Can We Talk 2

Ruth Cornell Woodman

         I'd never heard of her before, but Ruth Woodman became an important author and historian in the 20th century. I discovered her when researching the TV series, Death Valley Days. She was a respected self-taught historian and wrote over 1000 half-hour episodes of one of TV's most highly acclaimed shows.

         Ruth was a copywriter for a New York ad agency, a wife and mother. Both her parents had been born in the West, but her mother hated it. She coerced her husband to sell his Colorado ranch and move his young wife to the East. Ruth purportedly was raised in England. She was educated at Vassar. One of her ad clients was Pacific Coast Borax, a mining company located in Death Valley, California. (The office was in Kanab, Utah, where some filming took place.) She began writing radio shows for this client. She had gotten many of her western tales from her father, but she had an employee of Borax help her with research, Mr. Washington Cahill.

         Cahill had an uncle and a step-father who were teamsters (mule handlers and drivers) who had lots of first hand experience with events, people and legends of the Death Valley area. Borax insisted she have some first hand experience with the area and live there briefly every year. So she summered there when school was out. With Cahill's help, she met many people, miners, prospectors, lawmen, farmers, ranchers, and teachers. She amassed a lot of notes, letters, interviews, copies of records, photographs from people willing to share what they knew.

         The radio show began September 30, 1930 and ran until Sept. 4, 1951. The TV broadcast began in 1952 and ran until 1975, ending about the same time as Gunsmoke, marking the end of an era in TV. They were all true stories, portrayed as accurately as possible. For the first five years of TV, she wrote all the episodes herself. She became the respected, leading historian of that area in her time, an inspiration to all people not just women. If you want to become an expert in something, you can from her example.

         Her brain child became the "longest running of all scripted syndicated series". There is a set of restored films of the TV series in The Library of Congress, which has determined "the anthology is historically significant to the nation." Some of the stories are low key, limited action, but tell the stories of inventors, women sheriffs, and local ghost stories. Today there is a renewed interest in westerns in general, and her TV series if getting lots of play time.

         Her papers and most of the scripts are on file at The University of Oregon Libraries. They do tell the building of the nation in little day by day ways, and give us a glance at what life was like from about 1850 to the early 1900's. One copy writer with a dream is educating and entertaining people long after her death.


She lived from 1894 to 1970.