Journal Notes

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Cowboys, Creatures, and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures

Bat Men of Africa (a.k.a. Darkest Africa), directed by Joseph Kane, was the first fifteen-episode serial produced by Republic Pictures. World famous big game hunter and lion tamer Clyde Beatty starred in the chapter play portraying an adventurer on safari in East Africa. While in the Dark Continent, he meets and befriends a loincloth-wearing boy and his pet ape.

The boy reveals that he has escaped from the lost city of Joba, King Solomon’s sacred city of the Golden Bat, but that his sister, Valerie, remains there. Clyde agrees to help his new friend rescue Valerie and treks through the dangerous Valley of Lost Souls to get to her. Meanwhile, a pair of unscrupulous treasure hunters notices a green diamond the young boy is wearing, and they decide to follow the trip to plunder the city of Joba.

Among the cliffhangers in the picture are volcanic eruptions, a patrol of Bat-men type creatures attacking the trio from the air, a landslide, and a fall down a mineshaft. At a cost of $119,343, Bat Men of Africa was the most expensive Republic serial of 1936.

To learn more about the cliffhanger serials of

Republic Pictures read

Cowboys, Creatures and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures.

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A dark figure weaves through a forest of imposing, leafless trees toward a weathered cabin in a clearing. An eerie mist blankets the ground, and a lone wolf howls in the distance. Inside the cabin, two men dressed in business suits and fedoras discuss plans to steal a counter atomic bomb device called the Cyclotrode. Their conversation is interrupted when the door of the structure is flung open and a madman wearing a skull mask and crimson robe enters. This is the Crimson Ghost, and the men deliberating over the robbery work for him.

The Crimson Ghost is determined to get his hands on the Cyclotrode. The Cyclotrode cannot only stop nuclear missiles, but it can also cripple transportation and communications. The Crimson Ghost wants the invention for his own nefarious plans, including selling the device to foreign powers.

Two people know of the Crimson Ghost’s dangerous ambitions, and they are criminologist Duncan Richards and Diana Farnsworth, secretary for the professor who created the Cyclotrode. The duo is determined to stop the villain and his henchmen from taking the contraption and destroying lives.

The duo match wits and fists with the miscreant and his aides in an attempt to keep the Cyclotrode from being used for mass destruction. Duncan and Diana were threatened with death by explosion, poison gas, deadly slave collars, and death rays.

The Crimson Ghost was one of Republic Pictures most popular cliffhanger serials. To learn more about the exciting cliffhanger films from the once thriving movie studio read Cowboys, Creatures, and Classics: The Story of Republic Pictures.

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Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women in the Old West

A New England schoolmarm living in Wyoming in 1879, falls in love with a cowboy who’s not only an expert roper and rider, but handy with a gun.  The teacher is opposed to violence, and her relationship with the cowboy is put to the test when he insists on squaring off with a card sharp who’s accused him of being a cattle thief and a liar.  This is not a storyline in a Harlequin paperback series, but of a novel hailed by newspapers from the San Francisco Chronicle to the Kansas City Star as one of the “best romances of the West in American literature.”  The novel is the Virginian:  A Horseman on the Plains by Owen Wister.

Published in 1902 by Macmillan Company of New York, the hero of the story is a Virginian who drifted out on the old Santa Fe trail when he was sixteen, and who, at twenty-seven, when the story opens, is a master of the cowboy arts.  Wister’s Virginian has a grand sense of humor.  The Yankee schoolteacher is a fine woman, but I wish she’d been a little more jovial; then maybe her cowboy wouldn’t have had to endure so many forlorn days.  Wister captures their fragile romance with lines like “she would watch him with eyes that were fuller of love than of understanding” and “Ah, me.  If marriage were as simple as love!”

Now I admit I’ve never been a fan of romance novels.  The stories of beautiful people and how their love blossoms in unusual circumstances seem implausible to me.  When is anyone ever taking a casual ride on the prairie dressed in a taffeta gown complete with a black velvet and lace bonnet and silk gloves?  And then, on that ride meet a shirtless, Chris Hemsworth type searching for a wandering calf?  I went on a horseback ride with a guy once, we were both dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.  It was kind of fun until he ran out of quarters. But I digress.

Many of the most celebrated books in the western genre are romances.  From Dorothy Johnson’s short story, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Louis L’Amour’s Conagher to Lauran Paine’s The Open Range Men and Max Evan’s The Hi-Lo Country, romance is a driving force in those westerns.  Not only does the romantic element make the stories compelling, but, as it turns out, it’s also a key selling point.

A Publishers Weekly 2020 study showed that 72.6 million Americans read at least one romance a year.  Thirty-two percent of those readers were men.  Close to half of the romance books that sold were set on the American frontier.  According to a 2021 study by Psychology Today, the common ingredient that explains the appeal of the western romance is the “dashingly handsome, rogue cowboy captivated by the female lead who ultimately reforms his ways.”  The study also shows readers enjoy a romance story because it “simply gives them hope that they too could have that romantic love of which they dream.”

Whatever the reason, romance is big business, particularly in book publishing.  Online magazine MarketWatch notes it’s a billion-dollar industry and western romances claim a respectable percentage of those earnings.

In addition to Owen Wister, contemporary western romance writers have authors James Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte, and Zane Grey to thank for pioneering the genre.  Since their work debuted in mercantile stores and bookshops across the country in the 1870s to the early 1900s, the field has undergone changes and evolved with the times.  Western romance novels are no longer strictly written from the male perspective.  The focus has shifted from the hero’s goals and wants to the heroine’s journey, motivations, and aspirations.

The fancy but picturesque character study in The Virginian is just one of the reasons it ranks as one of the best western romance novels.  That, and Wister’s talent for writing crisp dialogue which makes it hard to resist rooting for his lead characters to live happily ever after.  “I don’t think I like you,” the schoolmarm says to the Virginian.  “That’s all square enough,” he replies.  “You’re going to love me before we get through.”

That’s the goal for all western romance authors, that we love what they’ve written before we get through with their stories.

To learn more about teachers such as the one featured in Wister’s book, read

Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women in the Old West.

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Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

Throughout history teachers have been at the forefront of all civilizations, educating and inspiring the next generation and keeping societies moving forward. Frontier Teachers captures that pioneering, resilient, and enduring spirit of teachers that lives on today.

Tears streamed down twelve-year-old Bethenia Owens’s face as she watched her teacher pack his belongings into a faded, leather saddlebag and slip his coat on over his shoulder. She was heartbroken that the gracious man who introduced her to the alphabet and arithmetic would be leaving to teach school at a far-off location. Bethenia’s brothers and sister gathered around him, hugging his legs and hanging onto his hands. Mr. Beaufort had boarded with the Owens family during the three-month summer school term in 1852, and everyone had grown quite attached to him, especially Bethenia.

Mr. Beaufort smiled sweetly at Bethenia as she wiped her face dry with the back of her dirty hand. Streaks of grim lined her thin features and continued on into her hairline. Her long, brown locks protruded haphazardly out of the pigtails behind each ear. The dainty ribbons that once held her hair in place were untied and dangling down the back of her soiled, well-worn gingham dress.

Bethenia would remember this day for the rest of her life and her first teacher Mr. Beaufort. It was his kindness and dedication to education that inspired her to want to be a teacher.

To learn more about Bethenia Owens Adair, the schools teachers like her established, and about the other brave educators in an untamed new country read 

Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West.

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Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

Teachers each day will fill lamps, clean chimneys.

Each teacher will bring a bucket of water and a scuttle of coal for the day’s session.

Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs to the individual taste of the pupils.

Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.

After ten hours in school, the teachers may spend the remaining time reading the Bible or other good books.

Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.

Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum of their earnings for their benefit during their declining years so that they will not become a burden on society.

Any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect their worth, intention, integrity, and honesty.

The teacher who performs their labor faithfully and without fault for five years will be given an increase of twenty-five cents per week in their pay, providing the Board of Education approves.

To learn more about the rules teachers had to follow in the Wild West read

Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women in the Old West

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Walk into any saloon in the mid-1800s and chances were good a thick cloud of cigarette smoke stood between patrons and the bar. Smoking was prevalent in the Old West. It’s hard to imagine a cowboy on the trail without a cigarette in his hand or a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth.

The effects of tobacco have been a topic of discussion among physicians since 1888 when Doctor Robert Koch, the leading authority on infectious diseases at the time, argued that the spitting of chewing tobacco was leading to a spread of tuberculosis.

A quartet of doctors from Dartmouth and Harvard weighed in on the subject of cigarette smoking in 1889. According to the October 4, 1889, edition of the Monroe Daily Independent physicians studying the proliferation of smoking in locations such as San Francisco, California and Denver, Colorado determined that “tobacco should be used moderately, if used at all.”  The four doctors involved in the study concluded that laborers and artisans could smoke all they want without injury, but that “brain-workers” exposed themselves to the risk of nervous collapse if they indulged in more than one cigarette a day.  The reasoning was that the life of a “brain-worker” tended to be sedentary and therefore their internal organs were not as strong as those who earned a living working with their hands.  Laborers were sturdy individuals whose heart could withstand the strain.

The physicians all agreed that the habit of smoking tobacco was a very pernicious one if indulged in by boys. “A complication of nervous disorders is produced by excessive tobacco smoking and boys ought not to smoke,” the doctors concluded in their findings. “Many boys started smoking when they were eleven or twelve years old. They began by picking up their father’s half-smoked cigar or by stealing his tobacco. When these boys come to be seventeen or eighteen years of age they are thin, pale-faced, short and their vitality is seriously impaired.”

In 1905, Doctor Sara B. Chase spoke to the issue of women smokers. “Tobacco in any shape has no good qualities at all in it for women. I found that women not only smoke, but chew tobacco. Many of the women that smoke today are teachers. The most injurious form of smoking is cigarettes.  It is the most injurious because tobacco is put right into the mouth and the nicotine poison in the tobacco is absorbed that way through the paper.”

The physician’s study concluded with the following warning, “A man would be a great deal better off if he would let tobacco alone. I know he would have more money because it is an expensive habit. Exactly how much nicotine is needed to poison a man is not known. A man who is a heavy smoker would probably require much more nicotine to poison him than a man who doesn’t smoke at all or one of nervous temperament.”

The results of numerous other studies would be posted in newspapers throughout the Old West from 1888 to 1912, but it didn’t stop a cowboy from rolling his own cigarette in corn shucks and smoking.

To learn more about some of the teachers that smoked and why, read

Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

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Sister Blandina stood over the pale, bullet-ridden body of a young gunman and mopped the sweat off his brow with a white cloth. He smiled benignly up at her, then turned his attention to the outlaws surrounding his bed. The renegades stared back at him quietly, all wearing grave expressions that reflected the severity of his physical condition.

Sister Blandina’s eyes shifted from the injured youth to the teenage boy standing next to him, tapping his holstered gun with his hat. “Sister Blandina,” the weak patient began, “Billy, our captain . . . .” Teenage outlaw Billy the Kid nodded politely to the nun. “We are glad to see you, sister, and I want to say, it would give me pleasure to be able to do you any favor.” For more than a month Sister Blandina had been caring for the wounded member of Billy the Kid’s gang known only as Happy Jack.

After being shot in the thigh he had been dumped in an abandoned adobe hut near Trinidad, Colorado, and left for dead. A boy from the school where Sister Blandina taught had found him and brought her to the location to help. In addition to fresh bandages and water, she had furnished the hurt desperado with food and linens. She had tended to his spiritual as well as physical needs, and for that she was rewarded with an audience with Happy Jack’s partner in crime. “He has steel-blue eyes and a peach complexion,” she recalled later in her journal. “. . . One would take him to be seventeen— innocent looking, save for the corners of his eyes, which tell a set purpose, good or bad.”

The purpose Sister Blandina had learned for one of Billy’s upcoming rides was definitely bad. According to Jack, the gang was going to kill the four physicians living in the area who had refused to call on the gunshot gang member. She was thinking of those men when she exchanged cordialities with Billy. “Yes, there is a favor you can grant me,” she said responding to his offer. “He reached his hand toward me,” she recounted later. “The favor is granted,” the Kid promised.

To learn about the favor Sister Blandina asked of Billy the Kid read

Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

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Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

Twenty-two-year-old Olive Isbell cradled a loaded rifle in her arms and scanned the hilly landscape surrounding the adobe school where she taught at the Santa Clara Mission in California. From far off she could hear a gun spit in swift five-syllable defiance, and she readied herself for a potential attack on the building. Twenty preoccupied students toiled away at the books and lessons in front of them. The exchange of gunfire was so routine it barely disturbed their studies. The mission was under fire from the Mexican Army, which was trying to reclaim land it believed belonged to Mexico.

Settlers scattered throughout the area had converged on the site for protection. More than 195 people with their wagon trains and pack animals spread out over various sections of the mission were busy loading weapons and preparing themselves for a fight. A number of those people had contracted typhoid fever. They were weak and at times unable to work, and they desperately needed medical attention.

Olive had gathered the healthy children together at a stable on the far side of the compound. It was her way of keeping the youngsters occupied and safe during the uprising. The one-room, makeshift schoolhouse was 15 feet square, thick with flies and fleas, with dirt floors and the stench of manure. A few crude tables and benches made from scraps of wood were used as desks and chairs for the pupils, who ranged in age from six to fourteen years old. A fire pit in the center of the room kept the class warm, and the smoke from the hearth escaped through a large hole in the roof.

Olive vowed to educate the pioneer class to the best of her ability and protect them from any harm. The gun that swung from the belt of her gingham dress when it wasn’t in her arms assured her students they were safe.

To learn all the dangers Olive had to protect the children from read

Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West

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Tombstone is a historic western city in Cochise County, Arizona, United States

Among the many short news articles included in the October 5, 1886, edition of the Daily Tombstone was the announcement of a new teacher to the well-known Arizona town.  Miss Sarah Herring, her four siblings, and mother, Mary, arrived in Tombstone in 1882 to join her father, mine owner and lawyer Colonel William Herring.  Born on January 15, 1861, in New York, Sarah acquired her father’s desire to teach.  The colonel was employed as a public schoolteacher for many years prior to moving his family West.  She believed teaching children reading, writing, and arithmetic was crucial to providing stability and opportunity to their lives, and by extension bringing respectability to wild frontier communities.  A year prior to Sarah riding into Tombstone, the boomtown witnessed its most notorious event, the gunfight near the O.K. Corral.  She was convinced Tombstone’s rough and rugged reputation would improve by educating the youngsters who lived there.

Sarah was among several aspiring teachers summoned by the Board of School Examiners in December 1885 to take a test to determine their qualifications.  She was one of four teachers that day who obtained a territorial certificate necessary to work at the school.  Sarah began her career at the Tombstone school teaching first grade.  The February 21, 1886, edition of the Tombstone Daily Epitaph included a brief note about her accomplishment.  “Miss Herring is an excellent teacher,” the article read, “who has been tried in this city, and in her selection the Board of Trustees have acted wisely, and their appointment will be approved by every parent in this city.”

The Tombstone school board provided Sarah with the books she was to use in her classroom.  Among the limited materials supplied were Appletons’ School Readers, the Elementary Spelling Book by Noah Webster, and Ray’s New Primary Arithmetic.

If not for the sudden tragedy that struck Sarah and her family in October 1891, she might have been content to remain an educator for the rest of her life. To learn what caused Sarah to leave the teaching profession, pursue another endeavor, and make history read Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West.

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Mary Graves Clarke, a dark-haired woman with a pale face and deep age lines marking her high cheekbones and small mouth, sat behind a wooden desk staring out a window that was slightly tinged around the edges with frost. The view of the distant snow-covered mountains that loomed over Huntington Lake in Tulare County held her attention for a long while.

The eleven students in the one-room schoolhouse where Mary taught pored over the books in their laps, quietly waiting for their teacher to address them. The pupils ranged in age from six to fifteen years. The majority of the class were girls, a few of whom couldn’t help themselves from whispering while casting worried glances at their distracted teacher. Finally, one of the children asked, “Mrs. Clarke, are you all right?” Mary slowly turned to the pupils and nodded. “I’m fine,” she assured them. “I was just remembering.”

According to the journal kept by one of Mary’s students, her “expression was one of sadness.” In spite of her melancholy spirit, she led the students through a series of lessons then dismissed them for recess. She followed them outside and for a moment was content simply to watch them play. A cool breeze drew her attention back to the mountains and drove her thoughts back to a time when she was a teenager, hopeful and happy.

If she had stayed in Indiana where she was born on November 1, 1826, she might have married the boy next door, taught students to read and write at a schoolhouse in her hometown, and lived out her days watching her children and grandchildren grow up on the family farm. Her life, however, took a different course when her family joined the Donner Party in 1846 and headed west.

To learn about Mary Graves and what she did to help save the survivors of the Donner Party read Frontier Teachers: Stories of Heroic Women of the Old West