Moving My Old West Town!



Monte Cristo, WA



You may recall that a while back I envisioned an Old West town called Dust Wallow. Well, this vision never really went anywhere for various reasons but I have recently come back to it with a new angle.

In considering locations for my Old West gaming I got to thinking why not set my little corner of Helltown here in the Northwest. We've got a ton of Old West history with the logging, mining and with Washington being the jumping off point to Alaska and the gold to be found in parts north.

So, out with Dust Wallow and in with Skookum, a town where loggers and miners butt heads and rub elbows and where you'll never see a tumbleweed but you'll have mud up to your ears.

Skookum is a Chinook jargon word that has come into general use in the Pacific Northwest region of North America.

The word skookum has three meanings:

1. a word in regional English that has a variety of positive connotations;
2. a monster; similar to the sasquatch.
3. a souvenir doll once common in the United States in tourist areas.

Building Skookum should prove fun. This is a chance to really put together some stuff you don't see in most of the dusty Old West gaming tables out there. Lots of evergreen tress, rocky hills and mountain, wet ground and local natives who live in lodge houses and build totem poles.

Like a lot of Old West players I'll be using a fictional town and already have a few things planned to make Skookum unique. It'll have all the usual stuff - saloon, bank, general store, boarding house, etc, etc. right now I'm learning how to build Old West buildings without killing myself on the details so it may be a bit before I can produce any town terrain.

Stay tuned!

-Eli