Wild West

Pioneers and frontiersmen (and, yes, frontierswomen, too) were the backbone of westward American expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, though most of their names have been lost to history. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett must have had backbones st

In the June 2019 issue of Wild West on P. 76 [“Formidable, Fearsome Fun,” by Linda Wommack, Collections] you indicate that the Old Montana Prison [see photo] in Deer Lodge, Montana Territory, opened on July 2, 1871, and was the first territorial pris

1 Anthony Quinn: Born in Mexico to a Mexican mother and Irish-Mexican father, he played Indians in several films, including a sympathetic portrayal of Crazy Horse in They Died With Their Boots On (1941) and Chief Flapping Eagle in the comedy-drama We

The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco presents “Levi Strauss: A History of American Style” The exhibition will feature more than 150 items, including vintage apparel, advertising materials and ephemera, related to the life and career of Lev

Born in 1860 in Haddonfield, N.J., rancher and performer William Tatem Collings was variously billed as Uncle Will, the Professor and Buckskin Charley. In the 1880s he started a 1,400-acre ranch outside Beaver City, Neb., and by 1890 was shipping hor

Arizona Territory grocery store owner Fred E. Kibbe and laundryman Albert F. Hillpot left hometown Globe on Sept. 13, 1910, to hunt deer on the nearby San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. John B. Goodwin and William R. Stewart were more recent arriv

Texas’ greatest ghost story is freely available to the public during the daytime but restricted to four people a night. The creaking oak gates and heavy doors all slam shut at 4:45 p.m., and you’re on your own until 9 the next morning. Accounts from

Jakob and Theresia Weinheimer and their six children left the Hessian village of Übernthal (north of Frankfurt) in 1845 to start anew in what within a few years would become Gillespie County, Texas. They and scores of other families had purchased the

It is little wonder Utah master sculptor Greg Woodard was drawn to create railroad-themed pieces, given that he lives a short drive east of Golden Spike National Historical Park in Promontory, where the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869

One 1955 Technicolor CinemaScope Western starring present and future brand-name actors features a story of suicidal valor, as two courageous but confused young Cheyenne warriors confront two troops of U.S. cavalrymen in a duel with predictable result

Renowned painter and sculptor John Coleman [colemanstudios.com] hails from Southern California but casts his artistic eye across the greater Western region and back in time. “I like to tell stories in my work using metaphors that help explain who we

In the wake of the 1832 Black Hawk War U.S. Army Lieutenant Philip St. George Cooke singled out a unit of mounted rangers composed of frontiersmen for its poor performance. The citizen-soldier had fallen in his estimation. “There was a time when our

Word of the slaughter of the Alamo garrison filtered quickly through the Texian camp on the Guadalupe River at Gonzales in March 1836. On the morning of the 13th, frustrated by the uncertainty of intelligence brought by two Mexican vaqueros, General

Stories of David Crockett sightings were not uncommon in the years after his death at the Alamo. In death, as in life, the frontiersman remained a national legend. Crockett’s name simply made for entertaining copy and, thus, healthy profits for publi

In the early morning hours of June 2, 1823, Edward Rose and Aaron Stephens slipped away from fur trader William Ashley’s camp along the Missouri River in search of “nocturnal recreation” in the nearby villages of the Arikaras, also known in the fur t

Karl Bodmer was a European of many names and accomplishments, but his reputation received a transatlantic boost in 1832. That year Prince Maximilian, a Prussian explorer, ethnologist and naturalist, was planning an expedition into the North American

It was a desperate, weary band of Wood Crees who paused with their white hostages at Loon Lake, Saskatchewan, on the morning of June 3, 1885. Little more than two months had passed since they and their nominal chief, Big Bear, had petitioned Canadian

Though driven to desperation by hunger, Big Bear’s band of fugitive Crees had few illusions as to their likely fates for having risen and killed white residents of Saskatchewan. Soon after surrendering at Fort Pitt, Wandering Spirit tried to commit s

It is difficult to fathom General Phil Sheridan. Hard and grizzled, he set the Shenandoah Valley ablaze in 1864 to deny the Confederacy food, bringing starvation to families from Harrisonburg to Staunton, Va. They called it “the Burning.” During the

In the spring of 1903 the Army sent forth the nation’s first black park superintendent, as U.S. Army Captain Charles Young led a company of buffalo soldiers from the Presidio of San Francisco up to Sequoia and General Grant (present-day Kings Canyon)

The cornerstone for Wyoming’s first state prison was laid in Rawlins in 1888, a full two years before the territory gained statehood. But given the often inclement weather, funding issues and government bureaucracy (some things never change), the fac

In 1868 James Pearce, a 26-year-old Cornishman who had started his working life as a miner in England, immigrated to the United States and resumed his mining career in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, while wife Maria ran a boardinghouse in that city. T

(1874, by George Armstrong Custer): Books about George Custer are plentiful, but some of the earliest remain some of the best, starting with his own memoir. Here he relates the early Indian wars campaigns (notably the Battle of the Washita), describe