WWWest-Online Development Blog

America’s a big place. Anyone who’s been there can tell you that. Even if you’re only looking at the area west of the Mississippi, you’ve still got quite a few miles between the Pacific and yourself. And if it seems big now, when we’ve got cars and planes to whisk us across it, imagine how vast it seemed 100 years ago. When people packed up and headed west, they did so with the knowledge that not only would they not see their friends and relatives for quite some time, they would not even be able to receive correspondence from them  frequently, as mail at the time was transported by boat or by stagecoaches, neither of which were particularly speedy. This problem became more pronounced as the drive westward progressed and settlements started popping out further and further west. To give you some idea of the “speed” of the mail carriers, mail from St. Louis took at least a month to reach San Francisco by boat. Sending it by stagecoach could shorten the trip by a few days, but the mail could still take up to 6 months to reach its destination (I’m stating Missouri as the starting point because it was the westernmost state reached by the railroad and telegraph lines at the time).

But it wasn’t just the citizens who wanted faster communication; the government also had great interest in a fast mail system. Near the middle of the 19th century, things were coming to a boil in the US, and civil war was a near certainty. Knowing this, the government needed to make sure that California and its newly discovered gold would side with the Union, which would have been very unlikely if there wasn’t even a fast and reliable method of communication in place.

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“America is built on a tilt and everything loose slides to California”   –Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, one of America’s most renowned writers and humorists. Samuel Clemens wrote over 40 books—several of which were only published after his death—in addition to any number of newspaper columns and letters. Some of his works were fiction; some of them were non-fiction stories and travels diaries.  And most of it was spiced with humor and wit, and still makes for a fun read today.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri inc 1835. When he was a child his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, near the Mississippi River. At the age of 12, after his father died, he dropped out of school and became an apprentice typesetter for local newspapers. Eventually he started working for his brother, Orion Clemens, who owned several newspapers.

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A song, named “Blood Money”¹ starts with the following lines:

“Hey Patty Garret, that’s what I used to call you
They tell me you want me, But I hear they’ve got you
They made you a lawman with a badge made of silver,
They paid you some money to sell them my blood”

In this song Bon Jovi refers to Pat Garret, who turned against the Famous Billy “The Kid”, and was the one who shot him to death, on July 14 1881.

Way back then, a lawman’s life was dignified, but not easy. These men worked hard to maintain the security of their town. An outlaw’s life wasn’t easy either, but it held thrill, the chance for fast profit, and the glory of fame (or at the very least infamy). Read the rest of this entry »

1. 1. from “Young Guns II” original soundtrack – “Blaze Of Glory”, 1990.
   Written and Performed by Jon Bon Jovi. [↩]

For many people, when they think of the Wild West, they think of the Gold Rush. But the thing is, there wasn’t just the one gold rush, but rather several separate, sometimes overlapping rushes to different locations where gold had been found in large quantities: the Georgia Gold Rush, the Colorado Gold Rush (aka the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush), the California Gold Rush, the Klondike Gold Rush. And that’s just a few of them.

The California Gold Rush started with a whisper in early 1848, when James W. Marshal, a carpenter at Sutter’s Mill (a sawmill being built in Coloma) found traces of gold. Read the rest of this entry »

Wow, it’s a been a while since my last post. During that time we’ve made a lot of progress with our knowledge base, and now I’m gonna tell you a bit more about it. So, as the song goes, let’s start at the very beginning.

WWWest-Online is set in the American Old West, more commonly known as “The Wild West”, so the first thing we had to do when we started work on our knowledge base was to delimit it to that era. The Wild West, we soon found out, was a bit tricky to box in, since its start and end are a bit hazy. What I did find, however, was that as a general rule, the Wild West era is considered to have spanned most the second half of the 19th century. Though several years before and after that time are still considered to be “Wild West”, that was how we decided to delimit it, and that’s why we decided on 1845-1895: we took those years and added a few before and after them, for some surrounding backstory.

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