Quick, if you were about to be hung, what would you want to write as your last letter? Outlaw Tom Bell faced that question on October 4, 1856. Bell...
Good Words of Advice as the Noose Awaits
read more
Jana Bommersbach
October was Black Bart’s Favorite
OCTOBER WAS BLACK BART'S FAVORITE: Over his eight-year-28-robbery spree, Black Bart most loved robbing stagecoaches in October. Maybe it was the...
Mountain Charley
Ever wondered how hard it was to be a woman in the Old West? Just ask Mountain Charley. Or should we say, Elsa Jane, a teenaged widow with two...
A Photo has Always Been Worth a Thousand Words
A photo has always been worth a thousand words and that is perhaps no where more pertinent than in the Old West. We have but a few images of some...
A Clear Path to a Clear Fork Post
Jim Alexander has always liked November. It’s his birth month—he turns 82 on November 7—and he shares the month with the focus of his life’s work,...
Preserving Polygamy
Preserving Polygamy became a women's campaign in the late 1800s—a point that will surprise many, who assumed women hated the plural-wife dictate of...
Their Name Lives On
It started with one Pima basket, bought in the late 1890s somewhere around Phoenix, Arizona. Newcomers to the Southwest—health seekers—found the...
The First Woman to “Despise” Polygamy
The first woman to “despise” polygamy was Emma Smith—the first wife of Mormon founder Joseph Smith. Historians note she never believed it was a...
No Place Like Home
Tomasita Duran could not believe what was right before her eyes. On that day in 2004, the director of the housing authority saw something special...
An Outcast in Her Own Town
She had to be shocked from the top of her flowered hat to the hem of her velvet dress. This can’t be happening, she must have thought, not after all...
A Barn Worth Saving
"So, you’re the people who save things.” Bob McDaniel was looking for exactly those kind of people because this lifelong resident of Santa...
August, the Dirty Low-Down Month
That's how Wild Bill Hickok would have described it in 1876, if he'd lived to tell the tale. The month actually started out very profitably for the...