Chris Enss

She cut. The bullet that slammed into the injured cowboy’s chest had come to rest next to his lungs and had to be removed.  Dr. French widely opened the wound to extract the slug.  Her hand was steady and eyes sharp.  She was no stranger to performing complicated medical procedures under pressure.  A woman in...

Boards, automotive parts, and motorboat engines blocked the main entrance of a majestic home in Ogden, Utah known as the White Mansion, home of Frank White.  Nearly every inch of the yard surrounding the house was crowded with engines, windshields, tools, and tires.  The interior of the house was in the same condition.  It was difficult for residents...

Fifteen-year-old Gertrude Hutchings sat on the edge of her sister Florence’s bed, crying.  Florence, a pretty girl of seventeen with long, dark hair lay motionless under a mountain of blankets.  A massive purple and black bruise on the side of her right cheek was the only color on her slender, pale face.  Her eyes were closed and her...

Bronc busting champion Kitty Wilkes won her first title at the Wild West Celebration Rodeo in Miles City, Montana, in 1916.  The seventeen-year-old New York native’s straightforwardness and untamed physical daring gave fans the impression she was born and bred into the rugged life of a Wyoming ranch.  Few would have guessed she was new...

Sarah Louisa Dutcher was the first woman to make her way to the top of Half Dome. Historians believe the intrepid young woman accomplished the feat in 1875.

“The gambler is a moral suicide.”Reverend Charles Caleb Colton – 1832 On July 9, 1871, two ragged, down-and-out prospectors walked into the Bank of California in San Francisco and approached a dignified looking clerk waiting behind a giant oak desk. The two hungry-looking men quietly inquired about renting a safe deposit box. The clerk eyed...

“From reckless despair she drifted into the life; it is with determination bordering on reckless that she starts to quit it.” Josie Washburn’s thoughts on the reformation of a prostitute – 1905 A large wagon filled with fallen angels rattled down a dusty street in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was daylight, but a hard rain obscured...

“The West is overrun with bawdy houses and soiled doves.” Gold miner Charles Bartlett in a letter home to his family in Virginia – 1872 Madam Laura Bell McDaniel’s broken body lay in a ditch beside a snowy thoroughfare conjoined with the twisted rubble of what was once her pristine Mitchell sedan. It was late...

At Love’s Command by Karen Witemeyer (Bethany House) Haunted by the horrors of war, ex-cavalry officer Matthew Hanger leads a band of mercenaries known as Hanger’s Horsemen who have become legends in 1890s Texas. They defend the innocent and obtain justice for the oppressed. But when a rustler’s bullet leaves one of them at death’s...