A hidden assassin with a shotgun blasted Charles Lummis in the face and chest. He was bloodied, blown off his feet, and left to die in the doorway...
The Wandering Visionary
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Tom Augherton
Herding with the Wind
He was standing there, as was his horse, Warrior, but both were invisible between the flashes. Shrieking winds cut the rolling grasslands into...
The Mystery of the Great Medicine Gun
Did Isaiah Lukens construct the air gun nicknamed “Great Medicine” that the 1803-’06 Corps of Discovery brought to impress the Indians on their...
Buckeye Gets Burned
With an anthropologist’s curiosity, an artist’s hands and an explorer’s heart, Western painter John Mix Stanley personally offered a changing nation...
Southwest Crusader
Charles F. Lummis was two years old when he experienced his first loss—the death of his mother from consumption on April 24, 1861, at their seaside...
Chalkley
Chalkley McArtor “Chalk” Beeson, the last of seven kids from Quaker parents Samuel and Martha, was born in Salem, Ohio, on April 24, 1848. The...
Señora Doña Maria Luz Corral de Villa
Doña Luz wasn’t the only woman in his life, nor even the only woman who claimed to be his wife. But the striking blue-eyed peasant woman was the...
Esther Ross
A century ago, the 17-year-old daughter of an ambitious Prescott, Arizona, pharmacist had traveled over three days and 2,400 miles to New York to...
Erwin E. Smith
Texan Erwin Evans Smith is regarded as one of the greatest photographers of the day-to-day life of the cowboy in the American Southwest. Smith...
Ely S. Parker
Seneca Indian Ely S. Parker was born Hasanoanda, which means “Leading Name,” in 1828 as his parents William and Elizabeth Parker attempted to return...
Henry Larkin Abbot
From the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, in peacetime and on bloody fields of war, Henry L. Abbot engineered the infrastructure of a new...
James Beckwourth
For most descendants of African slaves born prior to the Civil War, the path to freedom was usually a covert and perilous foot journey to exile in...