Many frontier towns had no official judge and usually a man respected for his wisdom would be called upon arbitrate disputes between two parties. If...

St. Joseph, MO was in turmoil in the days after Jesse James was killed on April 3, 1882. Townspeople were shocked that the outlaw had been living...

Did you ever wonder what kind of traffic signals and traffic laws were in place in towns the early years of the horseless carriage? Traffic moved...

In 1864 and ’65, a Confederate-sympathizer group called Ingram’s Partisan Rangers pulled a series of stage robberies in northern California. The...

Doc Middleton (real name: James Riley) was one of the greatest horse thieves of the Old West era. Some estimates say he rustled 2,000 head over a...

Dave Cook was one of the top lawmen in the Rocky Mountains, breaking up several outlaw gangs from his Denver base during the 1870s and 1880s. But he...

The St. Patrick’s Battalion, or as the Mexicans called them San Patricios, were a battalion of mostly Irish Catholic immigrants who deserted the...

The other day a friend asked, “In Mark Twain’s book Roughing It he refers to the gunfighters as long-tailed heroes. What does that mean?" Mark Twain...

Charlie Utter (right in photo) is best known as a sidekick to Wild Bill Hickok, but he had quite the life beyond that. Born in Niagara Falls, NY in...

Charley Parkhurst moved from New Hampshire to California during the 1849 Gold Rush. Once there, Charley became a stage driver—one of the best in the...

Tombstone’s Allen Street is one of the most notorious in the Old West. On the north side of the street saloons were open 24 hours a day. In 1880,...