That's one way to describe Nellie Cashman, one of the Old West's most famous entrepreneurs, who showed the gold in her heart to the miners who...
The First Drive By Shooting
Four or five times a year, artist Ed Ruscha would drive from LA to his parent’s home in Oklahoma. In 1962, Ruscha photographed a series of gas...
The Croquet Kid
An earthquake hit the Old West field in the fall of 2015. And a staid, relatively genial and, for the most part, collegial area of study was dragged...
The Camp Grant Massacre – Arizona
In 1871, many Apache began flocking to the Camp Grant, AZ, area (photo) where they had access to food and supplies—in exchange for work. Other...
Playing the Numbers
Funerals are a Western movie tradition: they’re intensely dramatic, with family, or grizzled outlaws, standing over the grave of someone whose death...
Bamboozler Anthony Blum
The mining towns of the West had an oversupply of con artists in search of suckers. After two years of delays, a shameless scoundrel named Anthony...
As a Farm Woman Thinks
The first time anyone ever read a word written by Laura Ingalls Wilder, it was in the column she wrote for the Missouri Ruralist from around 1911...
The Walker Party Unraveled
Pieter Burggraaf’s The Walker Party: The Revised Story, Across New Mexico and Arizona Territories and up the Hassayampa River 1861-1863 concerns...
Stagecoach Mary
A well-traveled trail rests peacefully between the rich forested hillsides around the town of Cascade, Montana, and snakes 12 miles west to St....
John Bull’s Fists
John Bull made a reputation as an Old West gunfighter. But he was also pretty good with his fists. In February 1864, it was the Irish vs. the...
The Railroad Arrives in Yuma
In the spring of 1877 the Southern Pacific Railroad was building east on the first transcontinental line through Arizona. After getting permission...
I’m Your Huckleberry, That’s Just my Game
Doc Holliday Im Your Huckleberry In the classic Western movie “Tombstone” (1993) Val Kilmer, as Doc Holliday, says to Johnny Ringo, “I’m your...