DIME NOVELIST NED BUNTLINE

Buntline's life was one big adventure, and he didn't slow down even after he became wealthy and famous. He fought in the Everglades in the Second Seminole War, and was an officer in the Civil War until he was given a dishonorable discharge for drunkenness. He went around preaching temperance at lectures, usually while drunk. He incited several riots. He got in plenty of trouble with women too — he was married seven times and was jailed for bigamy. At one point, he was flirting with a married teenager named Mary Porterfield. Her husband, Robert, challenged Buntline to a duel, which of course he accepted, and he killed Robert Porterfield. The angry townspeople attempted to lynch Buntline, and in fact they strung him up hanged him from an awning post. At the last minute, his friends cut the rope and he managed to survive.

To read the complete article, see:
The Writer's Almanac for Friday, March 20, 2020 (http://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-march-20-2020/)

As recently as the early 1990s, when I first saw his name in print, I had no idea that Eben Locke Mason was a numismatist. I am not one myself. I became interested in Mason for reasons that had nothing to do with numismatics. His conspicuous involvement in that area was revealed to me by a single entry in the gargantuan National Union Catalog, or NCJC. At the time I wanted to learn more about Mason because I was particularly interested in a good friend of his, Edward Zane Carroll Judson... a flamboyant author/adventurer, better known by his most famous penname, Ned Buntline. Sometimes called "King of the Dime Novelists," Buntline was born in the early 1820s (the exact year is uncertain). He probably met Mason during the 1850s, in connection with one of his pet projects. It is said that Mason was associate editor of Ned Buntline's Own, a journal Ned published from time to time, from the 1840s to the 1860s.

Mason is quoted, at length and quite respectfully, by Ned's first biographer Frederick E. Pond. He knew Ned, and apparently Mason as well, in the 1870s and early 1880s.

Mason must have paid more than one visit to "Eagle's Nest," the commodious Stamford house where Squire Edward Judson and his small family lived. On July 9, 1888 E. Locke Mason was married - at Stamford - to Ned's widow, Mrs. Anna Fuller Judson. I learned this from an excellent biographical sketch of Buntline by Albert Johannsen, a historian of dime novels.

Records of the town clerk in South Kortright, N.Y. (a township adjacent to Stamford), give vital statistics from bride and groom. Anna, age 38, was the daughter of J.W. Fuller and Sarah Buell Fuller, both of Stamford. The groom, Eben Locke Mason, age 52, was a coin dealer in Boston and this was his third marriage. He had been born in Portland, Me., the son of Eben Locke Mason (Sr.) and Mary Scott Cobbe Mason. His precise birth date, which I've been unable to determine, would have been either in the latter months of 1835 or the early months of 1836.

For an authoritative discussion of E. Locke Mason's numismatic career I refer readers to John W. Adams' biographical sketch, "Ebenezer Locke Mason," in volume one of United States Numismatic Literature (George Kolbe, 1982).

To read the complete article on the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/429?page=8

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