Nearly two dozen Texas gunmen rode a specially outfitted railroad car into Casper, Wyoming, on April 5, 1892. They disembarked well before sunrise,...
Invaders in the Big Horns
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John Stanley
Let Freedom Ring!
William Quantrill addressed his ragtag army on the evening of August 20, 1863. “Boys, this is a hazardous ride, and there is a chance we will all be...
Gold & Gambling
Twice Wild Bill Hickok asked to change seats with Charlie Rich at the poker table. Twice he refused. Although, with his back to the door and...
Where Cody Lives
The railroads may have built North Platte, but it was the Old West’s most renowned showman who put the Nebraska town on the map. In 1882, town...
Twain is Born
Franklin Graves lay dying. On Christmas Day, 1846, he called his 19-year-old daughter, Mary, to his side. “You have to do whatever you can to stay...
Rambles Through the Nebraska Panhandle
To the Lakota, it was the Moonshell River; to the French explorers, La Rivière North Platte; to the Americans, the North Platte. Whatever its name,...
Tombstone, Arizona
Tombstone got its start when Ed Schieffelin set out to prospect the desolate hills east of the San Pedro River in 1877. Friends, worried about his...
Durango, Colorado
Ferroequinophiles adore Durango. Yes, gold first lured Charles Baker and his prospectors into the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado in 1860,...
The Other Las Vegas
You can argue all day about which Old West town was the roughest, toughest and wildest of them all. Tombstone? Maybe. Dodge City? Entirely possible....
Willcox, Arizona
They say that in the 1870s, native grass grew stirrup high in Sulphur Springs Valley. True or not, ranchers flocked to southeastern Arizona. So did...
Queen of the Cowtowns
Few places inspired newspaper editors to wax wroth as Dodge City, once described as a “perfect paradise for gamblers, cut-throats, and girls.” The...
Kaycee, Wyoming
The Old West is easy to imagine in Kaycee, tucked up in historic Johnson County in northern Wyoming. Butch Cassidy, leader of the notorious Wild...