Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took their Corps of Discovery expedition up the Missouri River using keelboats and pirogues that they poled and...
Steamboats on the Missouri
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Renegade Roads
Peace on the High Plains
Red Cloud and other Lakota leaders met with Indian Commissioners at Fort Laramie in 1866 intending to negotiate an agreement that would allow safe...
Cattle, Cowboys and Culture
If you’re a vegetarian, stop reading. Unless you like opera. We don’t think of cattle towns as cultural meccas, but many of them were. And still...
Blood on the Earth
Two months separated the 1868 clashes between the U.S. military and the Indians at Beecher Island and the Washita River. One is known for heroism on...
Hancock’s War
Second Lieutenant Lyman S. Kidder, 7th Cavalry, was unlucky. I knew that before beginning this road trip, but as I step out of my Jeep in a remote...
Reveille on the Overland Trail
Ohio State Senator William O. Collins, a proponent of war-funding after the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, took a stronger stand for the Union...
Lords of the West
Birthed in Canada, the Hudson’s Bay Company was founded on May 2, 1670, when King Charles granted a charter to his cousin, Prince Rupert,...
Canyons, Chasms and Cataracts
Not long after his graduation from West Point, Lt. George M. Wheeler became an assistant survey engineer in the San Francisco area. Promoted to...
Texas Captains of Cotton and Cattle
Alabama-born Levi Jordan left the border country between Louisiana and Arkansas in 1848 and resettled near the San Bernard River in Texas. He...
When the Hills Bled Blue in the Boom of ’92
Douglas Magnus, the iconic silversmith in Santa Fe, New Mexico, shows me around the historic turquoise mines he owns in the nearby Cerrillos Hills....
There’s Copper in Them Thar Hills
Author Mike Anderson prefers talking about the legends who played at Warren Ballpark in Bisbee, Arizona—Connie Mack, Honus Wagner, Jim Thorpe and...
Whistle Stop Tour
As Nebraska gets ready to celebrate 150 years of statehood, you likely know these facts: it is the only state with a unicameral legislature;...