The Hunger (G.P. Putnam & Sons, $27) by Alma Katsu takes the tragic tale of the Donner Party and infuses it with hints of witchcraft, vampirism,...
A Horror Story Within a Horror Story
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Terry A. Del Bene
Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Stranded: A Story of Frontier Survival (Five Star Publishing, $25.95) by Matthew P. Mayo is a novel crafted around Janette Riker, an actual Argonaut...
Jersey Argonauts
The 1848 discovery of gold on the American River by New Jerseyan James W. Marshall set off an international migration. Jersey Gold—The Newark...
A Babe on the Battlefield
The horrified woman ran with all her heart through chaotic, thunderous reports of carbines, rifles and pistols that were dwarfed only by the din...
On to Oregon
The adventurous and restless souls who risked all to go West were compelled by those qualities to redraw and improve “tried-and-true” trails. Such...
Raining Bricks and Shooting Citizens
In 1906, San Francisco, was one of the jewels of the American West. The California boomtown of the 1850s had grown into the ninth largest city in...
Gambling with Men’s Lives
By 1848, John C. Frémont was a national hero. He had led three expeditions into the Great American Desert, and his maps opened the frontier West to...
Lost in the Wilderness
In 1870, descriptions of the natural wonders from the Yellowstone area were often seen as fantasy. Truman C. Everts, age 54, joined the Washburn...
Outrunning the Apaches
In the Arizona wilderness of 1881, 20-year-old courier Frederick Russell Burnham knew that the assignment from Neil McLeod, one of Tombstone’s many...
Shot on the Fourth of July
Miners are notorious for a lifestyle of hard work, at times peppered with harder play. Alfred T. Jackson was a Nutmegger (someone from Connecticut)...
Dinner at the Devil’s Inn
Sometimes survival is a matter of listening to your inner voice warning you to leave. Several travelers to Labette County had mysteriously...
That’s Got to Hurt!
The only physical remnant of one of the West’s more unusual survival stories is an all-too-graphic reminder of the pain and suffering that frontier...