Charles Wilkins Webber

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Charles Wilkins Webber was an American journalist and explorer; born at Russellville, Kentucky, May 29, 1819; went in 1838 to Texas, then struggling for independence; was for several years connected with the famous Texas Rangers, seeing much of wild and adventurous life on the frontier; returned to Kentucky and studied medicine; afterward entered Princeton Theological Seminary with a view to the Presbyterian ministry, but abandoned that purpose, and settled in New York as a writer for literary periodicals, especially The New World, The Democratic Review, and The Sunday Despatch; was associate editor and joint proprietor of The Whig Review; planned, with the two sons of his friend John James Audubon the naturalist, a monthly magazine of mammoth size, to be illustrated with copper-plate colored engravings by Audubon, but published only the first number; was engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to lead an exploring and mining expedition to the region of the Colorado and Gila rivers in 1849.

In 1855 he went to Central America, where he joined the filibuster William Walker in Nicaragua, and was killed in a skirmish on April 11, 1856. He was the author of Old Hicks the Guide, or Adventures in the Comanche Country in Search of a Gold-Mine (1848); The Gold-Mines of the Gila (1849); The Hunter Naturalist, etc. (1851), with 40 engravings from original drawings by Mrs. Webber; Wild Scenes and Song-Birds (1854), with 20 colored illustrations from drawings by Mrs. Webber; Tales of the Southern Border (1852); Spiritual Vampirism (1853); Jack Long; or The Shot in the Eye (a Gothic Western highly praised by Edgar Allan Poe^[1]), and Adventures with the Texan Rifle Rangers (1853), and other works.

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This article incorporates text from the Universal Cyclopædia & Atlas, 1902, New York, D. Appleton & Co., a publication now in the public domain.

1. ^ Sanford E. Marovitz "Poe's Reception of C. W. Webber's Gothic Western, 'Jack Long; or, The Shot in the Eye'," from Poe Studies, vol. IV, no. 1, June 1971, pp. 11-13. E. A. Poe Society retrieved January 2008