Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1989
Abstract
On 25 January 1890, L. Frank Baum took over the editor's chair of a weekly newspaper in northeastern South Dakota. Stricken with "western fever," the thirty-four-year-old Baum had emigrated from Syracuse, New York, more than a year earlier "to throw [his] fortunes in with the town" of Aberdeen, a promising railroad hub in what was then Dakota Territory. His first frontier enterprise, a variety store modeled on "The Fair" in Chicago, was too ambitious for the time and place, but Baum retained his faith in the West and turned to a career more suited to his talents and training. In the next fourteen months, the transplanted Yankee filled the pages of his newspaper with impassioned essays, political poetry, satirical humor, and some of the most exuberant and inventive local reporting ever undertaken in the West. For westerners, Baum's newspaper is a remarkable record of the year 1890. For all those who love the Oz books, it is a blueprint of the thought processes and ideas that figure in his most famous book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), and its first sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904).
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 9 (Fall 1989): 203-215. Copyright 1989 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska—Lincoln.