William “Doc” Rowan was a ham in the vein of P.T. Barnum, the circus king of the Gilded Age. For more than 20 years, Doc Rowan shone above...
Showboat Doc
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Dr. Jim Kornberg
Deliverance from the Little Big Horn
This is a book that needed to be written. In Deliverance from the Little Big Horn, Joan Nabseth Stevenson has tackled a complicated, unfortunately...
Not-So-True True Grit
Four riders surrounded the Texas Ranger, LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). Suddenly, the horseman on the Ranger’s left threw a lasso over his shoulders and...
Sioux Success, Against All Odds
On May 28, 1868, during a U.S. Congress floor debate about an Indian appropriation bill, Montana Territory representative James M. Cavanaugh...
TB Havens in the Old West
Recall that powerful scene in the 1993 movie Tombstone in which Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) sat by the bedside of his dying friend Doc Holliday (Val...
Spittle, Flies and Dixie Cups
The Old West frontier town was dirty, dusty, smelly and often dangerously unhealthy. In those early days most people did not understand or...
Docs, Dentists & Booze
American Western lore has spawned many stereotypical depictions of men and women in various professions ranging from sheriffs to prostitutes to men...
Worms, Lice and Nothing Nice
Dr. Harold Brown (my professor at Dartmouth Medical School in 1975) wrote a masterpiece titled Basic Clinical Parasitology. He lectured that if all...
Strychnine, Hollywood Style
In the Old West, the rancher’s cupboard contained a myriad of hazardous substances, ranging from rat poison and lye (caustic soda for making soap)...
Baits, Traps and Old West Rats
In the Frontier West, and throughout history, rats and men have lived in a delicate, fascinating equilibrium. In the Frontier West, and throughout...
A Deadly Oasis
It occurs naturally, everywhere in the West. It has a special affinity for the state of Nevada where it commonly exists in groundwater in amounts...
Frontier Headache
One of the most unpredictable, harrowing, sometimes embarrassing and always painful misfortunes that a cowboy could expect in the Old West was being...