The Old West’s Indian Wars were brutal affairs, with innocent victims on all sides. Depredations were all too frequent. One was the Camp Grant...

The rocky wilderness of the American West turned out to be the richest treasure trove of natural resources in the history of the civilized world....

Mattie Silks. Hollywood couldn't have done better if it wanted to name one of the most famous and successful “love merchants” of the Old West. Her...

Happy Jack Morco had the wrong nickname.  He boasted of killing up to a dozen men—there’s no confirmation of that.  He certainly was a boozer and...

To the Arizona cowboy, language has always meant imaginative mangling. Something isn’t just loud, it’s noisy as a fog horn in a funeral parlor. A...

Molly Ott didn’t realize she was a modern-day “homesteader” who would repeat a 150-year-old legacy when she moved her family from Phoenix, Arizona,...

Hard rock mining was hard, dangerous work where death was a constant companion. Before caged elevators came into use miners were lowered hundreds of...

Col. John Baylor learned that fame and power are fleeting. In 1861, he led Confederate troops to victory at the First Battle of Mesilla (New...

William Rogers Tattenbaum hailed from a Baltic Sea port and claimed Russian nobility in his lineage. After arriving at San Francisco in the 1870s,...

Until Willa Cather, literature in America was dominated by writers from New York and Boston. Immigrants were either ignored or portrayed as objects...

Grand Master mystery novelist James Lee Burke is known best for his popular Dave Robicheaux series (20, to date), but the Houston, Texas, native...

At the Pinal County Museum in Florence, Arizona are 25 nooses on display from hangings at the prison. They were used to hang 25 men and one woman....