Chris Enss

Maggie McDermott peered into the grimy windows of the Mascott Saloon and eyed the faces huddled around the bar. When she didn’t see who she was looking for, she removed the note tucked in her pocket, tilted it toward the lit oil lamp hanging outside the door, and studied the message. It read, “Frank and...

Among the spectators attending the baseball game at Fort Meade in mid-June 1879 between the Hard Scrabbles and the Never Sweats was brothel owner and operator Mollie Johnson and three of her best employees. All wore burgundy or emerald-green, silk taffeta and velvet dresses, and their blond curls dangled haphazardly from beneath the fancy bonnets...

On March 1, 1933, four men left Casper, Wyoming, to search for a woman that had been missing since mid-February.  Mrs. Rose Coleman was reported missing by her husband, the reputed cattle rustler Charles W. Coleman.  Charles wrote his brother-in-law Ernest Gale from jail informing him that he’d not heard from his wife for more...

Judge Harold R. Hanley hammered the striking block with his gavel after announcing the verdict the jury had rendered against one of the Black Hills most well-known madams, Dora DuFran. It was 1928, and the Rapid City, South Dakota, courtroom was filled with curious onlookers eager to learn the specifics in the case against the...

In early February 1941, more than twenty-five hundred people jammed into the stadium to watch the exciting events at the World’s Championship Rodeo in Phoenix, Arizona.  They came to see wild cow riding, calf roping, steer roping, bronc riding, and trick rider Berenice Dossey.  Not only was she a “spectacular performer” according to the Arizona...

Jeannette Rankin has a statue in Montana’s capitol and in Washington D.C.’s Statuary Hall, but two young suffragists from Helena, Montana, stand as boldly in history as champions for the cause of women’s rights. Frieda Fligelman, born in 1890, and her one-year-younger sister, Belle, were the only children in a prosperous, well-educated, Jewish household, who...

“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 polite but enthusiastic applause from 40,000 Londoners brought a huge smile to fifteen-year-old Lillian Smith’s face.  Her performance before England’s Queen Victoria was the highlight of her early time with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the queen’s rule, and the stands were filled with royalty from across Europe. ...

Cowboy Bill Pickett is credited with introducing the sport of bulldogging to rodeos in 1907.  In bulldogging, the rider dashes after a mad, fleeing steer; leans out from the saddle; throws himself onto the steer’s horns; and bringing the beast to the ground in a swirling scramble of dust and a half a pound of...