Chris Enss

Twenty-eight-year-old Elizabeth Cogley sat at a small desk in the Pennsylvania Railroad ticket office in Lewiston Junction, Pennsylvania, on April 16, 1861, frantically writing down the message coming through the telegraph.  The neatly dressed woman wore a serious expression; the message she was transcribing was vital and history making.  The day before, a similar wire...

“Underfeeding will make a coward of a nation,” Dr. Mary Pennington announced at the National Poultry, Butter and Egg Association conference in Chicago in October 1917.  “A hungry man may rise to a moment of valor, but when a whole people are hungry, they become moral and physical weaklings.”  At the time Dr. Pennington made...

The sun blazed high in a brassy sky, and heat danced in undulating waves across the high plateau town of Winslow, Arizona.  In the far distance, a train with the name Santa Fe Railway embossed on its side hurried along steel rails toward the La Posada Hotel.  It was May 15, 1930, opening day for...

Between 1860 and 1890, railroad mileage multiplied from 30,000 to 166,000.  Within the first ten years after the Golden Spike ceremony joined the first transcontinental railway, three additional railroads spanned the land, and short lines had been united into systems linking innumerable tiny towns and villages to each other and to the great metropolitan cities. ...

The Nevada County Narrow Gauge Railroad operated as it usually did on April 10, 1901.  It ran as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.  The wood burning engine proceeded along its customary route without delay or interruption, giving no indication that the line’s president and owner had passed away.   John Flint Kidder had...

The Great Northern Railway Coast Flyer No. 3 pulled away from the train depot in Malta, Montana, at 11:45 P.M. on July 3, 1901.  Malta was a typical cowtown with a broad, rutted lane of brown dust running between a double row of false-fronted, framed buildings.  Horses, their tails swishing idly at buzzing flies, stood...

In 1897, twenty-year-old Mabel Sloan of Florence, Kansas, responded to an ad in the local paper.  Looking for work, she was intrigued by the notice:  “Wanted:  Young women, 18 to 30 years of age, of good character, attractive and intelligent, as waitress in Harvey Eating Houses in the West.  Good wages, with room and means...

Twenty-nine-year-old Florence LaDue laid on her back in the middle of a rodeo arena in Alberta, Canada, twirling a lasso.  It was July 1910 and the crowd in the stands watching her work were cheering and whistling.  The trick the petite cowgirl was preparing to do was to throw a wide loop over a rider...

It was a gloomy, chilly evening in mid-April 1877 when Miriam Leslie, her husband Frank, a Skye terrier named Follette, ten of the Leslies’ friends, and their families gathered at the New York Central railroad depot in New York City. Porters carefully serpentine around crates of fruits, vegetables, spices, and vintage red wine until they reached...