Although it sometimes seems that I’ve been beating the Lovewell-History drum for decades, timestamps on blog entries verify that this site has been active for only about twelve years.
During that time, thanks to valuable help from cousins and like-minded researchers, we’ve managed to stuff album pages with over a hundred maps and photos, produce a couple of short videos, and file some 450 essays of approximately a thousand words each. My own goal in writing these pieces has been to reveal some side note to history that might hold a casual reader’s interest for two or three minutes before moving on.
What strikes me at the time as a perfectly appropriate title for whatever I’m writing, usually pops into my head as I type the closing paragraphs. While viewing a list of those titles today and finding myself completely baffled as to what each one might be about, I realize that I really should be giving the chore of naming these things a little more thought. However, it’s probably too late to turn over a new leaf.
Within the last quarter-hour I counted two visitors who each spent several minutes browsing the site, one in Ferndale, Michigan, and the other in Casablanca, Morocco. Over the past month there have been 8 visitors from the African continent, including 2 from Morocco. The US generally accounts for between 300 and 600 active visits each month, while there are about 2 each week from the UK. For the last few months I’ve been able to count on receiving at least 2,000 stopovers from China.
One of the more popular pages this month was a blog entry called “The Bad Old Days,” about a book published in 1974 called “The Good Old Days - They Were Terrible.” The entry received so many views that I decided to revisit it myself. Since the piece was written back in 2013, a slight update was in order.
The most-viewed blog page is “A Thousand Words and Climbing,” about a mysterious, damaged wet-plate photograph housed in the Denver Public Library. In 2013 I courageously made a stab at naming all nine of the people in the photo, which appears to have been taken in the vicinity of Pikes Peak around the time of the 1859 gold rush.
Information that has only recently come to light, casts doubt on my hope that two of the figures might be Solomon and Alfred Lovewell. Unfortunately, the pair now seem to have made the journey to California months ahead of their brother Thomas. I should also point out that the name of the wagon-master was always only a hopeful guess. However, I’m still fairly sure about the six other names, as well as the date of the photo-op, which was most likely the first week of August in 1859.
Second place goes to “Creepy Hollow,” which, like all of the entries documenting Phil Thornton’s travels in his great-great-grandfather’s footsteps, is a perennial favorite. Phil recently regaled me with the good news that he’s preparing to visit the ruins of Fort Churchill and the nearby town of Dayton, Nevada. Dayton became Thomas Lovewell’s temporary base of operations immediately after his discharge from the Army in 1864.
A few minutes ago a Canadian visitor from Sainte-Adele in Quebec was having a look at “The Battle of Whiskey Hills,” which is not a review of the 1965 comedy-Western “The Hallelujah Trail,” but the story of a real-life battle that almost happened in May 1869, but thankfully didn’t. Instead it was only a white-knuckle standoff that convinced a few dozen Excelsior Colonists to pack up and head east, as soon as Tall Bull’s Cheyenne Dog Soldiers disappeared over a western hill.
Actually, I can seldom be 100% sure precisely where visitors hail from, because whenever I access the website from my home computer, the analytics software remains firmly convinced that I’m searching the World Wide Web from the Deep South, instead of merely from the southern part of Kansas. On the other hand, when I was told that three people recently checked out “There’s No Place Like Irving” and that all three were from Irving, Texas, I was inclined to believe it.
I hope the trio weren’t disappointed to discover that it was a story about a different Irving.