Where is the center of the West? Try Emporia, Kansas. Last weekend, I was the keynote speaker and faculty member at the Center for Great Plains...

On the weekend of June 26-28, 2015 thousands will pilgrimage to the Battle of Little Bighorn National Monument to commemorate the 139th anniversary...

August 15, 1873.  Ellsworth, Kansas. Gunmen Ben and Billy Thompson get into a confrontation that leads to the death of Sheriff Chauncey B. Whitney. ...

Cathay Williams was born a slave in Missouri in 1842, but was freed by Union soldiers during the Civil War. She worked as a paid servant for the...

Stagecoach travel was no place for sissies. The Butterfield Overland Mail began its three-year 2,800 mile run from Tipton, Missouri to San Francisco...

July 19, 1878 Fire is licking at the last room—Susan McSween’s kitchen. In this final refuge, her husband, Alexander, sits with his head in his...

Frank Hamer was a legendary lawman/Texas Ranger.  He was in dozens of gunfights, proving his courage. He led the ambush that brought down Clyde...

Judge Roy Bean, the “Law West of the Pecos,” had some colorful ways to hand out justice in Texas. Like the time someone was stealing cattle from the...

Nate Champion was the working-class hero in the Johnson County War of 1892 that pitted Wyoming’s big ranchers, the Wyoming Stock Growers...

Sixty years ago, John Ford and his film company left Hollywood for Goulding’s Lodge and Monument Valley to make The Searchers, a film that many...

Endicott Peabody was a blue-blood easterner with a semester of divinity school under his belt when he went to Tombstone in January 1882. He made...

During the days of “bleeding Kansas,” as pro and anti-slavery forces fought over the soul of the place, there was a code when talking about the...