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Stocky red-bearded Ned Buntline, the unruly dime novelist, and Buffalo Bill’s promoter was born Edward Zane Carroll Judson in 1823. He left home at thirteen and took to the high seas, and at fifteen he had already worked as a cabin boy on a freighter bound for the Caribbean, become a midshipman, and published his first story. He chose the pen name Buntline as a reminder of his sailing days (a buntline was a rope at the bottom of a square sail).
When his maritime career ended, he spent the next two years, by his own embellished accounts, killing buffaloes and grizzlies and roaming the western plains for the Northwest Fur Company. In 1844 while writing for a New York “flash” newspaper, the Knickerbocker, he started his own magazine, Ned Buntline’s Own. It was mixture of adventure stories and scandalous gossip in the flash press style. » Continue Reading.
On a cool autumn evening in 1874, 19-year-old Edward Bennett stood in line holding his two-dollar ticket and waited to board the night boat to Albany. If all went as scheduled, he would arrive by morning just in time to catch the train to Saratoga. There the newly opened Adirondack railroad would take him to the last stop on the line, North Creek, one of the gateways to the Adirondacks. Those who would come to know him as a robust mature adult would not have recognized this skinny, pale Irish farmhand.
This is the story of how an unambitious, unsociable man who could barely support himself, much less his family, and had no experience whatsoever in running a hotel, came to build and run the first hotel on Raquette Lake. That such a person who, according to one of his relatives, “was neither suited to the country, nor the people” and “made enemies through the country” could be capable of this feat seems to defy all we know about other proprietors of pioneer hotels.
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