What do San Francisco real estate, George Hearst, Mark Twain, the Civil War and the Nobel Peace Prize have in common? The answer: Nevada’s famous...
Nevada’s Silver Roots
read more
Articles
Mormon War’s Grand Views
With a blast of the steam whistle, a small steamboat cast off from California’s Fort Yuma during the early days of 1858 to explore the Colorado...
A Respected Lawman
Leander McNelly had the distinction of serving as a captain of both the Texas State Police and a special force of the Texas Rangers. It was a...
The End of the West
Since 1988, when award-winning author Richard White published his first volume of history, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and...
The Unpopular Governor of Texas
Edmund J. Davis was a Reconstruction governor of Texas—and not a popular one. He was a former Union officer who joined the Republican Party after...
A Frontier Favorite Lever Gun
All 1873 Winchester rifles have octagonal barrels and the carbines have round barrels, right? Well, no, as a special option about one out of every...
John Ford and Harry Goulding
The year was 1938 and the Navajo were in the deep depths of the Great Depression. Harry Goulding, proprietor of Goulding’s trading post on the...
Bring ‘Em Back Alive?
Jack Helm is probably best known for being a victim of Texas’ Sutton-Taylor Feud (John Wesley Hardin was one of the gunmen involved in his death—see...
The Redoubtable Toothbrush
The question about hygiene in the West came up the other day from someone wondering if cowboys brushed their teeth. Well, some did and some didn’t....
Custer’s Gold
“GOLD!” proclaimed Dakota Territory’s Bismarck Tribune, August 12, 1874. Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Black Hills expedition had discovered...
The Bird Cage Theater
Tombstone’s fabulous Bird Cage Theater opened December 23rd, 1881 to a raucous crowd territorial Arizonans. There’s no doubt in the realm of legend...
A Shootout Between Friends
Billy Collins was the younger brother of Sam Bass associate Joel Collins—but he didn’t learn from his sibling’s death at the hands of lawmen in...