Note: This story is from my book Highway History And Back Road Mystery II. The Indians called him the Iron Man because it seemed like their arrows and bullets could not hurt him. The boys at the Bucket of Blood Saloon in Holbrook, Arizona called him a dandy because of his long flowing hair and […]
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 […]
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 […]
We spent yesterday exploring cowboy country. Back in the years following the Civil War, western Kansas was the Wild West, and it was here that some of the best known characters of the time made names for themselves. Meade, Kansas, where we are staying at the city park’s free “Tourist Camp” is the home of […]