When he was just a boy he started the longest war in U.S. history. Felix Ward’s abduction by Apaches when he was about 13, led to the infamous...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

On July 8, 1859, in Tubac, silver capitalist Sylvester Mowry and newspaper editor Edward Cross squared off with Burnside rifles at 40 paces. Cross...

One of the most surefire, but unglamorous, ways to get rich in 1880s Arizona was to sell all the boomers merchandise. Tombstone merchants sold...

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...

William Rogers Tattenbaum hailed from a Baltic Sea port and claimed Russian nobility in his lineage. After arriving at San Francisco in the 1870s,...