Yellow Journalism, Purple Prose and the Joys of Research
By Cindi Myers

I’ll admit, I’m a history geek. Set me in front of a microfiche machine with reels of film of old newspapers and I will happily spend hours squinting at the fine print and giggling over ads for corsets and quack remedies, while reading first-hand accounts of news of the day.

The newspapers of the 19th century were a different breed than the papers of today. Forget objective journalism. The papers of those days proudly wore their political sympathies on their pages and had no qualms about fostering one agenda or another. Readers sided with papers the way we choose up sports teams today, subscribing to the papers who championed their own views about the issues of the day.

And then there’s the prose style. Forget the Five W’s. In the days before television and movies, readers turned to newspapers for entertainment as well as news, and writers pulled out all the stops to deliver.  In researching The Woman Who Loved Jesse James, I came upon numerous examples of this purple prose, a few examples of which I’ll share with you today.

From the September 5, 1874, Lexington Caucasion, under the headline “Missouri’s Gay Bandits”: “In all the history of medieval knight-errantry and modern brigandage, there is nothing that equals the wild romance of the past few years’ career of Arthur McCoy, Frank and Jesse James and the Younger boys. Their desperate deeds during the war were sufficient to have stocked a score of ordinary novels, with facts that outstrip the strung-out flights of fantasy. Their fierce hand-to-hand encounters… their long and reckless scouts and forays, and their riotous jollity… all combined to form a chapter without a parallel in the annals of America…”

From the October 17, 1874 Lexington Caucasian: ” All the annals of romantic crime furnish no parallel to the exploits of Missouri’s bold rovers. Since Ishmael hung out his shingle, thirty-seven centuries ago, in the deserts of Edom, as a dashing, untamable boss brigand, they have been unsurpassed. They’ve laid Aladdin in the shade, and snuffed out all his marvel-hatching lamps. They’ve eclipsed the wildest wonders of the Arabian Nights, and rendered commonplace the most incredible achievements of the Cid. They’ve made the tales of the Crusaders and the Buccaneers stale nursery croonings. Achilles and Hector, Barabbas, Rob Roy, Dick Tarpin and Sixteen-String Jack dwindle to ordinary marauders beside them…”

Finally, I want to share this excerpt from the June 9, 1874 St. Louis Dispatch, a passage that definitely caught this romance writer’s attention. The headline is “The Celebrated Jesse W. James Taken at Last. His Captor a Woman, Young, Accomplished, and Beautiful.” “Through good and evil report, and not withstanding the lies that had been told upon me and the crimes laid at my door, her devotion to me has never wavered for a moment. You can say that both of us married for love, and that there cannot be any sort of doubt about our marriage being a happy one.”

Sigh. How could I not want to write a book about a love story like that?

Cindi Myers is the author of The Woman Who Loved Jesse James, available now from Bell Bridge Books.