Life in the Old West

The westward rush of the railroads across the Plains and westward led to an onward march of an interesting social characteristic that gained a special name: “hell on wheels.” More than just a curse or profane expression, “hell on wheels” was a Westernism for a very specific advancement of a very unusual type of a sort of “portable town.”

The expression “hell on wheels” referred to the motley collection of tents, board shacks, furniture, furnishings, and people who were moved along by the railroad itself ahead of the advancing rail-head and set up near the tracks for the benefit of the railroad workers. This ragged collection of shanties and shady people usually centered around a large tent and included a group of smaller tents and shacks that housed all the gamblers, prostitutes, and fast-money merchants who met the needs of the rail workers and others involved in moving the tracks westward.

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While kicking the dust off some boxes of old books, I ran onto a little volume I forgot I have. So I pulled it out of the box, blew some clouds of dust around the room, and took a close look at this little jewel. The title in English is “The Rocky Mountain West in 1867,” and in French it is titled “Le gand-ouest des Etats-Unis.” What I have is the English translation done by Wilson O. Clough. The original — and I do not speak or read any sort of French — was a collection of letters written by Louis L. Simonin, a French mining engineer and professor of geology. The letters were written to an unidentified friend in Paris.

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We have atomic clocks that can keep track of the “real” time in millionths of seconds — but how did someone living in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, etc., in, let’s say 1855, know what time it was?

Obviously, people living then in the Old West or anywhere else in the U.S., would have had timepieces, probably windup pocket watches. But who kept the “master timepiece,” i.e., who knew what the time zone was they were living in — or were there such things in the 1850s as “time zones”? — and how did they keep that all straight.

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