When Charlotte Caldwell looked out from her ranch in Shields Valley a dozen years ago, she observed, less than “a mile as the crow flies,” an old...
No School Left Behind
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Jana Bommersbach
Wildfires on the Prairie
Fire was a constant threat in the West. There is barely a western settlement that doesn't include a historical note on the day it “burned to the...
The Ultimate Sorrow
“Tongue nor pen can ever tell the sorrow,” says a heartbreaking film on the tragic 1856 Mormon handcart disaster at the Handcart Historic Site near...
The Whitman Massacre
The mother of women's migration West was a beautiful, golden-haired missionary with a lovely soprano voice, but a heart that could never learn to...
California’s Clara Barton
She was a businesswoman, a landowner, a healer and a founding mother of a wild land that would become California. And she was a Spanish...
Custer Cemetery Champion
"America’s most hallowed grounds” is how National Park Service Manager Chris Ziegler views the national cemeteries that hold the soldiers who fought...
From Slave to Philanthropist
Biddy Mason walked from Mississippi to California behind her slave master's wagon train, herding cattle, cooking meals and caring for her three...
Licks and Slicks
An Old West quiz: if you were a cowboy and had “licks” and “slicks,” what were you doing? You were on a cattle roundup. Thanks to the Federal...
Sending Geronimo Off With a Song
On September 8, 1886, the Fourth Cavalry Regimental Band was on hand when Geronimo and the last free Apaches were marched to Bowie Station to be...
Chinatown’s Angry Angel
She might look like just a nice, gray-haired grandma, but Donaldina Cameron (shown in picture, front row, third from the left) was known as...
Saving a Piece of True West
More than 30 years passed before four citizen groups and multiple city councils saved a “precious jewel in Austin’s crown,” the Norwood Park...
Saving a Piece of True West
More than 30 years passed before four citizen groups and multiple city councils saved a “precious jewel in Austin’s crown,” the Norwood Park...