Hildreth’s Diggings was a tent and shanty town housing the thousands of miners attracted to today’s Columbia after Dr. Thaddeus Hildreth, his...
Columbia, California
read more
Articles
Wild Bill’s Disease of Passion?
In his 1986 book Deadwood, Pete Dexter depicted Wild Bill Hickok as suffering from some form of venereal disease (VD) and more so from the remedies...
The Last Cowboy President?
Lyndon B. Johnson compared going to Vietnam’s aid to coming to the aid of the defenders at the Alamo. Leonid Brezhnev derided Ronald Reagan as a...
Roadside Culture
“We call these people ‘untutored,’ and yet, to watch a desert dweller spill varicolored sands between his fingers into a magic pattern on the ground...
Surviving the Santa Fe Indian Market
6:12 p.m. Friday: Now I know what it feels like to be a piece of turquoise in the middle of a Charles Favour mosaic bracelet. It’s...
Calgary, Alberta
At an elevation of 3,500 feet, the air is mountain fresh, and with chinook winds providing spring-like weather any winter month, the climate is...
Camera in the Cow Camps
At the turn of the 20th century, a young cowboy obsessed over how he could best preserve true cowboy culture. Erwin Evans Smith, born in 1886,...
The Mona Lisa of the Range
I was teaching photography at Prescott College in Arizona when I met 19-year-old Julie, the daughter of renowned wildlife artist Grant Hagen. She...
A Feast Along the Alferd Packer Trail
He was a shoemaker, Army veteran, hunter, guide, scout, miner, convict, harness maker, cane carver, horsehair braider, “jack whacker” and, of...
Comanche Moon
I won’t poke any more holes into what promises to be the final production in the Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove series, starring Val Kilmer (Inish...
Not Just Book Larnin’
You know that old adage, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”? University of Texas Professor Michael Collins proves that saying wrong. For...
Durango, Colorado
Along the Ute’s River of Lost Souls (today’s Animas River), you’ll find “water town,” first labeled as Urango by the Basque and later named after...