western history

(1894-1986) The stylish lobby of the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth was a bustle of activity on Saturday, March 11, 1922.  Well-dressed patrons were arriving and departing.  A string quartet in the corner of the massive entryway serenaded white-haired, prosperous looking gentlemen and their stocky, bejeweled wives being escorted to their rooms by attentive bellboys. ...

Every bed in the hospital at the military prison in Louisville, Kentucky was filled with wounded and dying men.  The Civil War had officially ended on April 9, 1865 but rebels still fighting for their lost cause refused to surrender.  Union soldiers pursued renegade Confederates until they were captured or shot. Guerrilla leader William Quantrill...

The manager of the Melodeon Theatre in Virginia City, Nevada, placarded every cliff and signboard on Sun Mountain with posters announcing the coming of Antoinette Adams, the first actress to appear in the town. Enthusiasm was boundless as the red-letter day approached, and on opening night, every bench, corner, and windowsill of the Melodeon was...

One of the most glamorous and perhaps most tragic of the “glamour girls” of the West was the beautiful Pauline Cushman, who during the Civil War served as a Union spy.  Her pictures show she possessed a gypsylike beauty, with long black hair, and her voice was likened to that of a lark. Pauline was...

You could tell by the way Hazel Elizabeth Hickey Moore dressed when she was growing up she was a cowgirl.  You could also tell she was a cowgirl by the way she rode magnificent jumping horses in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus.  Hazel was also destined for a career as a Wild West...

From the author of the best-selling book Steamboat, Legendary Bucking Horse:  His Life and Times and the Cowboy Who Tried to Tame Him comes a new work entitled The Mormon Handcart Migration.  Historians will applaud Moulton’s research and courage in writing about one of the deadliest chapters in the history of westward migration in the...

If you love watching old Western films, you have most likely pictured yourself living in the days of the Wild West. If you’re like me, you probably have even made statements such as, “I was born in the wrong time; I should have lived in the 1800s when cowboys still roamed the land.” The West has...

Her real name is Martha Canary, but everyone today knows her as Calamity Jane. There are many myths about this wild woman who sometimes passed as a man and may, or may not, have been a Soiled Dove. For one thing, she is thought to be the most written about Western American woman of the...