It’s November of 1882, and you live in a small mining town in western Pennyslvania.  Your local area has just sprouted what appears to be its fourth daily newspaper, like in nature to a hydra.  You know everyone and you know all their business because you seem to be invited secretly to every event in this ten-mile stretch of nothing, and this newspaper is just getting started.  To get readership, they will need hard hitting accusations, relevant issues, local human interest, drama, action, and questions.  

You have the biggest question of them all, and to open the first of what will become a daily correspondence written for the sub-sub-sub-locale of ‘Oreville’ for the next three to four years, you ask: 

“Where is Don?”

Please allow me to introduce you guys to VINDEX, the anonymous 1880s shit poster I met in the newspapers looking for various branches on my family tree.  

This is the beginning.  There appears to be no warning that this column would start, nor any bother with context.  You are now stuck caring about these people and following their painfully mundane but sassily-delivered adventures for the rest of the 1880s.  Vindex will break news of ill wives and children and then start the next line to mention corn and half nod to politics.  You never know what the next paragraph will bring.  Context and narrative flow are dead and have been so since the 1880s. 

I promise this gets Wild.  We have just been eased in.

Some notes as we begin:

I found this column because the frequent players in it are my distant family.  Many of these surnames are the people I come from either directly or as cousins.  Most of the ones on this page, really.  I have hope in my heart that Vindex is among them, honestly. 

You would think by the mention of snow just before that ‘Winter’ refers here to a season, but it does not.  It is instead one Winter Trigg, father of the Reuben in the next line.  He’s the main mining force in town and is either the darling or the scourge of the column, depending on how much work Vindex thinks he ought to be doing relative to the weather.   He came straight from England, married a woman from a branch of my family and then later fucked off to Ohio.  

Mrs. Wyley (actually Wiley) survives her typhoid and lives a proper long old lady life.  She’s my Great Great Great Grandmother.  Her husband Ben will find a human foot in his yard in 1913.   They feature only rarely in this column because they lived a little out of this narrow scope of land, but worry not, I’m related to pretty much everyone else too.  

I probably won’t include full columns every time I post about this, although often the sudden biting remarks are even better when they come immediately after a dull mining report.