Executive director of the John Wayne Birthplace Museum in Winterset, Iowa, since 2008, Brian Downes oversees the only museum in the world dedicated...
What History Has Taught Me: Brian Downes
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Articles
Does Consumption Exist Today?
Does consumption exist today? Roy G Rutter Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania Consumption, an early term for tuberculosis, was a dreaded disease of the...
Cattle, Cowboys and Culture
If you’re a vegetarian, stop reading. Unless you like opera. We don’t think of cattle towns as cultural meccas, but many of them were. And still...
Heart Gone Wild
In 1857, Olive Oatman’s ghostwriter said this about her life story: “Much of that dreadful period is unwritten, and will remain forever unwritten.”...
Legendary Westerners
Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship Between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill by Deanne Stillman (Simon and Schuster, $27) explores the...
Western Events for March 2018
Western roundup of events where you can experience the Old West this March. Adventure Arizona Renaissance Festival & Artisan Marketplace Gold...
Haycox: A Literary History
Ernest Haycox died in 1950, but he continues to cast a long shadow over Western fiction. In Ernest Haycox and the Western (University Press of...
A Tragic Mistake
Captain Emmet Crawford was one of the tragic casualties of the Apache Wars. In late 1885, he led a small force into Mexico, chasing Geronimo....
Charles Gatewood and the Johnson County War
Army Lt. Charles Gatewood is best known for his role in convincing Geronimo to surrender to U.S. authorities in 1886. But he was also connected to...
King Woolsey
King Woolsey, was one of Arizona’s best-known pioneers during the 1860s. He prospected for gold in Arizona before the Walker Party arrived in 1863....
Hazards on the Long Trail
The Long drives from South Texas to Kansas from the 1860s to the 1880s were roughly six hundred miles and took about six weeks. I should have taken...
Geronimo Finds Jesus?
It was 1903, and Apache leader Geronimo staggered into a Dutch Reform Church at Ft. Sill, OK, where he was being held as a prisoner of war. He was...