When the Bitterroot Mountains exploded in wildfires in 1910, Buffalo Soldiers from the 25th Infantry helped evacuate the town of Wallace, Idaho. The...
High Times in the Bitterroots
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Leo W. Banks
Across the Wide Missouri
History credits Missouri River trader John Calvin McCoy with founding Kansas City in 1838. The story, possibly legend, says he and his partners met...
Badlands, Bison and Rough Riders
Teddy Roosevelt first came to Medora, North Dakota, in September of 1883 to hunt buffalo. He so loved the region that he later operated two ranches...
JPS Brown: An American Original
One day in 1937, in the bar of Tucson’s Santa Rita Hotel, the cowboy-actor Tom Mix gave seven-year-old Joe Brown a pair of buckskin chaps with...
West Texas Paradise
Pecos, Texas, wouldn’t exist if not for the shape of the Pecos River. Near where the town would come to be, the deep, twisting gorge narrowed to...
Buckaroos and Basques
Elko got started in 1868 as a railroad town along northeast Nevada’s Humboldt River. But calling it a town might’ve been stretching the matter. It...
A Pioneer Paradise
When pioneers settled on Kanab Creek in the late 1850s, they faced hostile Navajo, Paiute and Hopi Indians. Several attempts at settlement ended in...
Crossroads of the West
Fort Kearny, the first U.S. Army post on the Oregon Trail, was a busy place after its founding in 1848. During one 18-month period following the...
New Doc Photo Discovery?
Look closely at the street scene from Silver City, New Mexico. Notice the skinny cat standing by the third stagecoach window, right hand in pocket,...
Queen of the Cowtowns
When Dodge City’s founders staked out their vision for a town near Fort Dodge in 1872, its first business was George Hoover’s bar. He sold whiskey...
Tales of a Legendary Western Life
J.P.S. Brown writes books about the true life of the cowboy, not the saloon and bodice tales that so enthrall other practitioners of the genre. His...
Crown Jewel of the Big Horns
John Loucks fought the Sioux during their 1862 uprising in the Dakotas. Twenty years later, he platted out his vision for a town on a piece of...