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The following is an article from the book History’s Lists from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
From the archives of the Old West, we’ve culled a list of the most notorious places on the frontier. Here’s our countdown of the baddest of the bad, meanest of the mean, Wild West towns.
Some historians say that the Wild West wasn’t as dangerous as we’ve been led to believe by Hollywood, but there’s no doubt that some frontier towns were beyond the immediate reach of the law -places where mischief, mayhem, and murder were everyday occurrences.
8. FORT GRIFFIN, TEXAS
One of the wildest places in the old West, Fort Griffin sprouted at the intersection of the West Fork of the Trinity River and the Clear Fork of the Brazos River in northern Texas. Built in the 1860s on a hill overlooking the Brazos, the fort itself was designed to protect the folks -mostly farmers and ranchers- who lived below in the settlement of Fort Griffin.
The town was soon invaded by outlaws and cowboys driving their cattle north to Dodge City. By the 1870s, skirmishes with the Kiowa and Comanche in the north diverted the soldiers from Fort Griffin and, as a result, law enforcement broke down, which attracted even more rough types to the town.
Visiting Celebrities. The motley collection of buffalo hunters, gamblers, gunfighters, and “painted ladies” brought with them a penchant for violence. Among them were a gambler and prostitute named Big Nose Kate and her pal, the legendary gambler Doc Holliday. Also passing through were Wyatt Earp (who met Holliday for the first time at the fort), lawman Pat Garrett, and John Wesley Hardin -by some accounts the most sadistic killer to ever come out of Texas. Dustups and gun violence became so frequent that the commander of the fort finally placed the town under martial law in 1874.
7. RUBY, ARIZONA
From the days of the Spanish explorations prospectors had searched for veins of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc near Montana Peak in southern Arizona close to the Mexican border. In 1891, high-grade gold was discovered. A local assayer judged it to be a bonanza, and the rush was on. The town of Ruby was born practically overnight.
Here Comes Trouble. Most of the miners lived in tents or rough adobe huts, and bought their meager supplies at George Cheney’s Ruby Mercantile, the one and only general store. The men provided for themselves and their families by hunting and rustling cattle. But the primary source of trouble came from Mexican bandits who frequently terrorized the settlement. By the early 1900s, Ruby was so dangerous that Philip and Gypsy Clarke, who owned a general store, kept weapons in every room of their house as well as the general store. When Philip eventually sold the store to a pair of brothers, he warned them of the danger. They didn’t heed Clarke’s warning and were soon found shot to death. Today, Ruby is a well-preserved ghost town.
6. DELAMAR, NEVADA
Delamar got its reputation as a notorious Wild West town not from gun violence but from dangerous conditions in the mines. The 1889 discovery of gold in nearby Monkey Wrench Gulch unleashed a stampede of miners intent on digging for the peculiar form of gold, encased as it was in crystallized quartz. A former ship’s captain named Joseph Raphael De Lamar bought most of the profitable mines in 1893 and built a mill to crack the quartz and refine the gold. Within a few years, the town had 1,500 citizens, a hospital, post office, opera house, school, several churches, and plenty of saloons. But then the deaths began to mount.
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We’ve all heard of underground societies, but rarely is the term used in such a literal manner as these amazing underground cities featured on Dornob.
Cities, empires and religions have risen and fallen around these unique underground havens once used by early Christians to hide from Roman armies, yet they remains occupied to this day – 100 square miles with 200+ underground villages and tunnel towns complete with hidden passages, secret rooms and ancient temples and a remarkably storied history of each new civilization building on the work of the last.
Read more about these amazing homes and enjoy the stunning pictures at the link.
While many towns were built on corruption, greed and scandal, few are as embracing of these embarrassing roots as the residents of Seattle. Of course, it wasn’t always this way, around fifty years ago, most of the city’s residents only knew of the white-washed town history that was (and still is) retold in school history books. Fortunately, when the city threatened to tear down the city’s gorgeous Victorian and Edwardian buildings in the historical Pioneer Square area, residents rushed to save their town’s heritage. To help protect this historical area, one amateur historian and professional journalist, Bill Speidel, set out to uncover the back story of the slum-ridden district. In the end, his findings resulted in the famous Underground Tour and helped establish the neighborhood as a preservation district, ensuring the continued protection of all the historical buildings in the area.
So what is so important about Pioneer Square and why should anyone outside of the city care? Read on, my friends, read on.
In 1851, a troupe of pioneers known as the Denny Party established the first white settlement in the area at Alki Point. The group was led by Arthur A Denny, who soon realized that Alki Point wasn’t a good place for a settlement and then moved his party to a tide flat off of Elliot Bay, which they named Duwamps, after the local Native American tribe.
Within the first few years of settlement, another leader, Doctor David Swinson Maynard moved in from Cleveland. Whereas the members of the Denny Party were dedicated teetotalism Methodists, Doc Maynard was a heavy drinker who believed vice was one of the most effective industries in a frontier town. Maynard convinced the other townspeople to rename the city Seattle after the Duwamps Chief Seattle, who was a friend of his. He did so not only to help honor his friend, but also because he knew Seattle would be a lot easier to promote to people back East than Duwamps, which sounded like a swamp.
In 1852, Maynard built his cabin, and contained a store inside of it, establishing the first shop in Seattle. He soon obtained the right to host a post office in his store, meaning everyone had to visit his store to get their mail. Throughout his life, Maynard helped build a number of important establishments in Seattle, building the first pharmacy, hotel, casino, saloon, brothel and hospital in the area.
When plots of land were officially established, Denny’s property stretched north of Pioneer Square, while Maynard’s extended to the south. Because each established their streets according to their piece of shoreline, the streets now have an awkward bend at what is now Yesler Way and that area of town is noticeably jumbled when it comes to driving.
Maynard helped jump start the city’s industry by offering his land at exceptionally cheap prices, provided the buyer started building a business on it immediately. He attracted critical business professionals such as blacksmiths into town, along with purveyors of vice, which helped attract more frontiersmen to the city. Early real estate records show that 90% of the city’s first businesses were built on Maynard’s land or immediately adjacent to his plot.
While Maynard obviously did a lot to help establish the town, he was left out of history books and almost completely forgotten about until Bill Speidel’s research helped bring his contributions to light. So why would such a key figure in the town’s founding be forgotten? Mostly because he was seen to be amoral.
When Maynard left Cleveland in 1850, he was married to a woman named Lydia. She eventually filed for divorce on grounds of desertion, but she never completed the divorce. Before arriving in Seattle, the good doctor circulated amongst several wagon trains, helping to fight cholera. While serving as the leader on a small wagon train that brought him to Puget Sound, he fell in love with a widow, Catherine Troutman Broshears. At first, her brother refused her permission to remarry, but after Maynard made a good deal of money in Seattle, he relented and the couple was married.
Years latter, Maynard’s first wife sold off her share of property and the man who purchased it then went after Maynard, claiming he was owed everything that was Lydia’s since the couple was never officially divorced. Lydia came to Seattle to help defend her husband and Catherine and the doctor became friends with her and let her live in their home. According to Speidel, Doc Maynard was the only resident that was commonly seen with one wife on each arm.
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io9 takes a look at cities with something different, whether it’s a colony of feral dogs who live side-by-side with city residents, a town on fire, underground office spaces, or microorganisms that flourish in toxic sludge. And then there’s Thames Town, a copy of an English community in China.
This quaint English village, housing 10,000 people, is just 20 miles outside the center of Shanghai, and a new rail system puts it just 15 minutes from downtown, as part of a rapidly expanding Greater Shanghai. Thames Town was designed to look exactly like a bucolic English town, complete with red brick buildings, a sandstone church, a village green, a market square, and a pub. But it’s not a theme park – developers insist it’s a real residential community.
Link -via the Presurfer
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The US has its share of strange town names. If you’ve made a few road trips, you’ve no doubt encountered some of them. Test your knowledge of these strangely-named cities in this Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss. I scored 67%. Note: be sure to read the questions carefully! Link
This small town got its name from an incident in which a store owner cheated a postal worker by charging him an extra fifty cents for a better watermelon. Certainly they are much more hospitable these days, though it appears they all are still pretty tight with their money: none of the families counted in the 2006 census were living below the poverty line. And most of them keep their money in the Tightwad Bank.
Read about twenty other strangely-named places and the stories behind them. Link -via J-Walk Blog
