As a young man, Bill Gulick thought his future was on the baseball diamond. He was battling his way up through the semi-pro leagues, when at age 21,...
Writing at the Bend of the River
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Candy Moulton
Rodeo Flight School
Offspring of a Percheron stud and a Mexican hot-blood mare, the big black colt born on the Frank Foss ranch of Southeastern Wyoming may have lacked...
On the Edge of the Abyss
It is late August, but the air is crisp as I board the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in Durango, Colorado. The firemen are already...
Trailing Lewis and Clark
The Missouri River northwest of Bismarck, North Dakota, is not the same river explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark saw in 1805, even though...
It Happened in the West
A Tennessean by birth, James A. Crutchfield (Jim to his friends) says he became a Westerner by choice, and when he has the choice, his preferred...
Lost to History
A few years before the Civil War, one of the most violent episodes in Western American trail history played out on a mountain meadow in Southern...
Boone’s Lick
Larry McMurtry’s novel, Boone’s Lick, is under negotiation to be directed by Lasse Hallstrom. The Universal Studios film will be adapted by McMurtry...
Skeletons of the Sahara
American sailors shipwrecked off the North African Coast in 1815 are sold into slavery in DreamWorks and Intermedia’s Skeletons of the Sahara, based...
Following the Arkansas River
I’m driving around Wichita, Kansas, looking for the Arkansas River and I can’t find it. That is probably because I’m pronouncing it like the state...
Right Brain Overload
Cotton Smith is a right-brain guy. He paints. He draws. He develops creative ad and marketing campaigns. He has written poetry, plays, short...
Pike’s Peak or Bust!
On the first day of summer in 1850, John Beck, a Cherokee preacher en route to California’s goldfields, stopped to do a little panning along the...
On the Trail of Wild Bill Hickok
May 27, 1837: A son, James Butler, the fifth child was born to William Alonzo and Polly Butler Hickok of Homer (later Troy Grove), Illinois. 1856:...