No. 794
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
January 28, 2025

A Boy’s Wild Ride.

Six Miles Through the Woods on a Buck’s Back.
January 28, 2025
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Via Newspapers.comThe following story goes in that bulging file known as “restless ghosts of murder victims.”  The “Ithaca Journal,” August 12, 1922:Painesville, Ohio, Aug. 12--A "ghost" which farmers living near Paines Hollow say has been haunting them for seven years, is "at rest" today. It disappeared several days ago with the burial of the body of Henry Lipenstick, found in an abandoned
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  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
(Illustrated Police News, April 3, 1886.)Agnes Anastasia Long moved out of her parents’ home in East Attleboro, Massachusetts, in April 1882. With her many male suiters, she was considered the black sheep of the family. Her father had enough of her bad behavior and, according to the Boston Herald, “refused to permit her to darken the threshold of his humble home.”She took a job at Streeter
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Murder By Gaslight - 8/22/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Pick-pockets "Working the Crowd.'' | The Pocket Photograph Camera.

A Boy’s Wild Ride.

Wild-Wide For years, an old buck, the leader of the deer herd in the North Woods of the Adirondack region, has maintained an absolute and malicious tyranny of the younger members of his own sex. His treatment rankled, and the other day they made a combined attack upon him, and a boy, the son of Edward Martine, a guide, finally mounted the buck’s back, and experienced for six miles what is probably the liveliest race through thick woods and deep snow which ever fell to the lot of a youth of his years. He was glad enough when the buck came to a stand-still from exhaustion, and happier still when a rescuing party following the buck’s trail on snow-shoes brought him out to a place of shelter.


Illustrated Police News, February 18, 1882.