Yesterday was a wet one, with rain falling most of the day. Sometimes there was not much more than a shower, and other times it was a real downpour. I would have been perfectly happy to stay home all day, but I had a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon, so we ventured out. As it […]
In yesterday’s blog I said I hope to wrap up my newest book, Big Lake Shootout, by the end of the day, and yesterday evening I finished it. I started working on it June 13, and finished July 29, so it took just a little under seven weeks. The book came in at 83,559 words […]
Judge Roy Bean, the famous Hanging Judge from Langtry, Texas, was a larger than life Old West figure, and it is sometimes hard to separate fact from fiction when talking about his adventures. This is further complicated because Bean was a shameless self-promoter who made up plenty of wild tales about his exploits, and then […]
Note: This story is from my book Highway History And Back Road Mystery II. A half-mile north of the Roosevelt Lake Bridge on Arizona State Route 188, a stone monument marks the spot where one of the Old West’s most colorful characters was killed. Even today, a hundred years later, there is much debate over […]
Movies and television would have you believe that ghost towns from the Old West era remain perfectly intact, with tumbleweeds rolling down their empty streets and homes and shops full of furniture and other items as if the residents just all got up and went away one day, leaving everything behind and never looking back. […]
The hardest part of any visit with the people we love is saying goodbye. Especially as we get older and realize that any goodbye could be the last one. And so it was yesterday when it came time to leave our old hometown of Show Low, Arizona. We were up and all packed and had […]
Today I thought I would give you part two of an update on our trip from Florida to Arizona, with more to follow. After two days in Hondo, Texas, we hit the road again, traveling thirty miles north on a two-lane state highway to the small town of Bandera, which bills itself as the Cowboy […]
Note – This story is from my book Highway History and Back Road Mystery. RVers hanging out in Quartzsite, Arizona enjoying the sunshine and camaraderie of dry camping in the desert may not know that they are close to a reminder of the Old West that many probably never heard of. In a tiny cemetery […]
On a lonely windswept hilltop a couple of miles east of Superior, Arizona, we came across the grave of one of the Old West’s more tragic figures, a scorned woman named Mattie Blaylock Earp. Born Celia Ann Blaylock in Wisconsin in 1850, and raised on a farm in Iowa, accounts of the day describe Mattie […]
Popular history, television, and movies made a hero out of Wyatt Earp, who blazed his way to glory in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. The truth is that while Earp was a sometime lawman, he was also a gambler, pimp, and a saloon owner, all acceptable careers in the Old West. And […]
Note: This story is from my book Highway History And Back Road Mystery. The Old West was populated by a remarkably colorful collection of adventurers, dreamers, rebels, and misfits. It took men and women of outlandish character to be willing to explore new lands, endure the hardships that accompanied pioneer life, and survive under conditions […]
In the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains, 100 miles east of Sacramento, the Emigrant Trail Museum, located at Donner Memorial State Park, tells the story of one of the most tragic events of the Old West. In the mid-1800s, lured by the promise of cheap land and a better life for their families, thousands of pioneers […]
Note: This story was in a previous edition of the Gypsy Journal. Hollywood and pulp fiction have glorified and made him out to be a hero, but in truth Billy the Kid was a ruthless runt who killed not only for money, but just for the thrill of killing. More then one unlucky cowboy met […]
We spent yesterday exploring cowboy country. Many of the wild tales of the Old West, both real and fictionalized, took place in Cochise County, Arizona, and we decided it was time to introduce Greg and Jan White to this historic corner of Arizona. We left the fairgrounds about 9 a.m. and drove to Benson, where […]
In a blog last week, I took you on a tour of Two Guns, Arizona, a relic of the glory days of historic Route 66. Across the highway from Two Guns, and three miles up a gravel road, lies what is left of the ghost town of Canyon Diablo. You have probably never heard of […]