The Scandalous Saddle

The Scandalous Saddle

As absurd as this may sound, the sidesaddle took hold in the 14th century to protect the virginity of a teenaged princess traveling across Europe to wed the young King of England. Surprised? Don’t feel alone. Most assume the sidesaddle was the natural outcome of...
Tom Bullocks Railroad

Tom Bullocks Railroad

Tom Bullock was a gregarious, smooth-talking promoter. He’d been a bartender Prescott’s Whiskey Row before heading to New York where he made a fortune building street railways. Ever since the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad (the Santa Fe Railroad)...
Nate Champion

Nate Champion

April 9, 1892 Johnson County, Wyoming: The column of hard-looking men rode up to within a short distance of the small ranch headquarters just south of the Middle Fork of the Powder River just before dawn.  The icy snow blowing in from the north was blinding.  They...
Suds for Crab Cowboys

Suds for Crab Cowboys

Texas’s oldest continuously operating tavern can be found in Austin. August Scholz opened his establishment after the Civil War, in 1866, and it remains a popular gathering spot to this day. Scholz found even more patrons to sip on his suds once the Houston and...
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...