The Sioux considered the Black Hills to be sacred, the center of the earth and a place to speak to the Great Spirit. They had controlled the area...
Black Hills and Gold Dust
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Inside History
Cold-Blooded Conman
Perhaps the most cold-blooded conman early Arizona ever knew, Louis Eytinge suffered from tuberculosis and had two months to live. He should’ve died...
The Road to and from China
Anson Burlingame is a name mostly forgotten today. But over a 22-year period, from the early 1860s through mid-1880s, he was well known in two...
The Dodge City Lawdog
Charlie Bassett’s story has been eclipsed—by the legends of Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. Yet for much of the 1870s, Bassett was the law in Dodge...
Custer’s Conspirator
A new officer joined the 7th Cavalry in the summer of 1869, bringing with him a background that even today seems the stuff of fiction,” Charles K....
The Black Man at Little Big Horn
Isaiah Dorman’s claim to fame? He was the only black man killed at the Little Big Horn battle. While not much is known about his early life, Dorman...
Proving Up
Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s Letters of a Woman Homesteader captures the rambunctious spirit of this woman pioneer who set out to prove that she could...
A Treaty Goes Up in Smoke
For two long years, starting in 1866, the U.S. Army tried to build and maintain forts in the Powder River Country in present-day Wyoming. The plan:...
Fake News Guru
In the 1920s, Oatman, Arizona, was a boomtown, and while the discovery of gold and the prosperity of the mines were always tabloid fodder, a bizarre...
The Suspect Savannah Strike
In March 2, 1867, a group of six riders came into the quiet town of Savannah, Missouri, about 15 miles north of St. Joseph. They tied up their...
Texas’s Loyal Unionist
John Dix was born to fight battles, taking his first breath on February 2, 1796. His minuteman father had fought in the first battle, at the North...
Gunfight in the Galiuros
At of Old West gunfights were quick, bloody affairs that left more questions than answers as each side had its own version of events. The Powers...