Talk:Buffalo Soldier tragedy of 1877

Article start
This article was part of the story on Nicholas M. Nolan and I realized there was enough information for an complete article on the subject. Now I have to go back to the NMN article and trim that one! Jrcrin001 (talk) 20:36, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Major tone issues
The article is not written as an encylcopedia article: it's written like a magazine article, script for a documentary, etc. That kind of writing isn't at all inherently bad, it's just not what Wikipedia does. Imagine opening up the manual for your Toyota Corolla to figure out the correct tire pressure and finding paragraphs of "One cold night in April, Tom Smith and his family piled into their brand-new 2008 Toyota Corolla, excited for a trip to grandma's house. In his eagerness and haste, Tom failed to check his tire pressure before embarking (cue four pages of build-up).  An encyclopedia is a concise and practical account, not an exciting story.

The article as written is full of foreshadowing, dramatic phrasing, colourful character description, and other items which are great in a novel, but completely unnecessary in any encyclopedia. If nothing else, the lede really needs to be fixed. Copying below and marking the stuff that really shouldn't be in a WP article, especially not in the lede where people specifically look to get a 1-2 paragraph distillation of the article:

Buffalo Soldier tragedy of 1877 also known as the "Staked Plains Horror" was a tragic event in the hot dry Llano Estacado region of north-west Texas and eastern New Mexico during July of a drought year. Four soldiers and one buffalo hunter would die from the hot horror of the desert. ''The character and loyalty of the men involved would be severely tested as would their honor and duty. Some would be called heroes and others deserters, but most would later state they were happy just to have survived.''

Okay, so I've read the lede paragraph and understand that five people died in 1877 on the Llano Estacado, and that's about it, the rest is literary device. It'd be easy to chop the literary stuff and just give a clear summary of the article in 1-2 paragraphs of lede.

Hope this is useful. MatthewVanitas (talk) 18:14, 3 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I have a few things on the juggling plates, but I will follow your example. I guess I did get carried away by the story and in reading the various sources, I got "involved." Jrcrin001 (talk) 02:34, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

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Dead Civilian?
I've been researching and following this story for years. There are several accounts of the event, some of which are contradictory. Some were written in the following weeks and month after the event, others decades later. Some are somewhat embellished. I cannot find out who the "Dead Civilian" is, or even if one of the hunters actually was lost? Who was it? I suggest that we find some references. H-2-O (talk) 17:40, 30 September 2023 (UTC)


 * I found mention of a dead citizen, still no names. H-2-O (talk) 19:20, 30 September 2023 (UTC)