Without the back-breaking labor of Chinese immigrants the pivotal event in the development of the nation—the laying of the last rail and placing of...
The Central Pacific’s Chinese Trail
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Candy Moulton
Oregon at 160
When wealthy trapper Ewing Young died in 1841 in what is Oregon today, he had no apparent heirs, and there was no way to determine how to handle his...
Following the Bent Brothers
So much of the Western story begins in St. Louis, and the tale of William and Charles Bent is no exception. From a family of eleven children, the...
Hell on Wheels
A century and a half ago the Iron Horse galloped across the prairie and plains of Nebraska then over and around the mountains and across the...
Gateways to the Old West
Get your mule, load the wagon and let’s take a look at the best museums of the West. St. Louis, known as the Gateway to the West, takes our top...
Trailing the Wild Bunch
Two of the best-known bank and train robbers of the 19th century spent time in jail and prison—for horse theft—and not a day behind bars for...
Steamboats on the Missouri
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took their Corps of Discovery expedition up the Missouri River using keelboats and pirogues that they poled and...
Peace on the High Plains
Red Cloud and other Lakota leaders met with Indian Commissioners at Fort Laramie in 1866 intending to negotiate an agreement that would allow safe...
The Barlow Road
The earliest travelers to Oregon Country abandoned their wagons at The Dalles and proceeded on down the Columbia River on rafts that took them to...
Stories of the Oregon Trail
When the travelers loaded their wooden wheeled wagons and hitched oxen or mules to begin a nearly 2,000-mile journey from the Missouri River to...
Reveille on the Overland Trail
Ohio State Senator William O. Collins, a proponent of war-funding after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, took a stronger stand for the Union...
Lords of the West
Birthed in Canada, the Hudson’s Bay Company was founded on May 2, 1670, when King Charles granted a charter to his cousin, Prince Rupert,...