Chris Enss

On June 15, 1853, a vivacious, petite woman stepped cheerfully off a stagecoach in Nevada City, California, dressed with all the style of Princess Eugenia of Sweden and Norway.  As she strolled into the National Hotel with her dainty steps and her bustle looping back and forth, she made a decision to changer her name...

Say the name Annie Oakley and the image of a young woman who could shoot targets out of the sky without a miss and rode across the frontier with Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody comes to mind. Annie Oakley was a champion rifle shot and did perform alongside well-known riders, ropers, and Indian chiefs...

The most influential woman at Republic Pictures from the early 1940s to the studio’s demise in the early 1960s, was Vera Hruba.  Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on July 12, 1919, the blonde beauty caught Republic Picture’s president Herbert Yates’ attention in 1939 when she toured the United States with an ice-skating show called Ice Vanities. ...

Cowgirl Mamie Francis sat atop her horse, Babe, waiting for the director of California Frank Hafley’s Wild West Show to let her know when the program began.  Mamie and Babe were perched on a wooden platform thirty feet in the air over Coney Island, New York, looking down at the audience in the grandstands.  Directly...

In many of the films actress Anne Jeffreys made for motion picture studios like Republic Pictures she either played a cowgirl or a damsel in perilous situations.  Neither the studio nor the performer could imagine how much those movies would affect the lives of young, ticket buyers.  A letter from a fan written to Republic Pictures in...

There were many talented, female contract players at Republic Pictures.  In the mid-1940s the studio had more than a hundred-twenty actors in its’ stable of gifted individuals.  Some of those actresses became household names because of their work in front of the camera and others rose to fame as a result of their off-screen exploits. ...

Dale Evans was one of Republic Pictures’ most popular Western stars.  The unlikely celluloid cowgirl, Western star starred in tandem with singing cowboy Roy Rogers in most of her thirty-eight films and two television series.  The undisputed Queen of the West was born Frances Octavia Smith on October 31, 1912, Uvalde, Texas.  In her words,...

World’s Champion Roper, America’s Greatest Horsewoman, Queen of the Range, and the first woman whoever roped steers competitively with men, Lucille Mulhall held the top spot in contests and vaudeville for twenty years.  Cowboy, actor, and humorist Will Rogers, Lucille’s friend and teacher, called her the world’s greatest rider.   “Born in the saddle,” her family...

Business for matrimonial publications increased substantially whenever stories of successful mail-order connections were made.  Editors for periodicals such as Matrimonial News and the New Plan Company shared happy ever after tales with daily newspapers in hopes they would print the romantic adventures of correspondence couples.   Several such stories appeared in newspapers like the Waterloo Daily...