Over the decades, numerous pundits and pessimists have announced the end of the West, Western films, Western novels, Western music and Western...
Broncho Billy Anderson
Max Aronson couldn’t ride a horse before he became the first real Westerns star. He got a start in “The Great Train Robbery,” and by 1904, he’d...
Tap into History at Helldorado’s “El Gato de Cristal”
If Tombstone is the “Town to Tough to Die” than the Crystal Palace Saloon should also be also known as “El Gato De Cristal.” Like a cat with nine...
Frank Canton
There are many stories of good-bad men in the Old West and one of the more interesting is Frank Canton. He was born, Joe Horner. Horner drifted in...
Surviving Captivity
In 1864, as the Civil War ground toward its bloody finish, the West was aflame in widespread Indian conflicts of unimaginable violence and...
Albert Afraid of Hawk
Albert Afraid of Hawk was a 20-year-old Sioux who was part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show when he died in Danbury, CT in 1900. He was buried in...
Apache Endurance
Captured by Sonoran mercenaries near Esqueda, Sonora, Mexico (south of present-day Douglas, Arizona), in the mid-1860s, Dilcthe was sold into...
The End of the Civil War and Custer’s New Frontier
With the end of the Civil War sesquicentennial this April, publishers have kept bookstore shelves heavy with dozens of new volumes on the conflict,...
Talk About a Mistake
As the Civil War broke out in 1861, you could draw a line in the East to separate the North from the South. You couldn't do that in the West, where...
Bisbee Massacre Hanging
March 28, 1884: Or was it March 8? Sources conflict. Five bank robbers convicted of murdering four Bisbee citizens, including a pregnant woman, are...
Wovoka, Medicine Man
The Northern Paiute medicine man Wovoka healed people and brought rain to parched lands. People listened to his prediction that 1891 would bring...
Hired Gun’s Last Weapon
On June 1, 1903, three men who knew Tom Horn rode together in the parade at Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming. Horn had been found guilty of...