Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Old West
“Then how come they’re digging a grave behind the old corral, Luke?”
“Oh, Sam, what happened?”
“Nothing serious, Miss Sally—Luke just picked up a little bit of lead.”
“Oh no!”
Underschooled and ill-equipped, the men who attended the pioneers practiced a rugged brand of medicine—but they made some major advances all the same
At every step in the trek westward, America’s pioneers found an enemy more ubiquitous, more stealthy, and more deadly than the Indians, yet in our histories we tend to forget this dread opponent. It was, quite simply, disease.
In this never-never land, the superhero is the gun slinger, the man who can draw fastest and shoot straightest.
Legend says the frontier was “hell on women,” but the ladies claim they had the time of their lives
Spare, frail, and plagued by old wounds, Ranald Mackenzie was still “the finest Indian-fighting cavalryman of them all”
On the morning of January 20, 1889, the New York Sunday Times carried an account of the elaborate preparations for the Yale Junior Promenade.
The steamship clerk of Pig’s Eye, Minnesota, built a railroad empire from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound
Long before his death, more than forty years ago, Jim Hill had become a legend in the American West. Whether lie was hero or villain matters little.
The Nez Percés led the Army a bitter 1,300-mile chase; when they surrendered, one of the last free Indian nations vanished into history.
In June, 1877, just one year after the Custer debacle, a new and unexpected Indian outbreak flared in the West.
The Middle West has put its stamp on many artists’ work
It is a big country, sprawling all the way from the Alleghenies to the Rockies, and it puts its mark on the people who live in it. Its climate tends to be uncompromising— baking heat in the summer, hostile cold in the winter—and it has never done anything by halves. Where it had forests, they rolled for hundreds of miles, great stands of hardwood, green twilight under their branches; its open prairies were like the sea itself, rolling west in an unbroken treeless groundswell.
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