In December 1868, George Armstrong Custer peered down at a beautiful, freckle- faced white woman frozen in the snow. Clara Blinn had been shot in...
Custer and Hostages
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Sins of the Father
In 1864, an irascible 51-year-old Nicholas Earp proclaimed himself a wagonmaster and offered to lead a group of Iowa emigrants to California. Sarah...
A Plague of Flea Market Billys
The conversation all started with a letter from my hometown, Buffalo, New York. Rob McElroy had sent a note to the Yahoo group “Photo History” about...
Who Killed the Texas Terror?
Undeniably the darkest hour in Texas’s history, the Reconstruction era, between 1865 and 1877, turned the Lone Star State into a bloody and...
Sitting Bull’s Dancing Horse
A strange and heartbreaking moment transpired outside Sitting Bull’s cabin in 1890, while he was being assassinated during an attempted arrest at Standing Rock Reservation…
A Bozeman Christmas
On Christmas Day in 1867, three years after the founding of this fair Montana Territory city, Bozeman was elected by citizens as the county seat....
Spirit of the West
Historian Dr. Larry Len Peterson’s tenth book, American Trinity: Jefferson, Custer, and the Spirit of the West (Sweetgrass Books, $34.95), is his...
Locked And Loaded
Western history and fiction publishers have had an outstanding year across all genres and categories. With the growth in electronic and audio books,...
Vaqueros, Buckaroos & Cowboys
Blame it on Joseph McCoy. The entrepreneur turned Abilene, Kansas, into a cowtown, which made the Chisholm Trail synonymous with cowboys and the...
Death-Defying Riders of the Pony Express
When America’s first Pony Express rider set off on April 3, 1860, from St. Joseph, Missouri, launching a coast-to-coast transfer of news and...
The Man Who Invented Billy the Kid
Long before Walter Noble Burns arrived on the scene with his Saga of Billy the Kid in the 1920s, the largely fictitious events presented in Pat...
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...