ffred's
nearly-forgotten treasuresWhat noble and generous impulse of our nature was ever quickened
by fear?
—Edward P. Mitchell, "My First Speech."
A Bohemian is a man with literary or artistic tastes, and an
incurable proclivity to debt.
—Charles Astor Bristed, "A New Theory of Bohemians."
When I first read The Knickerbocker Gallery, my eye was drawn especially to "Rambles in the Far West," by Edward P. Mitchell [as Ralph Roanoke]. As a consequence, I decided to collect, from various sources, as many other "Ralph Roanoke" stories as I could readily find online. A couple of citations that I found alluded to contributions to Neal's Saturday Gazette, of which I could find no trace*. Ultimately, I could only find nine pieces, all published in The Knickerbocker.
Given this scanty selection, and cogitating upon a means of padding it out for publication, I recalled yet another desire of mine to collect short works from authors cited at the The Vault at Pfaff's. By limiting my selection to short prose works published in The Knickerbocker, I found the desired complement.
My sources were the following scanned volumes:
So here it is: the master HTML version, the home-brew Kindle version, and the actual Amazon publication.
January 5, 2020
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*However, during that search, I did come across a possible candidate for nearly-forgotten treasures: The Widow Bedott Papers, by Frances M. Whitcher.