One of the most well-known lines from a Western is widely misquoted: “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!” Actually, in the 1948 classic “The...
Loser Mountain
During the Civil War, Gen. Irvin McDowell lost the First Battle of Bull Run and then, defying all odds, lost the second Bull Run (although he was...
A Long Shot
June 27, 1874 The Comanches and their Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne allies are hell bent on driving buffalo hunters off their land. The hunters have...
Bean Belly Egged On
In 1879, Ross Woods got the last breakfast eggs at the Stratford Hotel restaurant in Shakespeare, New Mexico. This didn’t sit well with Bean Belly...
The Legend of Red Ghost
One of the enduring, outrageous legends in Arizona is that a demonic, rogue camel with a skeleton on its back, killed and terrorized the country...
Legendary Dishwasher
In the spring of 1876, Henry Antrim worked as a bus boy at the Hotel de Luna at the edge of Camp Grant, Arizona Territory. Later he would change his...
Deadlines Missed
On July 8, 1859, in Tubac, silver capitalist Sylvester Mowry and newspaper editor Edward Cross squared off with Burnside rifles at 40 paces. Cross...
Getting Rich Behind a Counter
One of the most surefire, but unglamorous, ways to get rich in 1880s Arizona was to sell all the boomers merchandise. Tombstone merchants sold...
Cowboy Lingo
To the Arizona cowboy, language has always meant imaginative mangling. Something isn’t just loud, it’s noisy as a fog horn in a funeral parlor. A...
Russian Bill Swings at Shakespeare
William Rogers Tattenbaum hailed from a Baltic Sea port and claimed Russian nobility in his lineage. After arriving at San Francisco in the 1870s,...
Calling all fire adjusters!
The outhouse beind the Tivoli Gardens on Allen Street was the starting point for Tombstone’s second major fire in March of 1882. Within an hour, the...
Drunk As Skunks
Drinking too much alcohol in the Old West was a year-round sporting event and, of course, had its own slang. If someone was drunk they were “in...