December 2018

Wild West

Wild West Magazine presents the great American frontier from its beginnings to today

Wild West3 min read
Wells Fargo Fortunes
Wells Fargo has been around since the California Gold Rush—March 18, 1852, to be exact—and the name still captures the popular imagination. Its history as an express company in the Wild West is both colorful and iconic. Despite the company’s recent m
Wild West3 min read
Nelson Miles
In the August 2017 issue [Roundup] Peter Cozzens ranked General Nelson A. Miles among the “Top 10 Frontier Generals.” Really? The general who spent his time during the Apache wars sitting on the beach in California with his family while others did th
Wild West7 min read
10 Top Wells Fargo Guards And Sleuths
1 Pilsbury “Chips” Hodgkins was among Wells Fargo’s longest-serving employees, hiring on in Gold Rush California in 1853, serving 20 years as a messenger and retiring in 1891, a year before his death. 2 Henry Johnson, among Wells Fargo’s first detect
Wild West3 min read
Events Of The West
The Buffalo Bill Center of the West (Cody, Wyo.) and the Gilcrease Museum (Tulsa, Okla.) have teamed up to present the exhibition “Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West,” which examines how the celebrated Western landscape artist rendered not
Wild West3 min read
Robert Utley In Command Of Frontier Military History
Robert M. Utley [robertutley.net], a former chief historian for the National Park Service, has been recording the history of the American frontier—particularly its military history—for decades, and he shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. He h
Wild West5 min read
Leon The Mysterious Lady
Her story wound around western Kansas in 1879, crisscrossing through Anthony on four separate occasions. She went by various names: Dr. M.L. Stanley, Leon Belmont, Leon G.B. Stanley, “Belmont the Mysterious.” Newspapers speculated, cowboys gossiped,
Wild West4 min read
Wild And Woolly Basques
Dominique Laxalt, a Basque born in the French Pyrenees in 1886, came to America around the turn of the 20th century and spent most of his life herding sheep in Nevada’s Great Basin. In his waning years, as son Robert details in the book Sweet Promise
Wild West4 min read
Grave Business
Among 19th-century black market enterprises, grave robbing ranks blackest. It evokes Dickensian lowlifes haunting moonlit graveyards, plundering coffins for buried baubles, then skulking off to seedy pawnbrokers with their spoils. So it often was. Bu
Wild West2 min read
Finding El Dorado
Busy prospectors panning for gold along a Rocky Mountain streambed have cause to pause for a moment as one lucky old coot eyes a gleaming nugget in Alfredo Rodriguez’s Colorado Gold Rush, a 40-by-60-inch oil-on-linen the California artist did on comm
Wild West2 min read
Style
This stunning view of the Grand Canyon [nps.gov/grca] was taken from Yaki Point by photographer Michael Quinn. In winter months on the South Rim free national park shuttle buses run every 15 minutes from 6:15 a.m. to 7:15 p.m., providing access from
Wild West12 min read
They Rode For Wells Fargo
Wells, Fargo & Co. Express was one of the most important business enterprises in American history. From 1852 to 1918 it reigned as the country’s biggest and most reliable express delivery service. In an era when the U.S. mail was unreliable, the priv
Wild West12 min read
On The Trail Of Pawnee Killer
Oglala Lakota war chief Pawnee Killer lived up to his ominous moniker in 1873, but years earlier he started Civil War hero George Armstrong Custer down his vainglorious path to death on Montana Territory’s Little Bighorn River. Having achieved the ra
Wild West4 min read
When Mojaves Mourned, Souls Soared As Bodies Burned
Mention the word “Mojave,” and most people think desert. But Arizona is also home to Mojave (or Mohave) Indians who have always been more about river than desert. The Yuman-speaking people’s native name is Pipa Aha Macav, which means “People by the W
Wild West12 min read
Eyewitness To wounded Knee
On Jan. 3, 1891, a party of civilian burial contractors crossed the snowy South Dakota plains and arrived at the somber site along Wounded Knee Creek where five days earlier the last major confrontation between the U.S. Army and American Indians took
Wild West11 min read
War Of The Tombstone Underground
In the spring of 1881 geologist John Adams Church replaced Tombstone, Arizona Territory, co-founder Dick Gird as superintendent of the Tombstone Mill and Mining Co., which operated some of the silver camp’s richest mines, including the Good Enough an
Wild West6 min read
Venerable Jefferson Barracks
In the years following the 1804 Louisiana Purchase, an ever-rising flood of settlers followed the early explorers and trappers onto this immense tract of land that would comprise much of the American West. As the frontier boundary extended westward,
Wild West2 min read
The Barracks Today
Four different entities occupy Jefferson Barracks’ original 1,702 acres. Since 1960 St. Louis County has operated a 426-acre swath of the original post grounds as Jefferson Barracks Historic Site [stlouisco.com/parks/jb], which centers on a 42,000-sq
Wild West10 min read
Murder In the Black Hills
Samuel McMaster, superintendent of the Homestake Mine in Lead, a few miles southwest of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, was sitting in his office a little before noon on Jan. 17, 1879, when A.L. London and Abe Cohen, the owners of the rival Pride of the
Wild West2 min read
Custer In The Black Hills
On June 8, 1874, by command of Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry, 7th U.S. Cavalry Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer was authorized to explore the Black Hills. Prospectors and merchants along the Missouri River were ecstatic. Everyone knew Custer’s real mission
Wild West4 min read
The Little Carbine That Could—for A While
Fortified atop a precipitous rimrock in southeastern Arizona Territory’s Chiricahua Mountains, Cochise’s Apaches rained down bullets and arrows on Spencer-wielding cavalry troopers rushing their position. A couple of weeks earlier the warriors had am
Wild West4 min read
Jeff Smith’s Parlor Museum Recalls Soapy’s Dirty Deeds
In December 1897 the First Bank of Skaguay (a Tlingit word referring to rough weather conditions in the Alaska gold rush port) opened for business in a single-story wood-frame building on 6th Avenue between Broadway and State Street. By the following
Wild West11 min read
Must See, Must Read
(1936, by Neill C. Wilson): In this classic Old West history author Wilson relates the story of business partners Henry Wells (1805–78) and William Fargo (1818–81), who incorporated Wells, Fargo & Co. in 1852, chronicling the successes and struggles
Wild West3 min read
Timbuctoo, California
In the spring of 1848 Jonas Spect acted on a hunch. As the homeward-bound Easterner passed through Sacramento, Calif., he learned of James Marshall’s gold discovery at Sutter’s Mill, 45 miles east on the American River. Avoiding the rush, Spect opted

Wild West

More Issues From Wild West