wild woman of the west

Hundreds of cheering fans flocked to the train depot in Caney, Kansas, on Sunday, October 24, 1920, to welcome the Yankee Robinson Circus to town.  When the coast and crew alighted from the multiple cars, the men, women, and children on hand to greet them applauded excitedly.  Most of the townspeople followed after the performers...

The discovery of gold in California in 1849, sparked a raging fever in thousands of Argonauts hoping to strike it rich. Among the flood of fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands that ventured west were mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives. Although they were few in number, women shoveled and picked through tons of gravel working shoulder...

Bitterly cold snow flurries pelted the determined features of twenty-one-year-old Ethel Berry’s face as she drove her dog sled over the Chilkoot Pass in Alaska. Clad in a pair of men’s mackinaw breeches and moccasins, she cracked her whip over the team of animals hauling an enormous mound of supplies behind them. Ethel was slowly...

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,...

In many of the films actress Anne Jeffreys made for Republic Pictures she played 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 the motion picture studio in the summer of 1945...

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. ...

“Man is a gaming animal. He must always be trying to get the better in something or other.”  Historian Charles Lamb – 1823   The New World gambling parlor in Marysville, California in 1851 was filled with prospectors and sojourners eager to lay their money down on a game of chance.  Patrons could choose from...

Tom King followed five, spirited, fast-moving horses into a dense line of trees seven miles outside the town of Fredonia, Kansas.  It was a stifling hot, August day in 1894. The ground the criminal’s horse’s hooves pounded into was cracked and dry. Sweat foamed around the animal’s neck and hind quarters.  Low hanging branches on...