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The Union Pacific Gandy Dancers: Railroad Men and Their Myths
Not all the tracklayers were Irish or strictly meat-and-potatoes men. First of all, they were all Irish. Second, they had to fight Indians every step of the way while laying track. Third, they ate and...
View ArticleBlackfoot Natawista Iksana Was a White Man’s Princess
She reigned at the Fort Union trading post on the upper Missouri. “Fort marriages” were often temporary—and tragic for the Indian girls who thought they were permanently married to white men. A few...
View ArticleDutch Bill Greiffenstein Helped Found Wichita
Once a trusted trader, he turned to building a town. Dutch Bill Greiffenstein lost his young Cheyenne wife before the November 1868 Battle of the Washita and a young fortune afterward when Lieutenant...
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How Cornish Workers Saved California’s Richest Gold Mine From Ruin
.image-13785899 { max-height: 100%; --left: 48.56%; --top: 28.42%; } California’s Empire Mine yielded some $120 million in gold over its 106 years of operation. The owner built himself a dream house...
View ArticleSome Low-Paid Frontier Soldiers Proved Particularly Enterprising
They found various ways to augment their salaries. On his last trip to Washington, D.C., before his June 1876 trouble at the Little Bighorn River, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer buttonholed U.S....
View ArticleBank Cashiers Sometimes Dealt With Unauthorized Withdrawals
Jesse James tested the mettle of Joseph Heywood. As the U.S. banking system took form during and after the Civil War, the job to which every ambitious bank teller or clerk aspired was that of cashier....
View ArticleOlmsted Was a Design Genius, But As a Mine Manager He Was a Fool
He was unable to head off a miners’ strike or bankruptcy. Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. He defended California’s redwoods and Yosemite,...
View ArticleSquaring Custer’s Triangle
Sigmund Freud was still a teenager when George Armstrong Custer penned 1874. But you don’t need to read too deeply between the lines to My Life on the Plains in see what was really on Custer’s mind—or...
View ArticleBaron Walter von Richthofen: The Red Baron’s American Uncle
He invested in cattle, beer and milk in Denver, but his legacy is a castle. Getting rich or going broke can be a simple matter of timing. That’s how it worked out for Baron Walter von Richthofen, uncle...
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The Death of Crazy Horse: Fables and Forensics
.image-13797462 { max-height: 100%; --left: 49.12%; --top: 40.47%; } The scenario is familiar: Crazy Horse, greatest war chief of the Lakota Nation, harasser of George Crook and destroyer of George...
View ArticleOne Deadly Dude: The Marquis de Morès
The feisty Dakota Territory Frenchman called out Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt was a man who seldom backed away from a challenge. But had he not backed away from one written ultimatum when he...
View ArticleGiovanni Martini: The Message Got Through
Trumpeter Giovanni Martini was the last white man to see Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer alive. He also became the first enlisted man to serve as a scapegoat for the catastrophe at the...
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The Scapegoats at Chancellorsville
Did German Americans’ cowardice cost the Union victory at Chancellorsville? Or should that humiliating loss be laid at the feet of their top generals? “There is no doubt of the fact that our army was...
View ArticleDeath of an “American Dictator”
Durham White Stevens’ assassination in San Francisco in 1908 was an indirect result of U.S. imperial interests in the Far East. “Japan is doing in Korea and for the Koreans what the United States is...
View ArticleCurley With Custer, But Not to the End
Crow scout left before the fighting. The image has been fossilized on film since 1909, when William Selig produced On the Little Big Horn at a reenactment on location. Curley, a man in his 50s playing...
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The Doc Who Rode With Custer
Dr. Isaac Taylor Coates (National Park Service) Dr. Isaac Coates and Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer first met at Fort Riley, Kansas, at the outset of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock’s...
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General John Stark: A Patriot Who Rose Above Rank
Though passed over for promotion by Congress, New Hampshireman John Stark remained devoted to the Patriot cause. (North Wind Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo) Benedict Arnold and John Stark were among...
View ArticleSpirit of the Samurai
General Maresuke Nogi lived and died by a strict Samurai code—and tried to raise future Emperor Hirohito the same way. Guns thundered around Tokyo on September 12, 1912, as the cortege of Meiji,...
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This German Aristocrat Beat a 12-Year Prison Sentence As a Nazi War Criminal
Alexander von Falkenhausen led Turks against the British and Chinese Nationalists against the Japanese, spared Belgian hostages and conspired in Adolf Hitler’s assassination Jonathan Fenby, Chiang...
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Did These Western Bumblers Invent the Selfie — and Preserve Plains Indian...
.image-13780273 { max-height: 100%; --left: 53.83%; --top: 58.45%; } Karl Bodmer was a European of many names and accomplishments, but his reputation received a transatlantic boost in 1832. That year...
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