April 19, 1903 Acting on a tip, a 10-man posse surrounds the Bakersfield, California, establishment known as the Joss House, a combination meeting...
McKinney Meets His Maker
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Articles
A Mirror with a Memory
An Indian with his thick, long braids wrapped in otter fur stands beside an oil portrait of a woman and a baby. Who was this man? What had happened...
General Palmer’s Baby Railroad
In 1870, a former Union Army general named William Palmer supervised construction of the Kansas Pacific Railway into Denver, Colorado. The arrival...
Cherokee Nation’s Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Last March 6, a direct descendant of Sequoyah, the mayor of Tahlequah and the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation were among those who came...
Fort Laramie: Military Bastion of the High Plains
Douglas McChristian spent more than two decades as a National Park Service historian and administrator, and he has shared his knowledge in a number...
The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army in the West, 1783-1900
Noted researcher/writer Robert Wooster reaches some of those same conclusions in The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army in the...
Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870-1890
Kent State historian Kevin Adams’s Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870-1890 is somewhat mistitled. Almost all of...
A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn—the Last Great Battle of the American West
Speaking of standards, James Donovan’s 2008 effort on the most famous Indian fight in U.S. history is one. If you missed his A Terrible Glory:...
How Hollywood Saved the Durango & Silverton
Everyone’s heard the iconic children’s tale about the “little engine that could.” But few realize a real-life version exists. Call it the “movie...
Custer Survivor
CUSTER SURVIVOR: Sergeant August Finckle, Company C, 7th Cavalry, died at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876—or didn’t, if his real name was Frank...
Wanted Posters Fonts are Actually Egyptian?
Those “almost square-block serifs hanging for dear life onto needle-thin verticals” on Old West Wanted posters are actually so-called Egyptian fonts...
The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History
Back in 1992, Fred Nolan produced one of the standards of Western history. The Lincoln County War: A Documentary History was the most complete look...