Many have asked, so here is the background on how the Old Boston story came about in book form.  It is a bit lengthy, but again I get asked this a lot so I wrote this down and it will probably become a blog post.  My cousin farms and ranches in the area near where the old Boston town site was located.  Today it is the intersection of two country roads (See picture 1 below which is my cousin and I standing where the center of the town of Boston was.  I am the hillbilly on the right).  My cousin lives two miles west and two miles north of where the town was located.  The Boston cemetery is 1 mile east of my cousins’ house.  See picture 2 below (the date on the sign is wrong, it should be 1886)   My dad and uncles grew up nearby so I have heard bits and pieces of the Boston story my whole life. 

The other historical period the area is known for is the dust bowl of the 1930s.   About 10 years ago my oldest daughter and I went to a talk at the public library called “Women of the Dust Bowl.”  A name was mentioned during the presentation that I had heard stories of my whole life which led me to think, “I should write this story down”..so I wrote that story down…  

Mrs Tune the Sheriff and the Goats  

At that point, I thought there are some pretty interesting stories where I grew up and somebody ought to write some more of this stuff down. So at some point 7 or 8 years ago whenever I made a trip to my hometown I started going to the public library/county museum looking through the archives.  I was thinking about doing something on the dust bowl but I kept running into many interesting stories.  I then started finding a few things online that led to a blog post about a guy named Orville Ewing who is from near where I grew up.  Orville rode around in a wagon pulled by oxen and mules for 31 years (1938-1971). He sold postcards of himself to finance the whole thing so now when you Google “Orville Ewing Pritchett Colorado” you will find thousands of “Orville Ewing” postcards for sale.  So I wrote that story down…  

Orville Ewing’s Postcards

While on one of these trips and while looking for some stuff on Orville Ewing in probably 2014ish I came across a series of 64 articles from 1918 to 1919 which were published in my hometown newspaper.  The publisher, editor, and author of the series, Sam Konkel (The Writer), was also the editor of one of two newspapers in Old Boston(1887-1889).  

He, like everyone else, left in the spring of 1889 after the siege of Boston but came back to the area in 1905, bought the local newspaper in 1913. and in 1918 and 1919 he wrote the series “Person’s Stories and Incidents of Old Boston and the Old Days”  

I started digging into these archives and started scanning and transcribing all the stories in the series.  In April 2017 I pushed out a blog 

“Sidewalks of Old Boston”

It was about that time I started thinking,  “This should be a book”  (Maybe I was prompted by a handwritten note in the sidebar of one of the articles that said “Someone should turn this into a book”).      I already had the core of the content transcribed by this time, but I think what helped make the book was combining those articles with content from online databases that are now available.   The articles have just been sitting there for 100 years but being able to corroborate much of what Konkel wrote confirmed and improved the story.  I don’t think the way I did this could have been done even 5 years ago.  Being an IT guy and having access to a ton of online database archives because I work at a college didn’t hurt.    It is non-fiction.  The history is solid, and the story is crazy enough, I didn’t have to make anything up to have a wild story.

From the time I really decided to do the book  in April 2017 it was about a year and a half.  I set a hard date of Dec 30, 2017, for Draft 1,  I announce I was doing it in January with an intent to publish date of “late spring 2018.”   It went live on Amazon July 2, 2108.  I could have made late spring, but I was playing around with some things related to publishing on Amazon and with numbers related to the story as you will see in the bullet points below,

• The $18.86 Amazon price correlates to 1886 when Old Boston Colorado was first staked out. 
• I tied as many numbers in the book as I could to something historical so I did a 45-day pre-sale window because the Regulator Big Bill Thompson carried a single 45 on his right hip.   Chapter 13 entitled “Deviltry of Boston”…..I almost called this one “Unlucky in Boston” until I found the term “Deviltry” Some believe the number 13 is unlucky…and the original source? It relates to Judas Iscariot, who was the betrayer of Jesus Christ: From the 1890s, a number of English language sources relate the “unlucky” thirteen to an idea that at the Last Supper, Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th to sit at the table. Thus chapter 13 focused on the bad stuff, shootings lynchings etc. that happened there

As a side note. My grandma taught in a one-room school about a mile east of the location of the top picture on the cover of the Old Boston book cover which is titled ‘A Cowboy Funeral’  and the bottom picture is the intersection of 9th and Main in old Boston where the town well was located (where my cousin and I are standing in the photo above).

Bottom line timetable for the book…

• 2008ish 10 years – blog #1 about SE Colorado / Baca County area history. 
• 2010ish 7 or 8 years – I should write some of this (history) down.
• 2013ish  5 or 6 years – Orville Ewings Post Card blog post.
• 2013-2017 – blogs and background research, some related, some not.
• April 2017 –  Hmmm, this would make a good book.
• December 30, 2017 – Draft 1 “Old Boston: Wild As They Come” done.
• 2018 –  Look for a book late spring 2018.
• July 2, 2018  – Old Boston: As Wild As They Come -Published on Amazon.
• August 2018 – Book signing Springfield, Colorado.
• October 2018 – Book signing Trinidad, Colorado & Boise City, Oklahoma.
• Oct/Nov 2018 – By-products of Boston research will be published:  “Letters from Colorado: 1880-1889,” “Letters from Wyoming: 1880-1889” “Letters from Nebraska: 1880-1889,” and “Cattle and Cowboys: Letters from the 1880’s”.   These are all listed on my Amazon author page

NOTE: Everything we’ve done in the 1880s has a connection to the Old Boston book. For example,  one of the people who was killed in my book about Boston Colorado, Newt Bradley,  was from Nebraska City, Nebraska and what I was doing was looking for more information about him.  I didn’t find what I was looking for, so “technically” the Letters from Nebraska book is a failed research project.  However, it is a fun read.