Me complaining about the impossibility of historical accuracy and research from my rural armchair in an unnecessarily long text post below the cut. The tl;dr is most history isn’t written when it happens, it’s written long after the fact and by people who want to make themselves sound relevant without taking responsibility for their actions.
So one of my hobbies is doing digital research on the history of my immediate vicinity. Because my area wasn’t “settled” i.e. ‘contained permanent resident white people’ until the 1880′s (it was the seasonal residence of three extant peoples and likely countless other cultural groups for 12,000 years) and was regarded as the Wild West until about that time (complete with pony express, highway robbers, lynch mobs and militias), there were a lot of folks who lived through that era as lawless, violent young men seeking fortune, who then establish households and morphed into ‘upstanding citizens’ and later wrote their life stories in the 1920′s as Pioneers of the Counties.
This makes piecing together what actually happened in 1850-60 very, very difficult. There were no true journalists, no neutral observers, no unbiased reports. A lot of people told each other’s stories as their own and all of them wanted to come off as squeaky clean (by the day’s standards) Men of Vision fifty years after committing their sins. Newspaper reports were borderline dimestore novels, crafted to sell copies, and there was no fact-checking. (This became troublesome when people’s relatives were erroneously reported as dead in a spectacular gun battle with the paper’s villain of the day.)
A case study on one particular anecdote of a lynching of a man accused of murdering a business partner reveals almost all ‘primary & historic’ accounts were written forty years after the deed, when most people involved were at a distinguished old age and could recount the exciting facts from the fireside as a little ‘historical color,’ without bothering for self-reflection or questioning if an innocent man could be hung on the strength of circumstantial evidence and no witness. (Despite there being four or five original accounts of the whole tale, and the lynched man’s skull on display in a museum, no two agree on anyone’s first names or the spelling of the surnames, for starters.)
I’m trying to scare up a transcript of an alleged first-hand at-time account in a journal but the site it’s hosted on is currently down for hate speech. Not terribly surprising, as this would have been during an era when Native American civilians were hunted down by parties of armed miners and packers and killed without pause, in the shadow of the Civil War but in a state that banned Black settlement and land ownership for the next sixty years.
It was not a clean moment in history.
My point in all this is, consider your sources. Writing historical fiction? Find at-time accounts, not just reminiscences. Find diaries, not just newspaper articles. Take journalists with a very large grain of salt, and remember only the literate, powerful few get to put their voice on paper. ‘Fake news’ isn’t a new concept, it’s as old as print-for-profit and bragging rights. Consider what’s today’s click-bait headline will be tomorrow’s documented history and apply that filter back over the last two hundred years. You might have to wade through a lot of human nature to get an accurate picture of what really happened.
