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...

The Navajo Trail is more of a song than an actual Old West Trail. Recorded in 1945, “Along the Navajo Trail” is a classic Country song written by...

Coming at the conclusion of what white Americans call the frontier period in their history, Wounded Knee climaxed an era of intermittent warfare....

Marshall Ashmun Upson—“Ash”—was an itinerant journalist (and heavy drinker) in the years after the Civil War.  By 1877, he was a small rancher and...

Provocative encores could be lucrative in those rich mining towns of the West. Adah Issacs Menken, a free-spirited performer, appeared in La Mezappa...

A new, beautiful book about the search for lost Spanish gold—and all the danger, intrigue, adrenaline and obsession that lies therein—has just been...

Minden bills itself as “Nebraska’s Christmas City,” stringing 15,000 lights throughout its town square to seal the deal. But to know why this town...