Credited with pulling the first peacetime train robbery in America goes to the four, relatively unknown, Reno brothers of Indiana, John, Frank,...
A Litany of Train Robberies
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Articles
Basking in The Limelight
Billy the Kid and four of his gang were delivered to the jail in Las Vegas, New Mexico on December 26, 1880. They were locked up without much...
Dinner in Deadwood with Calamity Jane
In the fall of 1875, a makeshift tent town popped up, beginning a stampede to Deadwood Gulch. By the winter of 1876, the population of this Dakota...
Wanted Dead or Alive
Among the stories of the Old West, few are more exciting than the manhunts that pitted frontier authority against those who would kill, plunder and...
The Horseless Carriage Was Seriously Underestimated
“The horseless carriage...will never come into as common use as the bicycle,” the Literary Digest declared in 1899—two years after Henry Ford and...
High Times in the Bitterroots
When the Bitterroot Mountains exploded in wildfires in 1910, Buffalo Soldiers from the 25th Infantry helped evacuate the town of Wallace, Idaho. The...
Shopping from Home in 1897 with Sears Roebuck
Here's a sampling of what one could shop for in 1897 in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, known officially as the “Consumer's Guide” but popularly as the...
Last of the Fast Guns
Few would argue that names made a difference in the Old West. The easy-on-the-tongue alliteration of “Jesse James,” the rhythmic cadence of “Billy...
Western Films in Arizona
Theaters were a popular form of entertainment in early Arizona and the first moving pictures came to the towns in the 1890’s. They were shown...
Outselling the Best Sellers–Sears Roebuck
Readers in 1897 were captivated by two books that have gained immortality in the literary world—Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkewicz, and Stephen Crane's...
Mattie Summerhayes: An Army Bride from New England Follows the Guidon
“The temperature was 122 degrees in the shade, the drinking water was 86 degrees, and the butter poured like oil. The spoiled food caused the...
The Osage, Oil and the FBI
When oil was discovered underneath their Oklahoma reservation, the Osage Indians became the wealthiest people per capita in the world. Many lived in...