Typically, biographies related to the Army in Trans-Mississippi West feature officers. Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands 1848-1886 (University...
Trooper’s Tales on the Southwest Front
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“Up And Down This Road I Go”
The iron horse evokes images of smoke and cinders billowing from a steam locomotive stack as it sails down the trackless wastes of the frontier....
Johnny Lingo: In the Land of Pronunciation Legend Rules
“When the legend becomes fact... print the legend.” –Maxwell Scott (Carelton Young) The Man Who Shoot Liberty Valance, 1962 Ever wonder why locals...
Bust Cream, Anyone?
We think of the late 1800s as a time of Victorian refinement, with sensitivities so severe, one was to use the term “limb,” rather than the vulgar...
Life and Death on the Fur Trade Frontier
Is courage something learned or is it in our DNA? Can we control it? Based on a true story, Mariano’s Choice (Pronghorn Press, $19.95) follows...
Paranoia Takes Jim Murhpy
DON'T LET THE PARANOIA GET YA: That's what should have been etched on the tombstone of Jim Murphy. Jim was a 200-pounder with a red mustache and...
The Cheapskate of All Time
OK, there are probably hundreds of examples of men (and women) being cheapskates—not paying what they owed, or haggling over the bill. But here's...
Wanted Dead or Alive
Among the stories of the Old West, few are more exciting than the manhunts that pitted frontier authority against those who would kill, plunder and...
The Horseless Carriage Was Seriously Underestimated
“The horseless carriage...will never come into as common use as the bicycle,” the Literary Digest declared in 1899—two years after Henry Ford and...
Shopping from Home in 1897 with Sears Roebuck
Here's a sampling of what one could shop for in 1897 in the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, known officially as the “Consumer's Guide” but popularly as the...
Good for a Laugh… and a Shiver
The New Mexico Territory has one helluva hard case on the loose! Jim Jones’s The Big Empty (Five Star, $25.95) whips up the intense landscape of New...
The Western War Between the States
Among the thousands of volumes treating the American Civil War rare is the study venturing west of the Mississippi River. Andrew E. Masich’s Civil...