Wild Wild West?

Published Feb 2, 2023, 10:00 AM

Sometimes a thing is important because of how it's built, while other items are important because of the "why". Both options, though, deserve a place in the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Oftentimes, when people die, we erect a lasting tribute to their memory. It could be a headstone in a graveyard, or a small shrine in our home, or even a statue in a park. Every person, famous or not, affects the world around them, for better or for worse, and those who have left their mark deserve to be remembered. But sometimes we don't get it right the first time, and the way we honor someone we lost needs to do over. It started with a mob, but not an angry mob, and inspired one. The people of Boonsboro, Maryland, had all congregated on July four, eight seven, in the town square with one job to build a monument. Two years earlier, the Maryland General Assembly had voted to fund the project with money earned through the state's lottery program. Many initiatives were given budgets that way, with players buying tickets printed with numbers on them, just as they do today. The structure was to be made of stone and rise to the sky like a finger pointing towards the heavens. The people chose a perfect spot for their creation in the nearby woods and got to work all day. They gathered stones and stacked them, creating a base measuring fifty four feet in circumference. On top of that sat a tower fifteen feet tall. Halfway through the day, a local reverend delivered an impassioned speech to keep the builders motivated. They must have worked too, because they had finished fifty percent of the tower by four pm. With the day's work complete, someone stood up and read the Declaration of Independence to the crowd. Three veterans of the Revolutionary War then fired their rifles in salute. It was a day of celebration, but the rest of the tower would have to wait until a few months later, as most of the workmen were going to be busy until then. Everyone returned in September and construction was finally completed. By the time it was done, the Boonsboro Tower measured thirty feet high, a testament not just to the man they were honoring, but to their patriotism and work ethic as well. According to William Bell, a journalist with the town's Torchlight newspaper, Boonsboro citizens were filled with a spirit of zeal and ardor so much so that it didn't matter that the tower wasn't precise and its measurements or particularly good looking. It was sturdy and made with the best of intentions. Bell went on to write, we do not calculate that, when finished, it will give this town immortal glory, but we do sincerely hope that it will be the means of stirring up the fading gratitude of the people. Unfortunately, that gratitude didn't last long. The tower had been built with dry laid stone, meaning it lacked mortar to bind the masonry together. The monument was mostly destroyed by the time the Civil War had begun. Union soldiers used the small portion remaining as a signal station. After Confederate troops severed their telegraph lines. Someone would stand on top of the tower's ruins and wave flags in different formations to convey secret messages to their allies. It wouldn't be restored until eighteen eighty two, when a local organization raised the funds necessary to fix it up, but they did more than repair it, and they upgraded it. The structure now boasted whitewashed walls and a lookout tower on top that was made of steel. Sadly, it wasn't enough to keep the monument from falling into disrepair yet again. A little over twenty years later, the tower suffered from a lightning strike so severe that half of it turned to rubble. A rumor began to circulate around town that a father had used dynamite to blow up the monument because his daughters kept meeting boys there behind his back. A second restoration commenced in the nineteen thirties, just over one years after the structure was first built. The land was then bought by a local historical society and turned into a state park in nineteen thirty four. As for the monument itself, it was rebuilt with cement and mortar, designed to look like it did after it was first completed in nineteen just a whole lot stronger. But why was so much money and effort spent on preserving this one stone structure? Why was it so important? Because it was built in nineteen seven to honor the United States first President George Washington, which means that the Boonsboro Tower was the first ever Washington monument, built five decades earlier than the gleaming white Obelisque in Washington, d c. That everyone knows today. The sun glared overhead as the two gun slingers stepped into the road poised to fire at each other. It was hot, with barely a breeze as crowds watched with bated breath for the battle to begin. It was noon in Palisade, Nevada, and the locals were about to do what they did best perform. If you visit Palisade today, there isn't much there. The town was in Eureka County in northeastern Nevada, like so many towns in the Western front Here, though, it was formulated, plotted, and raised by the railroad companies that controlled large portions of westward expansion Central Pacific Railroad to be specific. The possibility of a railroad that connected the East and the West coasts was proposed in the eighteen forties. Not one to let those pisky things like treaties and territorial rights stand in their way, railroad executives began petitioning Congress that's August body refused to sanction the plan for several years until the Railroad Act of eighteen sixty to finally put full government support behind the Transcontinental Railroad. The Central Pacific Railroad Company of California would meet the newly created Union Pacific Railroad in the middle of the country. Construction began in eighteen sixty three, using poor labor practices and underpaid labor, largely immigrants from China and Ireland. The government and railroad companies sat down and, in conjunction with the Homestead Act of eighteen sixty two, plotted out where railroad stations would be and the towns that would surround them. So many towns were raised on the frontier, and all of them were a gamble. It was a question of risk and reward. Would this little community succeed or die in the face of all that hostile environment, the tough land, and crippling economic conditions that would be thrown at them. The cycle of boom and bust was kick started by gold fever in the eighteen forties. Towns seemed to rise and fall overnight as news of gold spread across the largely unexplored western ontier. Settlers looking for a better life quickly established new towns, and then railroads moved in, which brings us back to Palisade. It was founded in eighteen sixty eight to be a stop on the Central Pacific Railroad, which would help bring people to and from Nevada and transport the wealth from the nearby silver mines. As the town grew and as more people began traveling to San Francisco or Chicago, Palisade became a convenient rest stop, and then a funny thing started to happen. Slowly, but surely, Stories started to trickle back east from letters sent by loved ones, columns and newspapers, and telegrams of the bizarre experiences the wild West had to offer. As the West grew thick with settlers and railroads became more common, so did stories of bank robberies, train thefts, and outlaws who seemed to be roaming the territories by the dozen. These stories took on a whole new life with the creation of the dime Store novel in the eighteen sixties. These novels were, in a word, lured. They over exaggerated stories of cowboys, explorers, and bandits, and with the increase in literacy after the Civil War, the books flew off the shelves. Soon it wasn't just settlers and their families heading west. There were tourists going to visit friends and family members out there, hoping to see some of the excitement they've been promised. Cowboys and gunfights and wolves and lawlessness. But they weren't getting any of that, and it turned out the wild West wasn't nearly as wild as visitors had been led to believe. The people of Palisade noticed the grumbles of discontent by those stepping off the trains at their station and complaining at lunch in their restaurants. As you might imagine, no one wanted to lose the revenue that was brought in by the travelers, and while they were pretty sure that people weren't going to stop coming, no one wanted to test that theory. So the locals came up with a plan to give them exactly what they wanted. In the early eighteen seventies, when visitors rolled into Palisade, they could expect to see lawmen and outlaws having shootouts, watching bodies hit the floor, seeing daring escapes from bank robberies, and anything else that could say their morbid curiosity. It was a pretty impressive operation, made even more so because the whole town was in on it. They used blanks during gun battles, animal blood from the slaughterhouse for their grizzly death scenes, and even worked with the local native peoples to perform raids. All of this law and order hoop Law and Palisade didn't even have their own sheriff. Over the course of these re enactments, there were more people killed in Palisade than actually lived there, and none of the travelers noticed that they were never targeted by these ruthless outlaws. These performances went on for three years and entertained thousands with the drama that tourists expected to see. Slowly, fewer and fewer people passed through Palisade, and like so many other boom towns on the Western frontier, it became a ghost town not long after the railroad closed in the nineteen thirties. After that, the buildings disappeared, and all that was left was the land. No more was ever heard from Palisade and their outlaws, well, except for a local legend about an attempt to assassinate President Hoover with dynamites in ninety two. But friends, I think that's a curious story for another time. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious. Ye

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities

From the creator of the hit podcast Lore comes a new, bite-sized storytelling experience. Each twice 
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