THE OLD WEST WAS MYTHOLOGIZED, EVEN AS IT WAS HAPPENING.Such is the era’s hold on the American imagination, and the reason we selected it as the theme for the 2024 Best of Monterey County readers’ poll.
By 1872, when the ballad was published, a yearning for the days of the truly Wild West had developed among settlers. Speaking to us through the lyrics of “The Days of ’49,” an old miner laments, “How oft-time I repine / For the days of old, when we dug up the gold.”
Just over a decade later, after bearing the relentless transformation of the region for too long, members of the Paiute Nation began the Ghost Dance, a movement which spread among the Native peoples of the West. It was thought the spiritual performance would finally stop white expansion and bring about a return to the old ways.
What we know collectively as the Old West or the Wild West was a brief span. While its beginnings could be traced back to the epic expedition of Lewis and Clark at the beginning of the 1800s, in popular memory it starts with the Gold Rush of 1849 and ends in fenced-off lands and reservations before the turn of the last century. In fact, as the Ghost Dance movement was in full force, historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed.
So it was barely a 50-year swing during which, on telegraph lines and the pages of dime novels, the exploits of lawmen, gunslingers, Indigenous warriors, mountain men, Pony Express riders and others transfixed the American imagination. These tales were later cemented by the Western genre of film and television.
Much has been twisted into legend. Clint Eastwood addressed this in Unforgiven, during an exchange between Little Bill Daggett and the dime novelist W.W. Beauchamp about the latter’s glorified version of a moment of violence. Daggett tells the writer, “I was in the Blue Bottle Saloon in Wichita on the night that English Bob killed Corky Corcoran, and I didn’t see you there, nor no woman. No two-gun shooters. None of this.”
Monterey County is part of the Old West, which we chose as this year’s theme – not for the gunslinging, real or mythologized, but for the diversity of the subject. There are the great Indigenous nations, pioneers on the Oregon Trail, French artists, Mexican vaqueros, Laura Ingalls Wilder, who documented life for young readers and so much more.
Inside these pages, you will learn what our readers believe to be the county’s best, as well as a few thoughts of ours. We hope it serves as a fun, imaginative and informative guide.
-Dave Faries
Best Of 2024 Contributors
Marielle Argueza
Sloan Campi
Erik Chalhoub
Erik Cushman
Dave Faries
Caitlin Fillmore
Paul Fried
Celia Jiménez
Linda Maceira
Pam Marino
Agata Pope¸da
Keely Richter
Katie Rodriguez
Sara Rubin
David Schmalz
Gabriel Skvor
Grace Stetson
Jacqueline Weixel
Project Editor
Dave Faries
Copy Editing
Laurie Gibson
Illustration
Alexis Estrada
Lani Headley
Photography
Daniel Dreifuss
Cover Design
Alexis Estrada
