Jack Swilling’s Arizona Adventures: Part II

Jack Swilling’s Arizona Adventures: Part II

For a brief time in early 1862 Confederate troops occupied what would soon become the Territory of Arizona. This was part of a grand Confederate plan to occupy New Mexico and open a path to California that would make the South an ocean to ocean power. The so-called...
The Wretched Newspaper War

The Wretched Newspaper War

A profit-making enterprise that ended up documenting history may make one’s stomach queasy—especially when a complete picture of how that happened is explored. An album of Wounded Knee photographs was both shocking in its hammer price ($22,000 at Cowan’s Auctions, on...
Pancho Villa Pt. III: The Fall of Pancho Villa

Pancho Villa Pt. III: The Fall of Pancho Villa

At one time Pancho Villa got an American film company from Hollywood to make a war movie from one of his battles.  He even offered to attack at a time of day when the light was best for the cameras.  A movie, called, The Life of General Villa, was made but failed at...
Big Iron On His Hip

Big Iron On His Hip

I met Marty Robbins in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, at a National Cowboy Hall of Fame event in 1979. He was there to receive the Golden Trustee Award for his Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs album. I’d seen him perform a number of times in Arizona, but this time, I got...
The Great Western

The Great Western

In late August 1890, a detachment from the U.S. Army Quartermasters Department began the arduous task of exhuming the bodies of the soldiers in the long abandoned and overgrown Fort Yuma cemetery to be reburied at the Presidio in San Francisco, California. Of the 159...