In 1850, a new ice cream saloon in San Francisco, California, greeted patrons with the aromas of vanilla and lemon. The Alta California described...
Hand Over the Ice Cream
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Art, Guns and Culture
A Pistol For Dragoons
With the adoption of the U.S. Dragoons on March 5, 1833, the U.S. Army found itself woefully lacking in pistols for a mounted unit. Handguns at that...
Portrait of a Mountain Man
Albert Bierstadt legitimized the Western American landscape as a serious subject, first bringing to the East and the world the majestic...
Starvation Winter
"Any time I cash in now, I win,” Charles M. Russell wrote, a few months before his death on October 24, 1926, in the introduction for his short...
A Clear Path to a Clear Fork Post
Jim Alexander has always liked November. It’s his birth month—he turns 82 on November 7—and he shares the month with the focus of his life’s work,...
No Place Like Home
Tomasita Duran could not believe what was right before her eyes. On that day in 2004, the director of the housing authority saw something special...
No Business Like Show Business
There’s no business like show business, if you tell me it’s so. Traveling through the country is so thrilling. Standing out in front on opening...
Klondike Dining with the Earps
The Klondike and Yukon Rivers, bordering Alaska and Canada, were the final frontier for 19th-century miners out West. In the late 1890s, thousands...
Virgil’s Sixgun
Although the infamous Gunfight Near the OK Corral is arguably the best known and most written about shootout in the Old West, little is known about...
Eating Out
A basic necessity in frontier camps, restaurants often started out in tents. An evolution took place as wagons rolled west and pioneers arrived to...
The Shoots Far Gun
American Indians called the Sharps buffalo rifle the “Shoots Far Gun,” or the gun that “shoots today and kills tomorrow,” and for good reason. In...
On the Hunt for Geronimo
Five thousand against 140! With Geronimo’s breakout from the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona on May 17, 1885, the U.S. Army conducted the most...