“Fortune smiled the day we filed the Ponderosa claim” was one of the coolest introductions to a TV show ever. Backed by the galloping theme song, a...
A Bonanza Paradise
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Investigating History
Unsinkable Margaret Brown
On April 15, 1912, the brand new passenger liner Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg. More than 1,500 people died, and the legend of the...
Butch Cassidy Wannabe
Butch Cassidy is dead. William T. Phillips is dead. Yet the legend that the two men were one and the same still has not given up the ghost, despite...
Butch & Sundance—and Rolla
The old Bob Seger song claimed that Rock ‘n’ Roll never forgets. History does, all too often. Take the case of Clement Rolla Glass, who died too...
Mrs. Custer at the Movies
Elizabeth Bacon Custer—keeper of the flame for George Armstrong Custer, her husband who famously died at the Little Big Horn in 1876—was also an...
Where the Bodies Are Buried
In the hills outside the northeastern Oregon town of Baker City is a cemetery not unlike many that dot the old mining towns of the West. Except this...
A View of Vasquez
If you’d visited San Francisco back in 1967, you might have found a 14-year-old kid doing something a bit unusual for a teenager. He spent time in...
The Tunstalls Return
You could call the visit a “belated family reunion.” Five members of a proper English family gathered in a New Mexico canyon in July 2010 on an...
Rediscovering the O.K. Corral
“You sons of bitches, you have been looking for the coroner’s report, and you can have it!” Okay, that’s not exactly Cochise County Sheriff John...
Rediscovering the O.K. Corral
“You sons of bitches, you have been looking for the coroner’s report, and you can have it!” Okay, that’s not exactly Cochise County Sheriff John...
The Digital Frontier
On vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a stiff President Calvin Coolidge cut a comical figure, wearing cowboy boots and a 10-gallon hat, as...
Bent’s Fort’s 50th Anniversary
In 1833, the Bent brothers—Charles and William—along with partner Ceran St. Vrain were building a trading empire in the Southwest. The plan: to...