Sarah “Great Western” Bowman reportedly died of a tarantula bite. Is tarantula venom that poisonous? David Duggan Shelton, Connecticut “Contemporary...
There was a real-life Grizzly Adams (but very different from the 1970s TV character). John Adams was born in Massachusetts in 1812 and went West...
The conversation all started with a letter from my hometown, Buffalo, New York. Rob McElroy had sent a note to the Yahoo group “Photo History” about...
Although there were cattle drives prior to the Civil War their heyday came in the years that followed. The war had pretty much depleted the beef...
Frank Waters’ 1960 book The Earp Brothers of Tombstone was once considered an authoritative look at the Earps, as seen through the eyes of Virgil’s...
Ordered West: The Civil War Exploits of Charles A. Curtis, edited by Alan and Donald Gaff (University of North Texas Press, $39.95), is a long...
In the 1920s, Oatman, Arizona, was a boomtown, and while the discovery of gold and the prosperity of the mines were always tabloid fodder, a bizarre...
Who is Fred Harman? Walter Wehlauch Jacksonville, Florida Fred Harman was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1902, but his family moved to Pagosa...
Roys Oatman and his family have just finished hauling their belongings up a rocky grade to a bluff on the south side of the Gila River. At the end...
When the travelers loaded their wooden wheeled wagons and hitched oxen or mules to begin a nearly 2,000-mile journey from the Missouri River to...
What happened to the scalp that “Buffalo Bill” Cody took from Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair at Warbonnet Creek in 1876? Richard Hill Santa Rosa,...
Scott Eyman’s Hank & Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart (Simon & Schuster, $29) is a sensitive, deeply...