T. Lindsay Baker

In the spring of 1874 a handful of men and one women set out for the Texas Panhandle to seek their fortunes in the great buffalo hunt. Moving south to follow the herds, they intended to establish a trading post to serve the hunter, or “hide men.” At a place called Adobe Walls they dug blocks from the sod and built their center of operations

After operating for only a few months, the post was attacked one sultry June morning by angry members of several Plains Indian tribes, whose physical and cultural survival depending on the great bison herd that were rapidly shrinking before the white men’s guns.

Initially defeated, that attacking Indians retreated. But the defenders also retreated leaving the deserted post to be burned by Indians intent on erasing all traces of the white man’s presence. Nonetheless, tracing did remain, and in the ashes and dirt were buried minute details of the hide men’s lives and the battle that so suddenly changed them.

A little more than a century later white men again dug into the sod at Adobe Walls. The nineteenth-century men dug for profits, but the modern hunters sere looking for the natural time capsule inadvertently left by those earlier adventurers.

The authors of this book, a historian and an archeologists, have dug into the sod and into far-flung archives to sift reality form the long-romanticized story of Adobe Walls, its residents, and the Indians who so fiercely resented their presence. The full story of Adobe Walls now tells us much about the life and work of the hide men, about the dying of the Plains Indian culture, and about the march of white commerce across the frontier.… (més)

My interest in this book is due more to the use of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives than the subject of Route 66.  Like my ancestors on my father's side, Curt Otto Teich (1877-1974) was a German immigrant who came to Chicago and was very successful.  From its opening in 1898 through 1978, the company produced postcards for businesses and attractions across the country.  The records of this postcard production company, once the largest in America, originally wound up at the Lake County Forest Preserve District's Discovery Museum in Wauconda, Illinois.  Now the collection is about to be transferred to the Newberry Library in Chicago.  Some of the collection is available online in the Illinois Digital Archives.

T. Lindsay Baker, a history professor at my place of employment (Tarleton State University), visited the Teich archives and researched in the production files for postcards along historic Route 66, the former U.S. highway that ran 2500 miles across eight states from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Many of the production files included the original black-and-white photographs that were used to create the postcards.

The book features 112 sites (organized geographically starting in Chicago) along Route 66, presented in double-page spreads.  One side of the spread includes the black-and-white photo (often with notations on cropping and colors to use) along with the finished postcard (except in one case, where apparently a postcard was never made).  The other side of each spread includes Baker's research about the business or attraction pictured and the production of the postcard.  Baker also includes a brief description of what (if anything) was at that location in July 2014, when he and his wife took a road trip along the entire Route 66 looking for these sites.

The only things I would have liked to see in the book are:

- a small image of the text on the back of the postcard, and
- either an image of what was on the site in July 2014, or an address or GPS coordinates so one could look for oneself (on Google Maps Street View, for example).

Nevertheless, this is an outstanding book and a great addition to Route 66 history.

© Amanda Pape - 2016

[This book was borrowed from and returned to my university library.]… (més)