The English-born John Forster helped his brother-in-law, California Governor Pio Pico, escape to Mexico in 1846, but then he assisted the American forces who had come West to take possession of the pastoral paradise by the sundown sea.
Posted inStories
Hugh Glass: The Truth Behind the Revenant Legend
Bloody and battered from an encounter with a she-grizzly, old trapper Hugh Glass was eventually left to die by two of his comrades. When he refused to die before exacting revenge, a legend was born.
Posted inUncategorized
1902 Gunfight at Spokogee
The long-simmering feud between the Brooks and McFarland clans erupted into gunfire on September 22, 1902, at the new railroad town in Indian Territory.
Posted inUncategorized
Willie Kennard: Yankee Hill’s Black Marshal
The unlikely tamer of Colorado’s wild Yankee Hill was 42-year-old black marshal Willie Kennard.
Posted inStories
Who Shot First When a Mob Killed 3 Chinese Farmers in 1885? Turns Out, It Didn’t Matter.
Five white men and two Indians responded violently to the hiring of Chinese laborers to pick hops in 1885. A jury in the murder trial didn’t deliberate long — but we’ll never know for sure who killed the Chinese men.
Posted inUncategorized
Chinese Immigrants on America’s Western Frontier
Immigrants from China poured into gold-rich California in 1852 and kept on coming, mostly working as laborers who seemingly would do everything that Anglos wouldn’t or couldn’t do.
Posted inStories
A Wealthy Frontiersman Had a Town Near Deadwood Named After Him. He Was Later Hanged for Murder.
Bill Gay made $100,000 in gold prospecting the Black Hills of the Dakotas. Then he shot his way to the hangman’s noose in Montana.
Posted inUncategorized
Lieutenant Casper Collins: Fighting the Odds at Platte Bridge
Lieutenant Casper Collins and 20 others faced at least 1,000 Indians in the 1865 Running Battle, and on its heels came another lopsided encounter on the North Platte — Custard’s Last Stand.
Posted inUncategorized
Chief Seattle
Did Chief Seattle really say, ‘the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth’?
Posted inUncategorized
Bone Mizell: Cracker Cowboy of the Palmetto Prairies
Bone Mizell was a hard-drinking cow hunter who, with an assist from artist Frederic Remington, became a legend in his own time in Florida’s cattle country.