow to a live and throbbing city of 35,000 souls, and during this time it was red-hot. Fights and murders were frequent and in the slang of the times, we generally had "a man for breakfast."Westport was where four of the major frontier trails crossed at their beginning: California, Lewis & Clark, Oregon and Santa Fe. We find in his column that he had not originally planned on stopping at Kansas City but that he decided to stroll through the town for just a short time until the train departed again, presumably westwards. On his walk he bumped into an old friend, the son of Chancellor Pirtle, his law professor at Louisville:
. . . where I once captured a sheep skin, which now hangs on the wall over my desk, and unblushingly declares that I am a bachelor of laws, though I have never been inside of a court house, as an attorney, since the president of the university gave it to me, tied with blue ribbon, except once. I tried one case. The last and the evidence were all on the side of my client, but I wanted to make a speech and did. The judge on the bench rendered a decision in favor of the other side.Within minutes, Colonel R.T. Van Horn ambled along on the street and struck up a conversation with the two old friends. He was the editor of the Journal of Commerce in town and about to take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, so he hired Visscher on the spot to increase the Journal editorial staff to three. In that same column, Visscher also recalled that his few years in Kansas City marked the beginning of "Humor and Pathos," his humorist/lecture tour that he reenacted countless times over the next four decades. In our companion Skagit River Journal transcription of features by Bill Nye, you will read the hilarious story about how the Journal fired Visscher for inflicting fisticuffs on a cantankerous printer and his subsequent move on to the Kansas City Herald.
He was a young, razor-sharp, muckraking newspaperman from St. Louis who, in the two tumultuous years he spent in Denver, turned the city upside down with his habit of skewering self-important gold and silver bullion kings and politicians, making his "Nonpareil" column a daily must-read. When he wasn't torturing the rich and powerful with barbed truth-telling, he was cracking up the Tribune's readership with his joke-filled columns, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose.In his biography of Field, Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901), Slason Thompson reviewed the hijinks of the merry band:
It was in Denver that Eugene Field entered upon and completed the final stage of what may be called the hobble-de-hoy [awkward, gawky young fellow] period in his life and literary career. He went to the capital of Colorado the most indefatigable merry-maker that ever turned night into day, a past-master in the art of mimicry, the most inveterate practical joker that ever violated the proprieties of friendship, time, and occasion to raise a laugh or puncture a fraud. As his friend of those days, E.D. Cowen, has written, "as a farceur and entertainer no professional could surpass him." Field was tempted to go to Denver by the offer of the managing editorship of the Tribune, which was owned and controlled by the railroad and political coalition then dominant in Colorado. It was run on a scale of extravagance out of all proportion to its legitimate revenue, its newspaper functions being altogether subordinate to services as a railroad ally and political organ.
Harry Morgan drifted into Tacoma in 1884 from Maryland, or so he said, and quickly established himself as Boss Sport, the fellow in charge of the community's illicit entertainment activities. . . . In 1888 the Boss Sport opened a new joint, Morgan's Theater (later called the Comique), at 817 Pacific Avenue, where the Olympus Hotel now stands. The [competing Tacoma] Ledger implied that Sodom and Gomorrah would have rated PG to Morgan's X. They blamed the Morgan Theater for every Tacoma shortfall from stumps in the street to the murder of a young man on a somewhat distant downtown street. . . . In time the Ledger's carping annoyed Morgan sufficiently to cause him to bankroll the transformation of his theater program bill into a dally paper. It was called the Daily Globe and employed as its editor J. N. Frederickson, a desk man whose memory lingers in the Valhalla of journalism as perpetrator of the headline, over the story of a hanging, "Jerked to Jesus."Visscher arrived in Tacoma on New Year's Day, 1889. Within weeks, he began lashing out at the Ledger, and he profiled himself in the Globe before the competition could. In February he also serialized his first novel, Carlisle of Colorado: A Thrilling Story of Chicago and the Far West; he would often serialize books in such manner in the future. Just two months later, he serialized his own autobiography, Tales of Many Cities, as we explained above. One of Visscher's buddies wrote an introduction to that series; Judge Nye underscored Visscher's importance and fame, with his tongue way, way inside his cheek and gave us a glimpse of how the friends treated each other's fame or delusions of grandeur:
Editorship failed to inspire Frederickson further, and Morgan lured, from the Oregonian, William Lightfoot Visscher, a Civil War cavalry colonel of impetuosity and pungent prose. Visscher was disenchanted with a community which relied on gravity to pull riches past it. He did not want to become a freshwater barnacle. He responded to Morgan's [blandishments] to come to Tacoma and say something nice about vice. Direct endorsement of sin Visscher avoided, at least as far as one can tell from surviving issues of the Globe. But sinners he tolerated as he did Masons, Democrats, Englishmen, and Socialists not opposed to hard liquor . . . . Visscher avoided such excesses of expression. He contented himself with giving good coverage of community affairs and parodying the Ledger's former anti-Chinese theme by running edits headed, "The Ledger must go."
The work does not contain any statistics, whatever. Those who purchase it hoping to find a wealth of mental arithmetic or mirth-inspiring crop reports will be bitterly disappointed. . . . [I] tried to show him that he ought to weave in some statistics, but he thought he would not do so. He claimed that what the public seemed to demand, recently, was facts; cold, hard, water-proof facts. He did not feel like trifling with his readers by inserting flippant columns of figures. He said, moreover, that figures would not lie, and for that reason, they would be lonely and unhappy in this work.Within just seven months of arriving, Visscher, the editor known best for his well-knownness, was welcomed by his peers at the third annual meeting of the Washington Press Association in August 1889, when they chose him as poet of the organization.
In lending my name to this work and to Mr. Visscher, in this endorsement, I do not wish to be made responsible for any errors of orthography which may occur upon its chaste pages. The author has, of course, his little peculiarities of spelling, which I regard more as a manifestation of genius than anything else. If he has seen fit to depart from the beaten paths of Websterian orthography, I look upon it as an evidence of that free, unfettered, lawless wabble of mind which should always characterize and stigmatize the great man.
Tacoma was literally staggering under a boom of the boomiest. I do not quite remember what her natural resources were supposed to be, though every second man shrieked a selection in my ear. They included coal and iron, carrots, potatoes, lumber, shipping, and a crop of thin newspapers all telling Portland that her days were numbered. California and I struck the place at twilight. The rude boarded pavements of the main streets rumbled under the heels of hundreds of furious men all actively engaged in hunting drinks and eligible corner-lots. They sought the drinks first. The street itself alternated five-story business blocks of the later and more abominable forms of architecture with board shanties. Overhead the drunken telegraph, telephone, electric light wires tangled on the tottering posts whose butts were half-whittled through by the knife of the loafer. Down the muddy, grimy, unmetaled thoroughfare ran a horse-car line — the metals three inches above road level. Beyond this street rose many hills, and the town was thrown like a broken set of dominoes over all. A steam tramway — it left the track the only time I used it — was nosing about the hills, but the most prominent features of the landscape were the foundations in brick and stone of a gigantic opera house and the blackened stumps of the pines. California sized up the town with one comprehensive glance. "Big boom," said he; and a few instants later: "About time to step off, I think," meaning thereby that the boom had risen to its limit, and it would be expedient not to meddle with it. We passed down ungraded streets that ended abruptly in a fifteen-foot drop and a nest of brambles; along pavements that beginning in pine-plank ended in the living tree; by hotels with Turkish mosque trinketry on their shameless tops, and the pine stumps at their very doors; by a female seminary, tall, gaunt and red, which a native of the town bade us marvel at, and we marveled; by houses built in imitation of the ones on Nob Hill, San Francisco, — after the Dutch fashion; by other houses, plenteously befouled with jig-saw work, and others flaring with the castlemented, battlemented bosh of the wooden Gothic school.After touring British Columbia, Kipling returned to Tacoma on June 30. On the next morning, he headed east on the Northern Pacific Railroad via the Stampede Pass Tunnel and passed through Pasco Junction and Helena on the way to Livingston, Montana. That route was altogether fitting because one of Tacoma's city fathers was responsible for the Stampede Tunnel. Nelson Bennett and his brother Sidney blasted the tunnel underneath the North Cascades Mountains in 1888 and collected a handsome bonus for completing it on schedule so that NP passengers no longer had to suffer through the tedious switchbacks over the summit. Bennett resided in Tacoma at the time Visscher arrived, but he spent much of his time 120 miles north in the similar booming town of Fairhaven, which would be Visscher's next home. In the article, The Background of Mark Twain's Vocabulary, by Charles J. Lovell (American Speech, Vol. 22, No. 2, Apr., 1947), we learned that the Globe during Visscher's era "has coined two new words that fill a sad want in the English vocabulary-'typoscribe,' one who operates a typewriter, and 'typoscript.' " The former term is obsolete but the latter has been altered into computerese. The original definition was: a typewritten copy, as of a manuscript. The typewriter was one of those marvelous inventions that inventors cranked out by the 1890s to speed up the lives of scribes and others and it was as celebrated as the personal computer was in the 1980s. Within a year of Visscher's arrival, the Globe had risen quickly to the lead in Tacoma, but William Farrand Prosser (A History of The Puget Sound Country, vol. 2) noted that Morgan soon sold it to Frank C. Ross and Judge Fremont Campbell. Ross, one of the owners of the Tacoma and Lake City Railroad, would become famous for raiding land on the Puyallup Indian Reservation and two years earlier, Campbell had prosecuted one of Morgan's bunco-steerers who hung around the railroad station to fleece naïve arrivals. Visscher, meanwhile, had befriended Nelson Bennett, if only briefly and Bennett made the newspaperman an offer he could not refuse. By the time that Bill Nye arrived in Tacoma in April 1890 for a speaking tour, Visscher had already headed north to Fairhaven and their paths did not cross.
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See this Journal website for a timeline of local, state, national and international events for years of the pioneer period. Did you enjoy this story? Remember, as with all our features, this story is a draft and will evolve as we discover more information and photos. This process continues until we eventually compile a book about Northwest history. Can you help? We welcome correction and criticism. Please report any broken links or files that do not open and we will send you the correct link. With more than 550 features, we depend on your report. Thank you. Read about how you can order CDs that include our photo features from the first five years of our Subscribers Edition. Perfect for gifts. Please let us show you residential and commercial property in Sedro-Woolley and Skagit County 2204 Riverside Drive, Mount Vernon, Washington . . . 360 708-8935 . . . 360 708-1729 Schooner Tavern/Cocktails at 621 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley, across from Hammer Square: www.schoonerwoolley.com web page . . . History of bar and building Oliver Hammer Clothes Shop at 817 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley, 82 years. Joy's Sedro-Woolley Bakery-Cafe at 823 Metcalf Street in downtown Sedro-Woolley, 82 years. Check out Sedro-Woolley First section for links to all stories and reasons to shop here first or make this your destination on your visit or vacation. DelNagro Masonry Brick, block, stone — See our work at the new Hammer Heritage Square Are you looking to buy or sell a historic property, business or residence? We may be able to assist. Email us for details. Peace and quiet at the Alpine RV Park, just north of Marblemount on Hwy 20 Park your RV or pitch a tent by the Skagit River, just a short drive from Winthrop or Sedro-Woolley |
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