Many know the stories of how young, white woman from the East Coast traveled West to marry men who paid their train tickets—looking for a new life...

In 1880, young Juan Oliveras of Tucson was caught in an amorous act with his mother-in-law by her husband who chased his son-in-law down and killed...

If you’ve been reading my last couple posts, you know that Nitroglycerin was dangerous as hell. Whether it was blowing open a safe or the simple act...

History can sometimes seem a mishmash of facts, folklore and half-forgotten fables, held together by little more than spit and baling wire. Take...

The railroad arrived in what became Fairbank in 1881. It was the closest rail link to the boom town of Tombstone, at the time one of the largest...

Screenwriter and author Lee Martin’s latest novel, The Grant Conspiracy: Wake of the Civil War is ready-made for adaptation for the silver-screen or...

The story of the Mormon Handcarts is normally told as a tragedy. How two parties of foreign converts were caught in the winter storms between Iowa...

Jesse James had his own publicity agent—John Newman Edwards. A Confederate veteran, Edwards became a newspaperman after the war, starting the Kansas...

California author Chris Enss’ latest from TwoDot publishing, More Tales Behind the Tombstones: More Deaths and Burials of the Old West’s Most...

What were Old West jails like? Richard Olson Bagley, Minnesota For the most part, the Hollywood cliché of a frontier jail, with open bars on the...

When Fred Harvey set out to give railroad travelers a decent meal—something long lacking as the west developed—he had a big job on his hands. As...

In his seminal 1950 work, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Henry Nash Smith wrote, “The literary development of the Wild Western...