Drake professor Lee Jolliffe, with colleagues Katrina Quinn (Slippery Rock University, PA) and Mary Cronin (New Mexico State University), have received the 2022 Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture for Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age: Essays from the Arctic to the Orient (McFarland Books).
The prize was awarded April 14, 2022, at the Popular Culture and American Culture Associations’ annual joint meeting.
Collaborators Jolliffe, Quinn, and Cronin contributed chapters to the book as well as editing the volume. Colleagues to write additional chapters were recruited from the Symposium on the 19th Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression, hosted annually at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga by Prof. David Sachsman. All these writers created chapters that take readers along on 19th-century travels of reporters who pushed the edges of safety and civilization, sending home regular press correspondence that went beyond the tamer travelogues also common in this era. Adventure reporters stepped into the action and reported on their own experiences in far-away, exotic places.
Katrina Quinn shows readers the American West via newly cut trails and early railroads, following reporters up mountains and down into mineshafts. During their rough-and-tumble travels, journalists would suffer mishaps of the trail–-stagecoach rollovers, buffalo hunts, occasional battles with Native Americans, and “hotel rooms” that turned out to be blankets strung across ropes, like pup tents, sleeping four or five.
Mary Cronin shows more luxurious rail travel from New York City to San Francisco with magazine publisher Frank Leslie and an entourage of reporters and illustrators, who filled up his complimentary Pullman Palace car and dined on fresh oysters and strawberries. Leslie’s accounts show his business acumen, as he identified opportunities for US expansion but also show his sense of Anglo-American superiority.
Cronin also writes about a more treacherous expedition, this time into “an almost undiscovered country,” Alaska in 1890. Five men—all with exploration and reporting experience—set out adventuring through Alaska’s wilderness, by snowshoe, sled, and birchbark canoe. Leslie’s Magazine featured exciting stories about Alaska’s terrain, resources, and inhabitants, always with ice floes, bears, and literal cliff-hangers to entice readers. Lack of telegraph lines to transmit fresh stories from exploreres also led to news headlines fearing the team was lost in the wilderness or dead. In truth, the expedition was a success in sending home two years’ worth of exciting photographs, engravings, and stories from “Seward’s Icebox.”
These elements – the rough-cut, unforgiving new landscapes and the sense of ownership and entrepreneurship – emerge in the book as themes of Gilded Age adventure reporting overall.
Other chapters feature familiar names like Mark Twain and Nelly Bly on what may be adventures unfamiliar to readers – Twain, for instance, traveling to Hawaii and Bly to Mexico. These familiar figures are joined by less well-known but equally engaging Gilded Age adventurer-reporters like Henry Morton Stanley crossing Africa to find Dr. Livingstone, Thomas Knox reporting from China with almost sociological precision, and Eliza Scidmore mountain climbing in Japan to write and photograph for the young National Geographic. Scidmore, incidentally, brought back a gift of cherry trees to Washington, DC, from the people of Japan—trees that are now blooming in our capital city.
Lee Jolliffe closes out the book by showing these writers’ impact on prevailing American narratives that framed US expansion as heroic pioneers conquering a Wild West, with rodeos, cowboys, cattle drives, sod-busters, and settlement. The adventure genre, Jolliffe writes, would become so commonplace that one Gilded Age writer lamented that even in the most rural parts of the world, one might trip over other adventure journalists.
“It was true,” Jolliffe notes. “In 1882, two New York Herald writers, George Melville and William Gilder, met up by sheer accident in eastern Siberia as both men raced to report the fate of the lost Polar expedition ship, the Jeanette,” its doomed voyage financed by the Herald as a publicity stunt.
The Adventure Journalism collection as a whole makes for a fun read full of daring adventures, but also highlights how these reporters played roles in the United States’ post-Civil-War expansion, its claim to a manifest destiny, and the exponential growth in inventions, travel, and population, as well as the young country’s rising position on the world stage.
Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age was “a unanimous selection” by the Browne Award judges, who called it an “excellent volume all the way around. Important topic, excellent documented research, and tremendous and engaging readability.” ¬
Current-day adventure journalist and film-maker Jon Bowermaster says of the book, “Having reported on modern-day adventurers and my own explorations from ninety countries, to both Poles, and across the planet’s one giant ocean, I wish I’d had a copy of Adventure Journalism in the Gilded Age in my backpack during my own travels – it would have fattened my experiences, both here at home and to the most remote corners of the globe. Bravo!!” Bowermaster is a 6-time grantee of the National Geographic Expeditions Council, and author of Crossing Antarctica and Descending the Dragon: My Journey Down the Coast of Vietnam.
Lee Jolliffe has taught in Drake’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication since 1995. Previously, she taught at the Missouri School of Journalism and led the Writing and Editing Section at Battelle Institute in Columbus, Ohio. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on nineteenth century media, specializing in reporting on self-emancipated slaves with occasional forays into adventure journalism studies.