Emigrants heading west in covered wagons usually had a wagon master who knew the trails and had experience getting through the trials and travails...
Crimes on Emigrant Wagon Trains
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Articles
Rascals of Tombstone: Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne
After running away from the gunfight in the vacant lot near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ike Clanton made a desperate attempt to get the Earp’s and...
Billy the Tintype
“He is, in all, quite a handsome looking fellow.” That was the opinion of a newspaperman fortunate enough to obtain an interview with the notorious...
Tumbleweed Wagons
They called them “tumbleweed wagons” because like their namesake, the Russian thistle, they seemed to wander aimlessly across the territory picking...
What are “long-tailed heroes”?
In the book Roughing It, Mark Twain refers to gunfighters as “long-tailed heroes.” What does that mean? Paul Gortarez Phoenix, Arizona Twain was...
Did Billy the Kid Serve as an Interpreter for Irish Immigrants?
Did Billy the Kid serve as an interpreter for Irish immigrants? Marcil d’Hirson Garron Newhall, California Being of Irish ancestry on both sides of...
Father and Son—Not So Close
The relationship between John Wesley Hardin killer John Selman and his son, John Marion Selman (photo), was not very close. Old John abandoned the...
Hartley of the West
"I knew that it was something special; Sam (Peckinpah) was terrific, everybody was terrific, especially Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea—who I’d never...
What History Has Taught Me: Shelley Buffalo Calf
My favorite Old West location in the world is Lincoln, New Mexico, which is why I moved here as soon as I could. Most people don’t know I met Robert...
A Stormy Affair
On August 6, 1895, gunman John Wesley Hardin nearly got into a strange shootout. He and his lover Helen Beulah Mrose were in an El Paso (photo)...
Losing Control
By the time he died in August 1895, John Wesley Hardin had finished about 200 pages of his autobiography, up to the year 1889. Researchers Chuck...
Free Trappers
Basically there were only two types of trappers, the engage, or lowly company employee who worked for wages and the enterprising aristocrat of the...