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...
A Plague of Flea Market Billys
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Articles
The Texas Cattle Drives
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...
Muddied Waters
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...
From the Frontier’s Frontlines
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...
Fake News Guru
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?
Who is Fred Harman? Walter Wehlauch Jacksonville, Florida Fred Harman was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1902, but his family moved to Pagosa...
The Oatman Massacre
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...
Stories of the Oregon Trail
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?
What happened to the scalp that “Buffalo Bill” Cody took from Cheyenne warrior Yellow Hair at Warbonnet Creek in 1876? Richard Hill Santa Rosa,...
Silver Screen Icons
Scott Eyman’s Hank & Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship of Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart (Simon & Schuster, $29) is a sensitive, deeply...
Who Killed the Texas Terror?
Undeniably the darkest hour in Texas’s history, the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877, turned the Lone Star State into a bloody and...
America’s First Cavalry Blade
In 1833, the U.S. Army formed its first official mounted regiments, the First and Second Dragoons. These soldiers rode to battle, then dismounted to...