Information Sheet

 

 

R         Hershey, Charley, 1869-

188                  Diaries, 1883-1888.

                                    Five folders.

 

MICROFILM

 

 

 

These are diaries of a young itinerant peddler from Joplin in Jasper County, Missouri.  Her­shey and his brothers canvassed the mining towns in Jasper County and in Kansas.  They made a journey down the White River in Arkansas in 1884, and went to California, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado in 1886.  The collection also includes a fragment of a short story, “Goldeye’s Trip to the Hills,” n.d.

 

Nothing is known of the author of these diaries, or how they came into the possession of the Joplin Historical Society.  The text indicates only that Charley Hershey lived in Joplin, that he had two brothers, Austin and Sam, who worked with him, and uncles in Ellsworth, Kansas, and Penn­sylvania.  Charley was nineteen years old on 11 May 1888.

 

The diaries consist of daily records of travel and business, with very brief descriptions of the towns and sights visited along the way.  The entries are written in a flowery, pseudo-poetic style which evidences some literary ambition on the part of the author, who refers to himself as “Gold­eye.”  The style often stands in amusing contrast to the unorthodox orthogra­phy which is found throughout the diaries.

 

The peddling business apparently consisted of door-to-door sales of housewares and no­tions.  Charley and his brothers also sold greeting cards and magazine subscriptions.  The latter in­cluded Solidarity, an anarchist journal and the only title mentioned specifically.  Fig­ures on sales are gen­erally entered at the end of each month.  Although they worked as far south as Granby and as far west as Pittsburg, Kansas, business seems to have been best in the mining com­munities of Jasper County, Missouri.  Periods of slow sales were spent hauling wood and trapping around Jop­lin.

 

Fur-trapping was the object of a trip by the Hershey brothers down the flooded White River in 1884, which led to the most unusual incident related in the diaries.  Finding trapping impossi­ble, the brothers moved downstream toward Jacksonport, Arkansas.  They determined to go into the log-rafting business, by gathering stray logs floated by the high water from landings up­stream.  The promising scheme fell apart when a group of local inhabitants (Charley called them “Ku Kluxers”) made preparations to disrupt passage of the rafts down river.  The broth­ers wound up aban­doning their plans and camp, fleeing into the swamps.  There they were separated, and spent nearly a week’s uncomfortable sojourn before being safely reunited.  Charley called the Ar­kansas adven­ture, “The Turible[sic] Times in the Swamps and the Nar­row Escapes from the Swamp Devils.”

 

A typescript of the first two diaries, 1883-1884 and 1886, has been prepared by the Joplin His­torical Society and has been filmed in front of the originals.  Several sketches from pages of the books have been copied on 35mm color transparencies.  These have been filed in the Informa­tion Folder.

 

 

 

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