George Ainslie, Wikipedia, Google, and Internet Research

No, the title is not an attempt at “Search Engine Optimization.” (I have no idea if those are even good keyword choices.) Rather, the words encompass my thoughts on a project I tackled while I’m waiting for information related to the book I just completed: Boise River Gold Country. (Soon to be the subject of an item here.) The project took me on an interesting and informative journey through the World Wide Web – the subject of this article.

Lawyer Ainslie.
Idaho City Historical Foundation.

While I was researching and writing the Gold Country book, I accumulated a backlog of what I refer to as my “wikifixes.” These are articles in Wikipedia that I have additional information about. One such item was a short bio of Missouri-born attorney George Ainslie.

Ainslie practiced law in Idaho City, Idaho, the “Queen of the Gold Camps,” from 1863 until early 1890. A small part of his story appears in my book. While seeking more information about him, I hit a very brief Wikipedia article, based solely on his tenure as the Delegate to Congress from Idaho Territory.

That material is reproduced at the end of this article (without the standard sidebar). The item itself says he edited the Idaho World newspaper for four years. The sidebar gave his residence as Lewiston … but the World was an Idaho City newspaper.

Even before I began to dig, I had far more information than Wikipedia had. That included a long (nearly 1,500 words) biography in: An Illustrated History of the State of Idaho, The Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago (1899).

Another short biography appeared in: James H. Hawley, History of Idaho: The Gem of the Mountains, The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, Chicago (1920). A monograph on Ainslie produced by the Idaho State Historical Society largely repeated the information contained in Hawley, but did include a useful newspaper quote about him. I had also done a historic newspaper search (we have an account with GenealogyBank.com) and found some clippings about Ainslie’s legal and business dealings in Idaho.

From all that, I knew I had enough to significantly improve the Wikipedia item. However, a few minor points remained. And that’s really where this little adventure began.

The Illustrated History biography noted that Ainslie’s family was from Scotland, with several ancestors who fought in the highland regiments of the British Army. It also said that the family went back to Scotland for awhile after George was born. The bio said his father drowned shortly after they returned to Missouri in 1844. Oddly enough, none of the biographies gave his father’s name. It did name his mother, Mary (Borron) Ainslie; she lived until 1886. I thought it would be good to know his father’s name, and where they were from in Scotland.

So off I went to Ancestry.com. After all, I knew plenty about George. Sure enough, I discovered that the father’s name was John, and that he was born in 1807. But it did not say where. Not a crucial gap, but annoying. A quick search on Google proved only that there were too many men named “John Ainslie” to make that approach practical, even when you narrow it down to “Missouri.” Still, I tried some other combinations before abandoning that approach.

I then decided to attack the puzzle through the wife. After all, “Borron” is a reasonably unusual name. The combination “Borron Ainslie” returned 186,000 hits on Google. The eighth item down the very first page linked to a block of excerpts from the Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Northwest Louisiana, The Southern Publishing Company, Chicago & Nashville (1890). Hallelujah! There was my man:

“Of the Ainslie branch of the family, John Ainslie (brother of Col. William Ainslie, of the Ninety-third Regiment Highlanders), married our subject's sister, Mary.  He was a barrister or W. S., Edinburgh, Scotland.  He was also an author of some note, principally scenes in India, "Auren Zeebe, or Tales of Alraschid," "Ernest Campbell" and "Antipathy," being among his works.  He emigrated to Boonville, Mo., about 1836, and was drowned in the Missouri River.  His sons, George Ainslie, ex-member of Congress for Idaho, and Mark … ”

I was soon able to cross-reference this hit for some verification. Anyway, I now could infer that they had returned to Edinburgh when George was an infant, although that needed some verification. (Actually, I got diverted to the more interesting material below and never bothered.)

Mention of the “Ninety-third Regiment Highlanders” tickled a memory. (I have studied quite a lot of military history.) The 93rd Regiment of Foot was dubbed “The Sutherlands” and was very famous. There is even a Wikipedia article about them. They were the original “Thin Red Line” that stood off a major Russian cavalry charge at Balaklava during the Crimea War. As it turns out, my wife and I toured the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Museum, at Stirling Castle, when we visited Scotland a few years back.

However, accounts of that engagement, including the Wikipedia item, only mentioned Sir Colin Campbell, who commanded the Highland Brigade. The 93rd was indeed part of that Brigade, but a Colonel Ainslie was not identified in those accounts. So the question arose: Was Col. William Ainslie with the regiment at the famous Balaklava engagement? Back to the web.

I found a few brief, obscure hits before striking the mother lode: Thomas Carter, Medals of the British Army and How They were Won: The Crimean Campaign, Groombridge & Sons, London (1861). Lieutenant-Colonel William Bernard Ainslie had indeed commanded the 93rd Regiment during its “Thin Red Line” action. He was made a “Companion of Bath” (C. B.) for his leadership there, and in other Crimean engagements. At that point, I decided to add that tidbit (with citation) to the Wikipedia article about the Regiment.

During that research, I also discovered I had not scanned far enough down the page on the Memoirs of Northwest Louisiana. Further along, I found the obituary of Col. Ainslie, taken from the Glasgow Herald. Unfortunately, the transcriber neglected to give a date for the obituary. (Why you would not do that is a mystery to me.) Back to Ancestry.com. Born on Army station in India, William died October 31, 1887. Unfortunately, data at Ancestry.com is not always linked to specific citations. However, in this case, English probate records verify his death date.

I did not actually have all this in hand when I began preparing a revised article about George Ainslie. Some of it turned up when I wanted to learn more about William. But earlier today, I posted the revised material, which includes a mention of the uncle that led the famous “Thin Red Line.”

Clearly, the Web contains an enormous amount of data … which we all knew. I put together this account partly to prove that point, but mostly to encourage those who might be intimidated or overwhelmed by all that information. Relatively simple, and fairly quick searches can cut through those thickets of words. Of course, you should have a specific goal in mind. (If you’re just browsing for interesting bits, then all bets are off.)

First of all, don’t give up just because your first few word combinations don’t recover any “live” hits. Except in extreme cases, I seldom go any deeper than four or five pages into the search results. If nothing relevant shows up, I’d rather revise my search terms and try again. Also, I do not often go to the “Advanced Search” screen. Still, that can be handy in specific cases.

A word of warning. Once your searches begin to pan out, you will almost certainly have a lot of information that is peripheral to your main topic. To accomplish your goal, you need be ruthless about setting that material aside. I finally had to stop tracking the Col. Ainslie threads, which were fascinating, but peripheral to my George Ainslie article. (I may do a future article about the colonel, however.)

After you have some good-looking hits, you must apply some judgement and common sense. We also know there is a good deal of mis-information on the web. Check the credibility of the sources. If none are cited, then I consider that data virtually useless for anything important. I can certainly use it to guide a further search for comparable, but solidly-backed sources. I’ll close with one final plea: Describe your sources, as I have done in the paragraphs above. It will make things easier for us all.
                                                                                                    
[Old Wikiepedia Article]

George Ainslie (October 30, 1838 in Cooper County, Missouri – May 19, 1913 in Oakland, California) was a Congressional Delegate from Idaho Territory.

Biography
Ainslie attended Saint Louis University in 1856 and 1857. He graduated from the Jesuit College at St. Louis with a law degree and was admitted to the bar in 1860.

Ainslie practiced law briefly in Boonville, Missouri, but moved to Colorado Territory later in 1860. In 1862 Ainslie moved to Lewiston in what was then Washington Territory where he practiced law as well as engaged in mining. In 1865 Ainslie was elected to the Idaho Territorial Legislature and edited the Idaho World newspaper from 1869 to 1873. From 1874 to 1876 he served as a district attorney in Lewiston.

In 1878 Ainslie was elected as a Democrat to the United States House of Representatives as the delegate from Idaho Territory. He was reeelected in 1880 but defeated for a third term in 1882 by Republican Theodore F. Singiser.

After his defeat, Ainslie moved to Boise where he built the city's first electric street railway. Ainslie retired to Oakland, California, and died there in 1913.

Sources
George Ainslie (delegate) at the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.

Looking Forward To: Fur, Fortune and Empire

The future-release book I mentioned in yesterday’s “Blog Modifications” item is called Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. The author is Eric Jay Dolin, and the projected release date is this coming July. I have already added Dr. Dolin’s web page to my Links page, but here is the link again: Fur, Fortune and Empire. (Cover art, W.W. Norton.)

As you’ll see there, his previous release was Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America. If his new book does half as well as Leviathan did in the awards category, we truly have something to look forward to. As his site recounts, it was “selected as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007” by several metropolitan newspapers, won two maritime-related history awards, and some others honors.

According to the overview, the book takes a comprehensive look at the American fur trade, starting in the early 1600s and running roughly to the dawn of the Twentieth Century. Dolin is very clear about what the book does not cover: [it] “does not address the American fur trade as it evolved during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, nor does it cover the current highly charged political and ethical debate over animal rights and the propriety or – many would say – the impropriety of wearing fur. ”

Eric followed much the same approach in Leviathan. He provided rigorously-documented detail, spiced with colorful anecdotes and descriptions, but examined the whaling industry in its own pre-Twentieth Century context. For this, he was chastised by some “the glass is half-empty” reviewers. (Most reviewers, by the way, found the book enjoyable and authoritative.)

 The naysayers seemed to feel the book was “incomplete” because he didn’t engage in modern-day finger-wagging about the environmental damage done by the historical industry. How anyone can call a 480-page tome, with 90 illustrations, “incomplete” is a mystery to me. I expect those people will have much the same reaction to Fur Trade in America. This is no lightweight airplane-flight read, by the way: 464 page with (again) 90 illustrations.

There is no doubt that Dr. Dolin could, if he chose to, provide a learned discussion about ecological impacts, the nuances of environmental policy, wildlife and game management, and so on – just check out his biography, and his other publications.

By (my) good fortune, he is scheduled to be at the Museum of the Mountain Man during the 2010 Green River Rendezvous (July 8-11) in Pinedale, Wyoming. (Personal photo.)

The event actually precedes the formal release date, so this will be his first chance to talk about the book. (Eric assures me that the books will be available at that time. However, I'm guessing that a shipment won’t have made it to Pinedale – truly the middle of nowhere – by then.) Anyway, my wife and I are checking our summer schedule to see if we can be there.

Blog Modifications

Those of you who follow the blog may have noticed a couple new changes in its structure. These are both extensions of what I described back on April 5th, when I created the top-of-the-page tab that leads to a list of often-used references.

As I promised back then, I also created a “Comment Help” tab. At first, I only provided a link to the blog post where I provided step-by-step instructions for leaving a comment. This latest mod puts the instructions directly on that page, and adds a bit more detail. So now you can get help with just one click.

The other changes involve moving the list of interesting websites and blogs from the left-hand column to a “Links” tab.

I had been thinking about doing this for awhile, and then I received an e-mail about an upcoming book release. I wanted to add the author’s web site to my list, which made that skinny column on the left even longer. Putting the Links on a separate page allows me to include some explanation of what each linked website or blog is about.

Now that left column contains just my Profile, the Categories for blog posts, the Followers display, and the Archive. Can’t get away from the Profile and Archive, but I’d move the Categories list and Followers display if I could figure out how to do that.

I like the Followers feature … just wish I had more of them. In case you’re wondering what that’s all about, it’s basically a way to be informed, automatically, when I add a new post to the blog. A bit like having a Bookmark, but with the added benefit of knowing when there's new material.

I’m researching the new book release and will probably have more about that tomorrow.

Headline Hunting

Posting the “On This Day” item for today reinforced a notion I’ve had about that feature: Something truly important may happen every day somewhere in the world, but maybe not so much where you live. Thus, I had no “blockbuster” events for today, while my daily Encyclopedia Britannica message noted that the siege of the Alamo began on this day in 1836, and U.S. soldiers planted our flag on Mount Suribachi (Iwo Jima) in 1945.

So restricting my “On This Day” feature to events that are relevant to Idaho does limit my choices.

A few times – fortunately, very few – I’ve had to use events that required some fancy footwork to make the Idaho connection. However, lack of “excitement” for an event is much more common. Thus, on October 10, 1833, Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville camped near Soda Springs, Idaho. Not very exciting. However, the visit did produce one of the first, if not the first written description of the geothermal features that became a famous landmark on the Oregon Trail – commented upon and described by scores of later travelers.

Conversely, some events are exciting, but not particularly important to anyone besides the direct participants. Today’s blog about flooding in the Clearwater area is just one example.

If you’ve followed the blog for awhile, you’ve probably noticed that the most common events are birthdays. Given a choice, I try to highlight individuals who played a reasonably significant role in Idaho history: governors, legislators, judges, lawmen, and so on. If the choice is between a run-of-the-mill legislator and an engineer – a bridge, dam, or canal system designer – I generally go with the engineer. I also bias my selections towards women, given that choice … because so few of their contributions made it into the historical record.

Some of the individuals highlighted were not particularly famous people, and we might not consider their accomplishments important “in the grand scheme of things.” That’s all right: They too helped build the state and deserve to have their contributions remembered.

By the way: I don’t include people who are still alive; after all, they still have time to accomplish something else worth noting.

The feature does take a fair amount of work, but it’s worth it. I already have a list of project ideas – for articles and maybe a book or two – that’s longer than I’ll ever have time for.

Projects Update

Those of you who follow my blog regularly -- and there are a a few -- might have noticed that my “On This Day” postings have been a bit late the past couple of days. Problem is, I grinched my back, somehow, a couple days ago. Coddling that has bummed my concentration, and made it difficult to sleep. Hence, I slept later and ended up posting later.  It’s slowly getting better, so that should improve.

Back on October 22, I commented about the package I received from Arcadia Publishing. Their representative suggested we (I and Skip Myers, a friend/collaborator in Idaho City) put together a proposal for a book about Boise County for their “Images of America” photographic history series.
(See the "Projects Progressing" blog item for Oct 22nd.)

We did have our meeting with the Idaho City Historical Foundation, parent organization for the Boise Basin Museum. While some Foundation members were enthusiastic, they need some idea of what we want from them -- which is access to vintage photos. Trouble is, we don’t know at this point what pictures we need, nor do we know quite what photos they have. The Boise Basin Museum has a good selection on display, but that’s clearly only part of their inventory. (Museum photo, Library of Congress, Duane Garrett photographer.)

So at the moment we’re reviewing the photos we already have, and studying Idaho Gold Country history to figure out what the book should be about. The Idaho State historical Society does have an extensive inventory of vintage photos, many of which relate to gold and silver mining.

There, the cost issue is a problem. Their fees are not at all unreasonable, but they add up fast when you need a couple hundred photos. From the looks of things, the up-front cost would eat up whatever revenue we, as authors, might make on the first several thousand book copies sold. (So far as we know, they do not offer an advance.) As some of you probably know, such “regional history” books sell mostly to a relatively small “niche” market -- moving 3 to 5 thousand copies would be a major challenge.

Anyway, we can’t really decide until we know what photos are available, and what they might cost in procurement and usage fees. More, when we know more.

Projects Progressing

Doing the “On This Day” item, every single day, has been a challenging experience. The difficult days are when (1) I’ve been really busy and (2) the events for a day are a problem.

As to the first, we’re still greeting service people for the condo (enough said), plus I have projects (more in a moment).

Daily events can be a problem in two ways: they’re either not particularly exciting/interesting, they require some “massaging” to have Idaho relevance … or both.

The first problem arises from the fact that I don’t generally post items that have no Idaho connection. After all, there are a bunch of sites out there with a world-wide perspective. Two that I visit are the WorldofQuotes.com Today in History page, and a Wikipedia compilation of Daily Events (I just recently added these to my blog form). Each features a full-year calendar where you can pick out a specific date. (You have to scroll down to see the Wikipedia calendar.)

Like most such sites, the events are presented in a “bulleted” fashion, with very little (or no) context or background. The Wikipedia list does provide additional links for some items, or for sub-topics within an item.

The need to find Idaho relevance can be a challenge, but it’s also interesting. October 15th was a good example. The only Idaho-specific event I had for that day was the marriage of a prominent Idaho pioneer. I could have “spun” that, but he will eventually appear under his birthday, so I went looking for something else.

I found the Edison Electric Light Company incorporation item in 1878 on both of the sites referenced above. Then a thought tickled my memory: Wasn’t there something about the first electric light system in Idaho?

As it turned out, there was, but it was in my master database. There, I found that builders installed an electric light system in a smelter near Ketchum … just three years after the Edison incorporation. The Ketchum event was not in my “daily” database because historical accounts gave only the year, not a specific date.

But: Voila! An Idaho connection.

On-going Projects
  Those of you who follow the blog know that I’m working, sometimes off-and-on, on several projects. Of course, I’m still waiting for a response on my stock-raising book proposal.

Anyway, I need to get ahead on entering and checking events for the On This Day database – I’m still finding days where I’d like to have something more interesting Then there’s the next article for the South Fork Revue – that’s largely been “put on the back burner.”

Coming up, I have a meeting in Twin Falls with the Idaho Academy of Science Executive Committee. I am combining that with a visit to Idaho City. We (Skip Myers and I) have an opportunity to talk about the photographic history of Boise County with the Idaho City Historical Foundation. Supposedly there will be time to peruse the Idaho City/Boise County photo archives to see what they have.


The proposal package Arcadia Publishing sent me is fairly complicated, with many questions about book marketing avenues and other elements of our “platform.” Addressing those issues is fairly straightforward. (Photo: Idaho City, Main and Commercial Street, 1894, Idaho State historical Society.) 

The real problem is determining what the book content will be. Their format specifies 180-240 “vintage” photographs -- which probably means we’ll have to start with twice that many to select a set we can build the history around. We’ll see.

New Projects

 
While we waited for, and consulted with the visiting worker-bees mentioned in my “Problems & Frustrations” post [much earlier today], I’ve been writing the next installment of Idaho history for the South Fork Revue, and collecting more events for the “On This Day” database.

Also, as I waited for an answer from a publisher for the Idaho livestock history book (see THE BOOK page on the South Fork Revue), I started thinking about a new project. Then I was approached with an idea by Skip Myers -- I’ve mentioned him here on the blog before, and have a link to his “Idaho City Events” web page.

By an odd coincidence, he had heard about a request from a publisher to do a photographic history of Boise County (and therefore Idaho City). The publisher, Arcadia Publishing, has a series called “Images of America,” and this would be part of that.

No one at the Boise Basin Museum, nor people they knew, felt comfortable with the notion of tackling such a project. As you can tell from his web page, Skip is fascinated by the history of Idaho City and that region. However, the idea of creating an actual book rather flustered him … so he thought of me.

I already had a copy of Arcadia’s Idaho Falls title and found the concept very interesting -- particularly since I’ve done a fair amount of photo/text composition work with The Retort, the good-sized (18-22 pages) quarterly newsletter I co-edit and desktop-publish for the Idaho Academy of Science.

The Idaho Falls book basically has a page of background for each of its 10 chapters, and the rest is many pages of photographs with (usually) very detailed captions. Although Arcadia prefers to work with a local author, Skip and I felt we could team up for this project. Skip would do the local leg-work on the photos and anecdotes and I would organize the material and write the caption “glue” that holds everything together. (Of course, I do plan to visit over there and examine the materials myself, hopefully within the next month.)

I didn’t bring this subject up before because I wasn’t sure how things would go. Now, however, the preliminaries have gone very well, so I have started collecting references specific to that topic. The references I already had in hand have some information, but not as much as I’d like. (I was researching the livestock industry, not mining.)

Offhand, I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble finding the 180-240 photos they typically want for their books. (Finding ones with good quality might be more of a challenge.) At this point there are no guarantees -- we still have to prepare a detailed proposal and have it accepted -- but I feel it’s definitely worth a shot.

(And I’ll post this as soon as I have my link back. It went down again 10-15 minutes ago. MUCH LATER: After being unconnected all day it’s back. Service man says it could be one of my DSL filters has gotten flakey.)

Updates and Tourism Thoughts

As I entered my “On This Day” item, it occurred to me (it should have before this) that the title style was a bit cryptic. I decided to include enough key words so the actual subject of the bit was immediately clear. I liked that so much, I went back and edited all the OTD entries.

Yesterday, I had a pleasant, and productive, interaction with Skip Myers -- creator and keeper of the Idaho City Events site. I had asked him if he had newspaper clippings that gave a specific day for a notorious event in Idaho City history: the shooting of ex-Sheriff Sumner Pinkham by southern-sympathizer Ferd Patterson. Turns out, he did … he had lots of stuff besides the answer to my question. The clippings even included photos of the two protagonists. (Being newspaper stock, the pictures aren’t great, but they do the job.) You’ll be hearing more on this topic in the future.

Skip loves Idaho City history, but the future of his town is also of major concern to him. The mines are long gone, so tourism, recreation, and the Boise County offices pretty much define what the area is about. Skip’s web site lists some of those attractions: hiking, fishing, camping, and seeing the historic sights during warm weather; hunting, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, and other winter sports when it gets colder.

But with all of that going for it, Idaho City needs more to maintain itself as a thriving community, and the only area that might be ripe for expansion is more tourism and recreation. (I won’t rehash our discussion of this issue.)

So … during a walk to the store I mulled over some ideas. I’m putting them here in the blog because I know other towns have faced many of the same problems. One can never tell where good ideas might come from.

Anyway, during my stroll, two thoughts surfaced.

The first was based on my correspondence with Skip about that notorious (back then) Pinkham-Patterson shootout. It’s not my “cup of tea,” but Wild West shootout re-enactments are a thriving business. I found a ton of links at “The Gunfighter's Favorite Links” to Discussion Forums, quick-draw exhibitions, Gun Stuff, Western Performance, and more. The “Western Performance” sub-head provides a long list of “Wild West Re-enactors & Performers” -- I counted 55 to 60 links. There are groups in the usual places (Texas, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, NOT Idaho, and more) and some big surprises (New Jersey, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Ukraine).

There’s even an organization called the American Frontier Reenactment Guild. Since the Idaho City gunfight had a July 4th connection, I sense a show coming on. (The photo is from the web site of a reenactment group called Gunfighters Incorporated -- I didn’t ask for permission, but somehow I don’t think they’d mind.)

The second notion had to do with the reason Idaho City was founded: Gold! Google “gold panning events” and you get hits from all over the world (even Switzerland -- Who knew?). There are gold panning competitions, panning instruction exhibits, and endless variations.

I even found a “gold panning” hit at the “Official Idaho Vacation and  travel Planning Guide,” but the only hit-within-a-hit was a terse mention of a gold panning contest as a Roadside Attraction. Some of our neighboring states do much better. (The photo is from a “recreational” site in Nevada County, California.)


I grew up in California gold country, basically a century after the gold rush. In the 1950’s, my dad had a small jar half full of dust and nuggets caught in a riffle box along the Yuba River. No one is likely to get rich, but I’ll bet new color has also washed into the streams in the Boise Basin. Obviously, there are permissions and permits to be checked out, but surely there’s a possible opportunity here. Panning party anyone?

New Revue Article

I have started work on the next materials for the South Fork Revue. I thought I could get by with two more summary articles, but now I’m not so sure. The next three chapters (around 23 thousand words) cover the period from about 1865 into the early 1880’s. Idaho stock raising grew significantly, pretty much filling up the decent grazing land around the state. That, in turn, exacerbated the friction between cattlemen and sheepmen. During the latter part of this period, Idaho saw substantial cattle drives, some starting within the state and even larger numbers crossing from Oregon and Washington. Also during this time, the Indians made several “last stands,” resulting in the Nez Perce War (1877), the Bannock War (1878), and the Sheepeater War (1879).

Gold Rush Article

Edited and revised the gold rush article for the South Fork Revue web site on Sunday (Sept 20). It was ready to go, but I couldn’t upload it: Our Internet link failed. After considerable diagnostic work over the phone with an ISP support person, we decided their end and our end were okay, so the problem must be in the DSL service. After two calls by the ISP rep -- the phone company can’t be bothered with ordinary customer calls -- they admitted they did have a regional (apparently) outage. They said it could be a few hours to a whole day before it was corrected. Oh well.

Well, the DSL link was working again this morning (that is, on Monday Sept 21). Naturally, the phone company never told their benighted customers that there was an outage, and we can expect no rebate for the day without service. Anyway, I was able to post the gold rush article on the Revue web site. Now I’ll need to start work on the next segment -- I figure that and one more after it should complete what I want to do.

Research and References

The article on Idaho gold discoveries and the follow-on period is completed in draft form. As usual, I’ll set it aside to “cool” a day or two before I try to do a final proof and revision. In the meantime, I am collecting more information for my database of “on this day” events.

It might be useful here to describe some key features of my research and writing process. I just counted files for 231 separate articles, monographs, and books (or book sets) in the reference directories on my computer. Most contain multiple pages of text, although some are shorter files that contain only key excerpts from a given reference. On the other hand, several of the major histories are huge – the H. T. French work is 1,320 pages long in 3 volumes, and the J. H. Hawley history comes in 4 volumes that total over 3,400 pages. (A considerable portion of those pages contain see-no-evil biographies of prominent and not-so-prominent citizens.)

A surprising number of the older histories are available in electronic (PDF) format, already scanned by Google or any of several big university libraries. I have downloaded most of those so I can search for information without being online. Of course, some of these files, the Google versions in particular, only allow you to search them online. Still, it’s not that difficult to work from the page numbers in the table of contents or index (if there is one).

When I discover a particularly useful hardcopy reference, I scan all the relevant parts myself – plus some not-so-relevant portions, because you can never be totally sure what might be useful. If the volume doesn’t circulate (true for many rare and special-collections books), I record key excerpts in my laptop computer, or (gasp!) make hand-written notes that I type in later.

In addition to those sources, I have about 150 Reference Series articles from the ISHS, compiled into three big files, as well as about 60 newspaper articles from issues released before about 1910.

Once I have these electronic files, I enter key quotes or summaries into a relational database I have created (using Filmaker® Pro software on a Mac). Data fields show the date, a keyword title, summary text or quotes, a general topic, the geographic region, reference source, and other key features. My current Idaho history database has almost 2 thousand master event records.

By searching in this database, I can quickly assemble a rough outline for a book chapter or article. Then, the reference identifiers allow me to go back to the sources to retrieve the complete blocks of information. (When you do it this way, it’s surprising how much of the content you remember, but it’s always better to check the original.)

This may look like a lot of up-front work, and it is, but it pays off in the long run. For one thing, it lets you compare (or contrast) alternative descriptions of a particular event.

Magruder -- 1863

The gold-rush article for the South Fork Revue is coming along. However, one of the stories I had to trim concerns the infamous Magruder murders of 1863. Lloyd Magruder, a Marylander who had done poorly in California, prospered in idaho, owning a store and a pack train. Late in the summer of 1863, the packer carried supplies to the Montana gold fields, crossing the Bitterroot Mountains via Nez Percés Pass. On the return trip, four “helpful” conspirators accompanied the train back to Idaho. On the night of October 11, one of the conspirators split Magruder’s skull with an ax, from behind, and then they murdered four other innocents.
Later captured, the four were tried and convicted of the killings and three of them became the first legal hangings in what was then Idaho Territory. (The fourth turned state’s evidence to escape the noose.) A more extensive “suite101.com” article about the murders can be found at The Murder of Lloyd Magruder.

Also, the book The Magruder Murders: Coping with Violence on the Idaho Frontier by Julia Conway Welch (Falcon Press Publishing, Helena, Montana, © Julia Conway Welch, 1991) provides an in-depth look at the murders, the trial, and the event’s aftermath.

Side-Tracked

Got side-tracked by a couple other projects. One of my mailing list sources sent me a new meeting item to be added to the Clearinghouse of the Idaho Academy of Science (KEEPING BUSY page of the Revue). While I was at it, I ran through my organizational bookmarks to see if there were any other new events that needed to be added. All that took awhile.

Also, some years back, I compiled a booklet on how to run a multi-track conference/colloquium. It includes tips from various books on organizing such meetings, plus ideas I’ve gained from experience. The experience includes being on the organizing committees for at least 10 to 15 conferences of one kind or another (several times I was general chair). Eventually, I recast the document with specific terminology for the Annual Symposium of the IAS. Still, I believe the advice is useful for many kinds of conferences.

Here’s an example that fits many situations:
“Do not underestimate the number of people required to effectively run an event like the Annual Meeting. Your core organizational committee will need competent assistance for facilities and event management, technical paper review, publishing, and other matters. Paid services can provide some of this – if you can afford it – but someone has to make sure the jobs get done. They will also need clerical help, and ‘go-fers’ to pick up supplies and deliver packages.
“The preliminary needs are impressive enough, but they peak for the actual event: registration personnel, guides and go-fers, moderators for the technical sessions, A/V operators, student paper judges, and so on. (Retirees generally make responsible and effective Registration helpers. You might give them complimentary registrations for their help).”

Anyway, I had a request along those lines, so I did a quickie revision and sent it out (as a PDF document) to our current IAS President, the Symposium Director, and some others.

Some Article Text

Just to prove that I really am working on an article for the Revue, I’ll quote the opening here:
“The decade of the 1860’s began quietly in Idaho (then part of Washington Territory). Pioneer traffic on the trails to Oregon and California maintained what would be an average year: about 1,500 to Oregon and 9,000 to California. (Of course, not all the California-bound traffic passed through Idaho.) The Utter Massacre, in September, and the Civil War still lay in the future.”
At this point in the text, many rich gold and silver fields have been discovered, Idaho is now a Territory (and separate from Washington and Montana), farmers are exploiting the irrigable lands in the Boise Valley, and stockmen are pushing herds onto most of the promising rangelands across the state.

The need for brevity really slows down the production -- there’s so much I must leave out or super-summarize to stay within my target word limit.

Back to Web Writing

The Retort is out, so I can spend more time on the Revue article. It is meant to cover the period from the discovery of gold in 1860 on into the early 1870’s. That spans three book chapters, with nearly 20 thousand words, so boiling it down to maybe 2,000 is no simple task. Capsule summary: The rush into the goldfields quickly drew stockmen and farmers into the area to supply the mines, created a new Territory (Idaho) in 1863, and fueled further growth in the region.

Just Getting Started

Well, here goes. I designed the South Fork Companion as a complement to my conventional web site, South Fork Revue (follow the link at “Places to Go …” [Later EDIT: "Linked Web Sites"]).

The Revue is mostly about Idaho history (slanted toward the period before about 1910), with sidesteps into other topics I am working on, or just find of interest. Of course, it makes no sense to only focus on Idaho events without explaining where they fit into the context of Western and United States history. As noted on the Revue, the history articles are based on the tremendous body of reference material I have collected over the past few years. [Note to self: Add page listing some of those references.]

THE BOOK (about 100 thousand words) I have written and am currently revising mainly deals with the development of the Idaho stock raising industry before about 1910. I started this blog after I sent my proposal package off to a publisher. In my cover letter for the package I wrote: “Say ‘Idaho’ to most people, even Idahoans, and they think ‘potato.’ Fair enough, considering decades of relentless marketing. What many do not think of are ‘cowboys’ and ‘cattle.’ Yet Idaho was, and is, as much a cowboy state as its more-recognized cattle-state neighbors in the Intermountain West.”

As early as 1910, Idaho ranked 6th in U. S. wool production and 32nd in livestock (cattle and dairy product sales), despite being only 44th in population. Today, Idaho still ranks low in population (39th) but is a significant livestock-products supplier. To quote a book paragraph pertaining to 2008: “Livestock sales and dairy product shipments were valued at over $3.1 billion, placing Idaho in the top ten among all states. Although the state is also in the top ten for U. S. wool production, the total income from that commodity is quite small. (The U.S. now produces less than 1 percent of the world’s wool.)”

With one exception, at present, the Revue contains relatively “static” historical articles, along with background on me and my wife, Caroline. During the summer, I added a FEATURES page to the site which was meant to “include something of timely and/or peripheral interest (historical facts, rants about sports, travel items, etc.).”

Extensive reading finally convinced me that a blog would be a much better approach to highlight the kinds of items slated for the FEATURES page, whether they were history topics or other items of interest. However, my immediate priorities among many projects (see KEEPING BUSY at the Revue) are to (1) finish The Retort, the newsletter I co-edit and desktop-publish for the Idaho Academy of Science and (2) write the next article for the Revue. (When I get bored with those, I generally go back and tweak a book chapter.)

With all that going on, I do not expect to put a lot into the blog right away. Hopefully, however, I can create enough new content to keep it interesting.