Summer is the time to load up the family and take a tour across America -- not that different, come to find out, from the days of the Wild West.
Joan Tapper provides a sort of tourist's snapshot of the West of the 1880s in her new book "The Wild West On 5 Bits A Day" (Thames and Hudson, $18.95).
Back then, our country was rapidly changing, with a transportation system emerging on the rails. Utah played an important role in that development, having hosted the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit in 1869.
"After 1869 when they laid that Golden Spike ... it wasn't a tourist place, but it made tourism possible. People started crossing the country," said Tapper.
"It was kind of the thing to do, to take the train across the country. Of course, everybody changed trains in Ogden."
Towns fought to get the railroad to build track through their communities. If you had a railroad stop, that meant you were on the map and people flocked to your town. Virginia City, Nev., swelled to over 30,000 residents in the 1880s; that railroad town was second in popularity to San Francisco in the West.
The reverse effect was that towns became vacant if the railroad chose another route.
"They would stake their hopes in the railroad coming and then the railroad went someplace else. Then these towns became frozen in time," Tapper said.
Tapper's book reads like a guidebook for traveling around the West 130 years ago. The book relates the hot vacation spots, and the people to meet and to avoid. Billy the Kid was at the height of his crime spree in 1880, and Jesse James and his gang of bank robbers were at war in the Midwest.
According to the book, Dodge City, Kan., was filled with drunken trail riders who came through with their cattle. It was normal for the riders to ride down Main Street and shoot their guns in the middle of the night.
Deadwood, S.D., looked like a tent city in 1880, as growth outpaced construction.
Tapper's book is part of a series called "Traveling On 5," which uses the same concept to illustrate what constituted entertainment during a specific time period -- such as in London when William Shakespeare was a playwright or through ancient Athens.
The research came easily for Tapper, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif. She has written several coffee table books about historical towns and on travel spots such as "The Most Beautiful Villages and Towns of California" and "Island Dreams Caribbean."
She found help in the words of the old-time residents.
"I had a sense of what people are interested in when it comes to the Old West," Tapper said. "It's amazing the sources that are available. Everybody wrote. I mean, people traveled and they wrote and we saved (their words) happily."
Utah is featured as a major tourist spot in Tapper's book. Ogden's Union Station was one of the major hubs in the country. Salt Lake City was considered a sightseeing trip, but mainly because people felt that the town was like visiting another country.
"Utah was exotic, for one thing because of the Mormon influence," Tapper said. "It seemed very foreign to many people.
"You had this beautiful mountain landscape and you had what were, to most people, exotic people."
The biggest surprise she encountered during her research was finding how history continues to repeat itself. The old travel spots are still among the popular attractions today -- such as Yellowstone National Park.
"It's more than a hundred years ago. But things are very familiar in many ways," Tapper said. "There are ups and downs in the financial cycle. You had whole districts where they built homes and all of a sudden there would be a financial reverse -- and then everybody left.
"Human nature doesn't change."
PARTY LIKE IT'S 1880
Many of the ideas that people nowadays have about the 1880s are inaccurate.
"The irony is the things that we think of as being so characteristic of the Wild West were things that really sprang up afterwards," said Joan Tapper, author of "The Wild West On 5 Bits A Day" (Thames & Hudson, $18.95).
Rodeos were just starting out and were drastically different from the bull-riding and calf-roping competitions of today. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows -- in themselves, a glamorized version of what Western life was really like -- were still a few years away, said Tapper.
Here's a sampling of what residents enjoyed during the real Wild West:
* Opera houses -- "There were opera houses," Tapper said. "Which weren't exactly like our opera houses."
You only needed an empty room with a stage in the back, and you could watch vaudeville acts, plays, comedians and speeches by people like Mark Twain.
"Theatrical productions and plays were a big deal," said Brian Westover, historical interpreter coordinator at This Is the Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City. "It wasn't always on a professional scale. Sometimes, it would be just a family affair where the children of the family would learn the lines of a popular play or they would make up their own."
He also said people listened to piano recitals for hours on end.
* Feats of strength -- Through every period of society, you can find men trying to show their strength. Athletic competitions were alive and well in the 1880s.
Hose competitions were quite popular -- as firemen were pitted against a rival city's firefighters. Tug-of-war games, horse races and wrestling were popular.
"Shooting for mark was a big deal. That goes back to probably as long as we have had firearms," Westover said.
Boxing for prizes took place, remaining a staple of athletics today. Baseball is called America's pastime for a reason -- it's also embedded in history.
"I got a kick out of knowing they had baseball ... in 1880," Tapper said.
* Saloons -- Not every saloon was considered seedy.
"You had one-bit saloons and two-bit saloons, which were a little nicer," Tapper said.
Card games were played in most saloons. The most popular gambling game was not poker, but a card game called faro, which involved a selection of cards face-up on the table; participants placed bets on the card they thought the dealer would turn over.
Dancing was also big in the nicer saloons, and some places even offered women to dance with.
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