Mining Business Brings Luxuries To Virginia City

When writing a story, I often refer to a series of book titled Images of America (insert city name). What I particularly like is seeing how a town progressed from clapboard construction to masonry or brick buildings within a few years--often as a result of a fire sweeping through the town. The horrible event happened in a high number of cities--large and small.

From the business signs shown in the pictures, I can get a sense of the ethnic makeup. Seeing the density of businesses sharing a wall means that someone might have to walk halfway down or all the way around the block to go to a rear entrance--like for a delivery. Sometimes the streets are really wide. Often a well is seen in a downtown section. You can get a sense of the height of structures, as well as the architectural style. When I lived in Texas, I liked seeing the old buildings containing the year it was built somewhere at the top near the roof. Now, I look for those indicators everywhere.

My latest story, An Agent for Liana, is partially set in Virginia City, Nevada, which is a good example of a boomtown that became permanent. A large body of gold and silver ore (the Comstock Lode) was struck in 1859. Prospectors flocked to the area, and initially, the miners lived in tents and flimsy shacks. But as the strike was determined not to be placer (where just anyone would find flakes in a stream) but instead deep in the earth (where heavy machinery was needed to extract it), the way of mining changed. But people had already built shops or houses there at the edges of the holes miners went into to do their work.

source: Wikipedia

An 1875 bird’s-eye view map of Virginia City shows huge piles of tailings located on lots between streets. Conveyor belts ran from smelters or stamp mills to deliver the remaining rock once the precious metal had been extracted. Buildings are evident right next to the mounds. Businesses are built on both sides of the street where tracks for ore cars disappear underground.

The city itself is built into the side of Mount Davidson. Pictures in the Images book show the stepped foundation and inclined dirt streets. Walking from the bottom of the city to the top would involve a change in elevation of several hundred feet.


The Comstock Lode was so rich that the majority of the businesses in town performed tasks that supported the mining operation (stamp mills, foundries, assay, freighting, railroad, etc.) The city operated a gas plant that allowed for streetlights and gas heating for homes. Water and sewer lines provided modern utilities for shops and residents in a town with a population of approximately 7,000 people in 1877.


I recommend this series of books for when you want to see how life was back then.

An Agent for Liana released today and is part of the popular Pinkerton Matchmaker series. I hope the blurb entices you.


Loner Dale Claybourne spent the last five years as a dedicated and decorated Pinkerton agent. Confident in his abilities, he’s not afraid to face down thieves, swindlers and even murderers. But he quells at the mandate of having to train a female agent and, even worse, to marry her before receiving his next assignment.


Gregarious Liana LaFontaine served as a seamstress for the Denver Pinkerton Agency. Now she yearns for a taste of the adventurous life of being an agent. Her ability to speak several languages and her ease with getting people to talk are her strongest assets.


Impulsive by nature, Liana jumps into situations she doesn’t have the experience to handle. Dale fights his growing admiration for this French beauty while keeping close to guard her safety. At odds over almost everything, the pair has to solve the mystery of who is stealing from a Virginia City saloon—a task made even harder because of the wild attraction that shouldn’t be present in a marriage of convenience.

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Researching Pinkerton Agents

When I started researching the Pinkerton National Detective Agency for the hero of a story, I had no idea what was a reasonable amount of time for an agent to spend on a case. Or if traveling from Rhode Island to Texas was believable. First, I consulted non-fiction titles that detailed Allan Pinkerton’s personal detective history that led into creating his agency. One book I read, Inventing the Pinkertons by S. Paul O’Hara was really slanted toward the economic and political conditions of the times. (rather dry) Then I read The Pinks by Chris Enss, which showcased the famous female detectives and the types of roles they performed for the company.

Allan Pinkerton circa 1861 credit Wikipedia

I dug deeper and, to my delight, discovered that Allan Pinkerton himself published reports of various cases. A first-hand account of events is always the most reliable and valuable source for research. The added bonus is that these reports read like fiction. Possibly he learned his writing skills because he released a couple dime novels based on cases. But he also wrote factual accounts of the timelines, events, agents involved, and the methods used. I was so surprised at how dedicated he was to fulfill the clients’ needs.

One story I read is titled The Spiritualists and The Detectives, and it related how two agents went undercover and worked for weeks to gain the confidence of the spiritualist who had a lawsuit against their client, hoping she’d admit the case was a fraud. The woman who read palms and gave séances claimed the rich client promised to divorce his wife and marry her. She sued him for breach of promise. When the spiritualist suspected someone was watching her, (which was happening because she’d rented rooms in her house to the two men who posed as salesmen) she jumped on a westbound train and ended up in Missouri, when another lawsuit was pending. The agents followed her on the train, but replacements took over surveillance once she settled in Missouri.


Something spooked her again and she set off, meandering through Illinois and Indiana. A sheriff attempted to serve her with a subpoena to appear in one state’s court and she successfully avoided touching the document until the riverboat reached mid-river and she was within another state’s jurisdiction. The replacement agents suspected she was headed back to Rochester New York where the original ones first met her and advised they return. In total, the surveillance lasted almost four months before the court date was close enough the agents could serve her with an order to appear and keep her in town. She lost.


If you’re interested in reading about real cases, I also found these titles by Allan Pinkerton: The Somnambulist and the Detective, the Murderer and the Fortune Teller; The Spy of the Rebellion: Being a True History of the Spy System of the United States; Bucholz and the Detectives. The best thing is the books are part of the project where out-of-print titles are scanned and made available free.

I used the research in writing my novella titled Taming A Scandal, book 14 of Lockets and Lace series. Socialite Mercia Saunders is traveling to her brother’s Texas ranch to let the gossip settle from a Philadelphia scandal. Pinkerton agent Dominic Prentice is pairing surveillance on the spoiled lady and hunting down stolen jewelry. Will the confinement of a cross-country train ride toss them together and ignite sparks?



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What Drove the Creation of Time Zones?

While researching a recent novella, I learned about the official adoption of the different time zones in the United States (and by default, Canada and Mexico).


In my story, Taming A Scandal, which is part of the Lockets and Lace series, I needed to move my characters from Rhode Island to central Texas, with a side-trip to Chicago and St. Joseph, Missouri. That train trip covered lots of miles, transported them along the rails owned by a variety of railroad companies offering a variety of services, and moved them from dense to moderate to sparse population. As you can imagine, reading those historical timetables for travel across the distances was confusing when arrival and departure times from the same city didn’t follow a logical progression.

I like to be as accurate as possible with the historical details included in my plots. I didn’t want to state that the heroine stepped onto the Fall River Steamboat in the bright sunshine when in reality, the only time the steamboat sailed from Newport, RI, was at 8:15 at night so the passengers arrived in New York by 7 in the morning. Many cities used their own time standard, and the Library of Congress estimates that at one point following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, at least 300 local sun-times existed!

The railroad owners knew a better system needed to be put in place to allow people to use their railways to travel with the least delay. Railroad managers instituted 100 standard zones. But that short-term solution didn’t solve the problem. The railroad operators formally adopted using four standard time zones in the continental United States on November 18, 1883. (The Time Standard Act of 1918 made the zones official for the US)  In 1884, the International Meridian Conference with representatives from two dozen nations was held, and Greenwich was established as the prime meridian and Greenwich Mean Time as the world’s standard. The prime reason was because Britain had more ships and shipping companies using Greenwich than all the other shipping lines combined. A case of majority rules.


Even with only 4 zones in the US, I always have to stop and calculate when I’m supposed to be at an online meeting at a certain time. Anyone miss a flight or train connection because of a miscalculation?

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Release Day—Taming A Scandal

Today is release day for my second book in the multi-author “Lockets and Lace series by the authors of the Sweet Americana Sweethearts blog. Taking place from 1820-1920, these stories are linked by a visit to The Bavarian Watch and Jewelry Shop in St. Joseph, Missouri.

BLURB:

Socialite Mercia Saunders got evicted due to a touchy situation--which she feels was justified because it was for the sake of her art. Now her Philadelphia landlady has shipped her belongings to the family’s Newport, Rhode Island, home. Her father is livid and demands she choose between being courted by the hand-picked sons of prominent Newport business owners or live scandal-free with her oldest brother on a Texas cattle ranch. To a young woman raised with society, the ranch sounds like boring banishment, but she refuses to let her father choose her beau.

Pinkerton Agent Dominic Prentice is on the trail of a jewelry thief when he first meets the enticing Mercia—too bad he’s wearing the disguise of an elderly Southern gentleman. Then he’s assigned the task of keeping the art student under surveillance on a west-bound train to Texas. He can’t resist a railroad flirtation as himself, and the two draw closer than Mercia’s chaperones know. His allegiance to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency is tested when Dominic is forced to decide between tracking the jewelry or wooing the maiden.

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If you didn’t catch my first entry in this series, Tending Troubles, I put it on sale for only 99 cents through April 6^th. Both novellas, clean and wholesome romances, are stand-alone stories and have connections with my “Dorado, Texas” series.

BLURB

Traveling west to become a mail-order bride is the most adventurous act Bostonian Imogene Franklin ever did. Unfortunately, the groom chose another so now Imogene must make her way on her own. Dreading the idea of returning home to continue raising her siblings, she is reduced to waiting tables in the Dorado café. 
Guilt hangs heavy over Reggie Othmann—ever since he brought home a childhood illness that claimed both his parents’ lives. The ink is barely dry on Reggie’s degree when he arrives home in Dorado to establish a medical practice. All he’s wanted since he was ten years old is to help people, but the townspeople have been without a doctor for so long, they don’t flock through his doors as expected.
An illness sweeps the town, and Reggie is overwhelmed, fearing   he’s not qualified to heal them. Imogene steps in and together, they work hard to prevent anyone from dying, spending days together. Is their emotional tie born of the closeness of the ordeal or perhaps something more?

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