wild women wednesday

Between 1860 and 1890, railroad mileage multiplied from 30,000 to 166,000.  Within the first ten years after the Golden Spike ceremony joined the first transcontinental railway, three additional railroads spanned the land, and short lines had been united into systems linking innumerable tiny towns and villages to each other and to the great metropolitan cities. ...

The Nevada County Narrow Gauge Railroad operated as it usually did on April 10, 1901.  It ran as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.  The wood burning engine proceeded along its customary route without delay or interruption, giving no indication that the line’s president and owner had passed away.   John Flint Kidder had...

The Great Northern Railway Coast Flyer No. 3 pulled away from the train depot in Malta, Montana, at 11:45 P.M. on July 3, 1901.  Malta was a typical cowtown with a broad, rutted lane of brown dust running between a double row of false-fronted, framed buildings.  Horses, their tails swishing idly at buzzing flies, stood...

In 1897, twenty-year-old Mabel Sloan of Florence, Kansas, responded to an ad in the local paper.  Looking for work, she was intrigued by the notice:  “Wanted:  Young women, 18 to 30 years of age, of good character, attractive and intelligent, as waitress in Harvey Eating Houses in the West.  Good wages, with room and means...

It was a gloomy, chilly evening in mid-April 1877 when Miriam Leslie, her husband Frank, a Skye terrier named Follette, ten of the Leslies’ friends, and their families gathered at the New York Central railroad depot in New York City. Porters carefully serpentine around crates of fruits, vegetables, spices, and vintage red wine until they reached...

A huge cloud of steam boiled out of the tremendous stack on the locomotive engine hauling a Union Pacific train up a steep grade outside Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1888.  Among the many cars being pulled along was one belonging to the celebrated actress Lillie Langtry.  The seventy-five-foot, blue, private car named the LaLee was...

Just off Fort Point are several rocks that are a terror to mariners and on which many a good ship has laid her bones.  The currents here, right in the jaws of the entrance to the harbor, are very strong and irregular, and in case of fog the rocks are extremely dangerous.” —San Francisco Chronicle,...

We could hear the Mexican officers shouting to the men to jump over, and the men were fighting so close that we could hear them strike each other. –Enrique Esparza, San Antonio Daily Express, 1902 The distant cadence of drums from the nearly deserted town of San Antonio de Bexar sent a shiver of fear...