Ward Kimball and the Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin

After a lifetime of cigarette addiction, Walt Disney was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer on November 7, 1966. Doctors gave him only six months to live. He didn't even make it that far: Walt collapsed at home on November 30, was taken to the hospital adjacent to his beloved movie studio, and passed away on December 7. His sudden parting left the studio bearing his name in mourning, but the show had to go on. There was still a full slate of films that Walt had been involved with that were in production and due for release. One of those films, debuting on March 8, 1967, was also one of Disney's most inspired comedies, The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin.

The Disney studio never drifted far from 19th century historical romanticism, even in the decades since Walt's passing. The "Gay Nineties" was a favourite aesthetic sensibility for the company, returned to again and again through The Nifty Nineties (1941), Casey at Bat (1946), So Dear to My Heart (1949), The Brave Engineer (1950), Crazy Over Daisy (1950), Football Now and Then (1953), Pigs is Pigs (1954), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Pollyanna (1960), and Summer Magic (1963). The very last live-action film on which Walt Disney worked was The Happiest Millionaire, based on true-life philanthropist and eccentric Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, which was released on June 23 of 1967. Disneyland's Main Street USA was a physical manifestation of this fascination, and every Disneyland park around the world since has had a Main Street (or an ersatz version of it) as its opening act.

The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin pushes the date back a few decades, to the same mid-19th century period as Song of the South (1946) and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), but retains that same fascination with the Gilded Age. Specifically, Bullwhip Griffin is set to the California Gold Rush of 1848, and the challenges and opportunities experienced by the sourdoughs who sought fabulous wealth along the Golden State's shining waters. 

The Diamond Maker of Sacramento by Noah Brooks

Published in the July 1868 edition The Overland Monthly, volume 1 and issue 1, The Diamond Maker of Sacramento by Noah Brooks defies the convention one might expect of a California Scientific Romance. Namely, it's not about the Gold Rush of '49. Whereas earlier Scientific Romances like Aurifodina: Or, Adventures in the Gold Region (1849, available in Science Fiction of Antebellum America; An Anthology) were transparently based on the gold rush, it serves more as a conceptual backdrop for The Diamond Maker of Sacramento. It's roll is to demonstrate the atmosphere of lawless ambition on America's westernmost frontier, and the ready availability of capital by which the mad scientist can indulge his foolhardy experiments. Yet even the mad scientist learns that there are limitations on even the most liberal frontiers, including the most ultimate limitation.

The following is The Diamond Maker of Sacramento as it appeared in vol. 1, issue 1, of The Overland Monthly. Click for a larger image. 

Charles Golightly and his Steam Rocket

Man in Space, the classic 1954 episode of the Walt Disney's Disneyland television series that helped launch the American space program, begins with a brief history of rocket science that veers from Newtonian physics and Chinese fireworks to the various silly and ill-conceived adventures of the Victorian Era to the successes of the German V-2 program. Nestled into it is a mention of "Charles Golightly," a British inventor who took out a patent on steam-powered rockets in 1841.

But who was Charles Golightly? Did he exist? And did he ever build his rocket?