Why the World Needs Fact-checkers

All history, at least theoretically, is based on primary sources. Suppose you want a study of the daily lives of soldiers guarding the Black Hills Road. Someone is going to have to take a look at the military records of the soldiers themselves, their diaries, letters, and memoranda. These are the primary sources. Without some evidence from that time, you have only speculation.

Now, what happens when someone publishes this study? It becomes a secondary source, i.e., one that synthesizes and interprets a number of primary sources. Future studies, also secondary sources, will likely consult this book on the Black Hills Road to take advantage of the knowledge that it has built up from its study of the primary sources. But here’s the problem: unless you’ve seen the primary sources yourself, how can you trust the author of the secondary source? How can you be certain that the primary sources really do say what the author thinks they do? Well, to begin with, it’s a comfort if you know that the author had a good editor.

It’s a truism that the more pairs of eyes you have looking at something, the more likely you are to spot potential issues. And in many cases, that’s what an editor is: a second pair of eyes. Here at the South Dakota State Historical Society Press we pay particular attention to fact-checking, as do many other presses. We strive hard to go back to all the pertinent primary sources and vet the accuracy of the author’s references. In some instances, we even have to look over another editor’s shoulder, as it were, and check the primary sources cited by the secondary sources cited by the author of the manuscript that we’re working on. Dubious towers of inaccuracy have been constructed by one author citing another citing another citing another whose work wasn’t properly fact-checked in the first place. In some cases, an erroneous “fact” can become enthroned as historical truth if it is printed often enough by authors who are not sufficiently careful in checking their sources—and then good luck dethroning it!

So for the sake of accurate history, we certainly do our best to check, check, check!

RGH

Swearingen by Any Other Name . . .

I wrote a friend of mine today and misspelled his name as Bryon instead of Byron. It’s an old fault of mine; my brother Brian spent most of his youth as Brain. But it got me to thinking about Al Swearingen, the notorious saloon keeper of the gold-rush era who first opened business in Custer City and then moved, famously, to Deadwood. In the historical record, his name is often grossly misspelled, but we rarely mistake him and his enterprises for anyone or anything else.

Consider how his name appears in Captain Jack Crawford’s letters written from Custer City during the gold rush. “Swannger’s Hall, or Hurdey Gurdey house, as it is termed, is open and in full blast,” Crawford wrote on 27 March 1876. The rest of the letter makes clear the nature of this Swannger’s business. On a wooden floor in the back of the hall could be found, Crawford continued, “four fairy-like forms gliding around in the gay quadrille, while four of the hardy miner boys, whose heavy boots sounded like so many trip-hammers in a foundry, were handling the girls as they would flowers in the spring time—they looked so delicate, you know.” For those who wished to indulge, the dance cost “the sum of fifty cents for each set, to be paid at the bar after the dance is over, for which [the purchaser] receives a cigar or drink, and his girl, or the young lady he danced with, also receives a treat” (Ho! For the Black Hills, p. 95, published by the SDSHS Press).

Crawford wasn’t alone in mangling Swearingen’s name. Harry (“Sam”) Young, another early Custer resident and later a bartender at Deadwood’s Saloon No. 10, also struggled with the moniker. Young recorded Al’s arrival in Custer City via Cheyenne, Wyoming, in his 1915 memoir Hard Knocks: “Swarringer immediately constructed a large log building, flooring it, and in the rear erected fourteen stalls, or rooms, where the girls slept. . . . This new enterprise took the town by storm and Swarringer made a great deal of money there” (p. 194).

By any other name, Swearingen is still recognizable as himself.  I hope my brother and my friend remember that fact when I misspell their names once again.

NTK

Ho! For the Black Hills

Award-winning historian Paul L. Hedren discovered Captain Jack Crawford’s newspaper articles and letters from the 1870s Black Hills Gold Rush and Great Sioux War and was instantly captivated. Captain Jack’s words, which create a fascinating window into that time, have now been published by the South Dakota State Historical Society Press as Ho! For the Black Hills.

In 1875, Captain Jack joined the Dodge Expedition into the Black Hills of Dakota Territory, from where he penned letters to the Omaha Daily Bee. Not content with accompanying Dodge, Captain Jack returned to the Black Hills in 1876 for a further six months.

John Wallace Crawford, who became better known as Captain Jack, wrote a vibrant account of this tumultuous era in the American West. His correspondence featured his adventures as he played the parts of reporter, plainsman, scout, and raconteur. Captain Jack informed his readers, in great detail and with an eye for the unusual and intriguing, of the relative merits of the gulches, the vagaries and difficulties of travel in the region, the art of survival in what was essentially wilderness, the hardships of inclement weather, trouble with outlaws, and interactions with American Indians.

Hedren has compiled these almost unknown letters, writing an introduction and essays. The result is a treasure trove of hitherto hidden primary documents as well as a ripping yarn in the traditions of the Old West.

Hedren, of Omaha, Neb., is a retired National Park Service superintendent. A lifelong student of the 19th-century regular army and the Indian wars of the northern plains, Hedren is the award-winning author of 10 books, including First Scalp for Custer and After Custer: Loss and Transformation in Sioux Country.

A Glut of Book Signings

Ever since I joined the SDSHS Press (and before, I suppose, although I am less privy to that information, of course), we have attempted to organize book signings and speaking events for our authors and illustrators. During that time, the book world has changed a bit and the old-fashioned, multi-city signing tour for authors has begun to decline in popularity.

Still, there is a place for such tours, and we happen to find that they still offer value for our time and effort in arranging them, as well as a chance for people in those communities to interact with our authors. As such, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks working on three separate tours. One, that for Paul Hedren and his new book, Ho! For the Black Hills, was on very short notice (it takes place next week), while the other two will coincide with authors being in the state for the annual South Dakota Festival of Books.

Arranging these signing tours is often a task of unimaginable logistical headaches. You wish to have an author spend X number of days in the region and you wish them to definitely speak and/or sign at certain critical locations, but you usually find that the needs and wants of those places and/or the author make it much harder than it might at first seem. Additionally, you are trying to get the media interested, arrange radio interviews and television spots if possible, as well as letting them know exactly when and where the author will be!

It’s a challenge at times, but when all is said and done, if you can pull it all together, a great book-signing tour is always worth the effort; seeing our authors interact with those interested in their work, as well as the joy of putting pen to paper within their own book and leaving that most individual of signifiers, the signature, is a great feeling.

So, while there is still plenty to do, one tour is set in stone for next week and the other two are beginning to come together nicely.

A Preface in 14 Lines

Here’s something to look forward to for the New Year: this summer the SDSHS Press will release the collected dispatches of the Poet Scout. Ho! for the Black Hills: Captain Jack Crawford Reports the Gold Rush and Great Sioux War is edited by Paul L. Hedren, who just published an article of interest in South Dakota History. The forthcoming book is a rich, engaging read, a pan full of colors, if you will, from the early Black Hills and beyond. As the “poet scout” moniker implies, Captain Jack was known for lightening his dispatches with the occasional amusing verse. So in the spirit of Jack, here’s a bare summary of his activities:

John Wallace Crawford headed for the West
In ’75, a correspondent of
The Daily Bee; he watched Crook give the shove
To miners in the Hills, but like the rest,
He soon was back. He met Wild Bill and tried
Some prospecting himself, and frequently
He wrote a verse to send back to the Bee.
And what he did then, pard, you can’t deride:
He joined the Army scouts, and saw Slim Buttes,
And rode a dispatch back, three hundred miles,
In six days flat. He went on to beguile
The public in his trademark buckskin suits.
There’s much more to this interesting guy;
Our book is coming to you this July!

RGH

2012 Books

Just a quick update to let you know what’s on the cards from the SDSHS Press in 2012.

S. D. Nelson’s Greet the Dawn: The Lakota Way is a beautifully illustrated story based no traditional Lakota teaching and belief. Standing Rock Sioux member Nelson has written and illustrated the book in his stunning style.

The Mystery of the Pheasant by Mark Meierhenry and David Volk is the fourth episode for the twins Max and Hannah as they learn about the natural history of South Dakota. In this installment, the twins take part in the annual tradition of Opening Day of pheasant season and get up to their usual tricks and treats!

Historian Paul Hedren has edited the letters and correspondence of Captain Jack Crawford in Ho! for the Black Hills: Captain Jack Crawford Reports the Gold Rush and Great Sioux War. Crawford wrote extensively about the very earliest incursions into the Black Hills for the Omaha Bee newspaper. Hedren’s work on this correspondence brings a wealth of important documentation to the attention of researchers, historians, and those with a general interest in the Black Hills and the Great Sioux War. Write to SDSHS Press, 900 Governors Dr., Pierre SD 57501 or email info@sdshspress.com for a special excerpt of this book.

These 3 books are all set and will come out in 2012. We’ve got a few more in the pipeline that we’re not quite ready to share with you just yet, but we’ll let you know what else is coming as soon as we can!

Famous Visitors

Like many in my overstimulated generation, I find that it helps to have some quiet, intelligent music playing in my earbuds while doing certain kinds of work (organizing sources, proofreading, writing blog entries…) at the SDSHS Press. Recently I’ve been enjoying the Piano Concerto of Antonín Dvořák (pronounced d’VOzhahk), a renowned nineteenth-century Czech composer with a Great Plains connection. (Almost. According to the University of Nebraska Press’s gorgeous new Atlas of the Great Plains, Iowa does not quite count as part of the region. But it’s close.)

The story: one of the well-known phenomena in the settlement of this region is the frequent tendency for ethnicities to stick together, at least at first: Czechs in Tabor, South Dakota, Finns in Frederick, Dutch in Harrison. (A good number from this last group also settled in Volga. I was hoping for Cossacks, but history is nothing if not quirky.)

Anyway, in the mid-1890s Dvořák lived in the United States, and he spent one summer as a working vacation visiting relatives in the Czech-speaking community of Spillville, in northeastern Iowa. (Isn’t Spillville a wonderful name? It’s certainly more evocative than, say, Pickstown.) To this day, I am told, you can see the church organ on which the composer liked to try out new ideas. (I know one person, in fact, who has played this very organ. Oooh!)

Unfortunately, I don’t think any prominent composers have spent the summer in South Dakota. However, Calvin Coolidge did compose one very famous note during his 1927 stay in the Black Hills. You can read about it in A Marvelous Hundred Square Miles.

Oh, and citizens of Tabor: Paul Moravec was born in New York, but he has a Czech name! Maybe he’s somebody’s distant cousin?

Just a hint.

RGH

Thinking and Writing

The past couple of weeks at the South Dakota State Historical Society Press, we’ve been spending some time thinking and writing.

Specifically, we’ve been thinking and writing about the Prairie Tales in relation to their development and what they really mean, outside of their existence as great stories with wonderful illustrations. This might sound a little cerebral, but the point has been to take stock of the series and pen a short essay with our thoughts and determinations.

Publishing the Prairie Tale Series has been an education, it has been fun, and, we think, the stories have brought a lot of enjoyment to a lot of people. The education aspect was for us, the editors. We’ve learned a great deal about publishing children’s books. Working with illustrators and children’s book designers was something that we had not done much of before the series, and we have had to learn quickly as the series has progressed. The series has also been fun for us because it has represented the lighter side of history. Each story contains a great deal of interesting and important history, but it is packaged within the fantastic tales and beautiful illustration. We’re pretty sure the stories have brought a lot of enjoyment to those who have read them. We’ve had a great deal of positive feedback, a number of national awards, and sales have been brisk and steady. All those things are usually signs of publishing good books.

I won’t go into the details of the essay here. We’re hoping we’ll get it published at some stage, and at that time it will be available for all to read. Regardless, it is good to take mental stock on occasion and give some serious thought about what we have done, what we are doing, and what we hope to do in the future.

SD Book Festival

Last week we posted about the South Dakota Library Association conference, but that’s not the only travel we have planned this week. Starting Thursday evening, and running through Sunday morning, it’s also the South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood.

The Book Festival is a major event for the South Dakota State Historical Society Press. As the largest publisher or books in the state, this is our most important chance of the year to put ourselves in front of our readers. The Book Festival is always a really well run show with many thousands of attendees, tons of well-known authors and illustrators, as well as excellent sessions and presentations throughout the 4 days.

This year we’re proud to say that we have eight SDSHS Press authors and illustrators attending the festival and presenting talks about their work. Suzanne Julin, Marilyn Kratz, Donald F. Montileaux, Merlyn Magner, Susan Turnbull, David Wolff, Mary Kopco, and Marc Rasmussen are the talented people in question. We also have a major announcement to make, but we can’t give any more details on that just yet. Show up to the opening event on Thursday evening at the Roundhouse Restaurant in Lead to find out the exciting news.

Additionally, we’ll have prize draws and special offers at our display booth throughout the weekend, as well as the chance to hang out with our authors and illustrators, get their books signed, and savor the ever-growing list of books we publish.

We’re looking forward to a great show and we hope we get a chance to say hello to you at some point during the weekend.

Is it good to have a banned book?

Just in case you missed the news, which I think might have been tough to do this week, it is Banned Books Week. This celebration of the books that, over the years, have been banned for one reason or another seems to stimulate a lot of discussion. One of the questions that always pops up in my mind, is whether or not it is a good thing to have a banned book? If you can shout proudly from the rooftops that one of the books you published was banned does it mean more people will listen to you?

In other news, our new catalogue is with the printer and should be in our hands by early next week and winging its way to you a little bit later. We’ve added seven new books to our list and converted another four books to ebook format for all those who prefer to read electronically. One of those new books is our first chapbook, Why We Love History, which just arrived in the warehouse last week. For $3.00 you get a fascinating little book packed with interesting perspectives on what makes history so interesting.

We’re expecting another piece to arrive from the printer tomorrow sometime. The piece in question is a Special Excerpt from the forthcoming Ho! for the Black Hills: Captain Jack Crawford Reports the Gold Rush and the Great Sioux War edited by Paul L. Hedren. This little 12-page excerpt is a giveaway that we’ll be handing out at tradeshows, conferences, and anywhere else we might see readers! So, if you are attending anything that we are stop by and say hello.