The California Gold Rush. The very words evoked the strong reaction of an American populace driven by adventure and a lust for easy riches. Drawn inexorably west in the wake of the Jan. 24, 1848, strike at Sutter’s Mill were argonauts from every walk of life—shopkeepers, former soldiers, fallen women and those willing to parade their talents onstage for bemused hardscrabble miners. Among the latter was the Robinson Family, a husband-and-wife acting duo with four kids in tow. The youngest of the brood would become one of the most celebrated performers in the annals of Victorian theater in the American West. With her onstage portrayals Sue Robinson brought to a viewing public the humor, angst and subtle realities of everyday life in that time and place.

The “Fairy Star”

Born in suburban Chicago on Jan. 14, 1845, Robinson moved west at age 6 with her parents and siblings, who were soon performing for Gold Rush audiences composed primarily of young men starved of family life. The Robinson Family trouped the length and breadth of the mother lode settlements, from northernmost Georgetown south through Coloma, Angels Camp, Murphys and countless other hamlets since lost to history, their names—Bottle Hill, Poverty Bar, Limerick, etc.—reflecting both the struggles and humor of the era.

The touring life held little of the perceived glamour of the entertainment world. On July 4, 1855, the Robinsons found themselves performing atop a giant sequoia stump for a raucous crowd in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Three years later the family drew such a throng to Poverty Bar’s Treadway Hall that its main stringer and floor joists gave way. Even when performances fell short of expectations, Sue in particular garnered flattering notices from the various camp presses, which regularly lauded her as the “jewel” of the family troupe. One reporter ascribed her popularity to a combination of factors:

“She is only 8 years old, yet she appeared to understand all the fascinating qualities of her sex of a more experienced age. This in connection with her sprightly and graceful dancing, as well as her natural beauty and sweet disposition, is sufficient not only to make her a favorite among us, but also to endear her to the hearts of all with whom she is acquainted.”

Recognizing the appealing innocence of their star attraction, Sue’s parents billed her alternately as the “Fairy Star” or “La Petite Susan.” Yet, the endless trouping in the rough-hewn mining camps scarred the young girl’s psyche. At age 8 she was severely injured while exiting a stage in Grass Valley when she brushed past the open flame of a footlight and caught her clothes on fire. Rushing to her rescue, her parents themselves were scorched in the effort. Fortunate to have survived, the Fairy Star was soon back onstage, though from then on she was prone to fleeing the stage at the mere hint of trouble.

From an early age the youngest Robinson recognized the importance even a few coins could mean to the survival of her struggling theatrical family. One evening, as she completed the Scotch lilt for an appreciative audience of Placerville miners, the men showered the stage with coins. Ignoring a bouquet of flowers thrown to her, Sue didn’t exit till she had retrieved every last coin, even filling her shoes with them.

The multitalented young girl’s singing embraced everything from sentimental ballads to grand opera, while her dance specialties included jigs, flings, clogs, the cancan, “La Cachucha” (performed with castanets), “Fisher’s Hornpipe” and a double “Sailor’s Hornpipe” performed with older brother Billy. Among her most popular numbers was a burlesque of Irish dancer and actress Lola Montez, who had reportedly taught both Sue and contemporary child star Lotta Crabtree the infamous Spider Dance, during which Montez would writhe and cavort to rid her flimsy costume of spiders, to the delight of appreciative male audiences.

Tragedy and a Rivalry

Sue was only 10 when her mother fell ill and died on Aug. 22, 1855, while on tour in Diamond Springs, sending the family fortunes into a tailspin. Economic uncertainty was and remains a stressor in the acting profession, but his wife’s death pressured Joseph Robinson to take dire measures to provide for his children. In addition to trying his hand at theater management, Sue’s father opened a dance school in Sacramento, advertising his daughters, “La Petite Susan” and Josephine, as potential dancing partners for gentlemen customers. As survival took precedence over propriety, father Robinson—characterized by one period newspaper as a peripatetic “bilk,” a Victorian-era term for an untrustworthy individual—appears to have abandoned any feelings of paternal responsibility for his daughters’ welfare.

Another formative factor in Sue’s childhood was an ongoing, unspoken competition with Crabtree, who rose to become a nationally known actress and variety star. Both girls experienced insecure childhoods spent relentlessly touring the mining settlements to perform before mostly male audiences. They occasionally crossed paths. Sue played the hand organ in a troupe that supported Lotta’s first professional performance, and in the mid-1850s Robinson performed in a saloon opposite Crabtree in a neighboring saloon. In a painful memory for Sue, the miners abandoned her performance, crossing the street en masse to watch the charismatic, slightly younger Lotta. Dressed in green and wielding a miniature shillelagh onstage, Lotta became the darling of the newly immigrant Irish then fueling the labor force in the camps.

While both girls learned the basics of stage presence, Robinson struggled with less emotional and financial support than that afforded the more celebrated Crabtree. The disparity prompted one contemporary actor to remark that had Sue been given proper theatrical training, she would have equaled any other actress of the time. Yet, the multitalented Robinson persisted in the face of adversity. Celebrated as a “child of extraordinary promise,” she sang, danced, played the banjo and, as she matured, excelled in the genteel comedy pieces and farces that followed the featured melodramas. By age 14 Sue was receiving top billing in show posters promoting the Robinson Family.

Growing Celebrity

In 1859, after remarrying a captivating performer scarcely 10 years older than his oldest child, Joseph Robinson moved his family to the Pacific Northwest, where recent gold discoveries augured a new gold rush. Playing their way through Oregon and Washington by 1860, the family spent a year in Victoria, British Columbia, headquartered in a building Joseph leased and converted into a theater. Trouping back to Portland, Sue appeared onstage with the handsome Frank Mayo, a regional actor and comedian who went on to national fame. Like Sue, he had come West as a young hopeful during the gold rush.

In some ways Sue’s life was typical for a member of an acting family prone to chasing the next theatrical opportunity and dollar. Generally ostracized from polite society, actors were clannishly protective of their own. On May 4, 1862, 17-year-old Robinson married fellow thespian Charles Getzler in Walla Walla, Wash., where she soon gave birth to Edward, the first of their two sons. Though Getzler was 12 years Sue’s senior and not her first love, he professed his adoration for her. Seeking stability and a parental figure to help assuage both the loss of her mother and her father’s veiled exploitation, Robinson almost certainly hoped for a stable married life. Sadly, it was not to be. Much as the Fairy Star had been the breadwinner for her vagabond gold camp family, so Sue shouldered the support of her husband and boys as a young adult.

Complicating matters was her growing status as a celebrity, which carried its own perils. A few months into the couple’s marriage a smitten theater patron approached their home, threatening to kidnap Sue. As Charles wrestled the deranged fan to the ground, a concealed gun in the man’s clothing discharged, killing the would-be kidnapper. On another occasion, when fistfights and gunshots erupted in a theater audience composed of enamored Union soldiers and citizens desiring decorum, a panicked Sue ran offstage. “Susie never seemed quite the same afterward,” recalled one eyewitness to the fray. “A slight commotion in the audience would attract her attention in the midst of her best song, and in her best play she always looked as though she was just a little afraid someone was going to shoot.” That nervous strain hovered just beneath the surface. When an earthquake struck during a performance of The Soldier’s Bride at Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, Nev., Sue bolted from the stage, only returning when the aftershocks had subsided. The tremulous quality of her closing song betrayed her lingering fear.

In her best moments, absent such disruptions, Robinson exuded a calm, professional demeanor—quiet by theatrical standards. Feeling more comfortable onstage than off, her pursuit of acting as an adult after a childhood spent before the footlights was her most logical, if not only, career choice. Empowered by her celebrity status and the ability to earn a living, Sue continued performing even after marriage and the birth of sons Edward and Frederick. As a dramatic actress she often executed men’s “breeches” roles, perceived in that time and place as both sensational and erotic. Clearly, Robinson didn’t feel hemmed in by conventional gender boundaries.

For Victorian-era actresses the theater was a paradox. By entering what was traditionally a male space, they breached societal norms, a transgression that discredited their work. Yet, the theater was a place where women could earn an income equal to that of a man and maintain a degree of autonomy over their lives. The theater also had the power to overturn prevailing gender stereotypes that bound women to domesticity, keeping them indoors, protected, frail and helpless.

Stardom in San Francisco

Sincerity was a hallmark of Victorian ideology, and Robinson’s realistic acting—deemed “finished, truthful and good” by one critic—continued to reap positive reviews. Another critic found the “young but promising actress possessed of far more real talent than many who are lauded before the public as stars of the first magnitude.” Though the charismatic Crabtree had outshone Robinson in childhood, Lotta never grew beyond the song and dance routines that were her bread and butter. Sue attained a higher level of recognition as a legitimate actress in classic dramatic roles opposite the leading male actors of the day.

During her tireless theatrical career Robinson is thought to have played more than 300 different roles and performed before tens of thousands of people. Her first stage appearance in the growing entertainment mecca of San Francisco was at the Union Theater in 1855. Sue was praised for her Ophelia, played opposite the Hamlets of Lawrence Barrett, John McCullough and Edwin Adams, three of the era’s best tragedians. She appeared for almost two seasons as Sacramento’s leading lady, executing Desdemona, Lady Macbeth and Portia in other Shakespearean plays, as well as comedies, melodramas and farce. In December 1868 Sue accepted a one-year contract with Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco, and by the early 1870s she was regarded as one of the best, if not the best, comedic actresses in the West.

Still, mainstream Victorian mores inevitably seeped into the life of the successful, assertive actress, who was often billed under her husband’s last name. Getzler accompanied his career wife to San Francisco, where in 1869 a domestic dispute led to violence. A year later she filed for divorce. Sue’s accolades may have threatened the insecure, underperforming Charles, whose job as saloonman also may have contributed to alcohol abuse. The divorce papers charged that “without cause or prevarication…he committed a violent assault and battery…by beating and bruising her severely, telling her at the same time that she was only a thing to use for his own convenience.” In colorful testimony Getzler accused Sue of being unchaste, called her a “bitch and strumpet” and insisted “all actresses are whores.” In an era when courts weighed a woman’s chastity, the judge accepted his assertion the couple’s younger son, Frederick, was not his and split custody. Sue kept Frederick, Charles kept Edward.

On the Move

After the divorce, though the loss of the companionship of son Edward grieved her, Sue continued to tour with her own theatrical company. Three women and five men constituted the Sue Robinson Company, which closed its run in Virginia City, packed up a mud wagon and pushed on to Reno. Actors were challenged to find paying customers, and the quest kept them constantly on the move. A ticket speculator in Reno charged theatergoers 75 cents to take in Robinson’s performances and pocketed a tidy profit, while the troupe lost money on the deal, having covered the hall rental. After performances in Truckee and Dutch Flat, Calif., the troupe performed on dusty stages in gold rush towns long past their heyday, out of necessity skipping town with unpaid hotel bills.

The company’s luck changed in North San Juan, a Sierra Nevada hydraulic mining camp where Sue had performed as a child 12 years before. On July 4, 1870, the day of the troupe’s arrival, the settlement suffered a devastating fire. Without hesitation, two of Robinson’s leading men manned a fire hose from the vantage of the hotel roof. Thanks in part to their efforts, the blaze was confined to a small section of town, and that night the company’s performance of Camille set a new theater attendance record in North San Juan. Grateful townsfolk rewarded the troupe with several ovations and curtain calls.

Though Robinson reportedly earned more than $80,000 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars) in the 1860s—largely while touring through Washington, Oregon and Idaho—and though she had announced her retirement on several occasions, each time she was compelled to return to the stage in support of her family. One biographer blamed her “worthless” husband for having forfeited her earnings on faro tables across the West. When not touring, Sue performed menial labor to supplement the family income.

According to friends, such persistent financial concerns, coupled with overwork and continued threats by Getzler that she’d never again see son Edward, contributed to her decline in the summer of 1871. Uncharacteristically, Sue canceled several performances, calling in sick. In early June her vindictive ex-husband sent her sheet music to a song entitled “You’ll Never See Your Boy Again.” Whether the sentiments of the lyrics pushed her over the edge is uncertain. Regardless, on June 17 Robinson succumbed to an unspecified illness while on tour in Sacramento. The epitaph on her tombstone in that town’s New Helvetia Cemetery reads, A fallen rose, the fairest, sweetest but most transient of all the lovely sisterhood, suggesting the fleeting nature of the acting profession and the ephemeral status of the characters she’d portrayed onstage.

Sue’s career had been in ascendance, as she had recently agreed to appear as leading lady at McVicker’s Theater in Chicago, one of the nation’s leading playhouses. Though just 26 at the time of her death, she had already spent 20 years in show business, her career having paralleled the glory years of economic prosperity with professional highs before appreciative audiences.

“Not All Sunshine”

Much of Sue Robinson’s life has been lost to the greater drama of the California Gold Rush and its substantial effect on the settlement of the American West. Forced into a performing life by her parents, she made the best of her significant talents, as both a child entertainer and as a stellar adult comedic and dramatic talent. Her early theatricalities before rough, mostly male audiences provided them welcome respite amid dangerous, demanding lives. She was rewarded with a successful career. Fittingly, her last role was in a play called Ambition, an emotion that had driven her to persist through many trials and setbacks.

Ironically, in their time the Old West figures that today capture the lion’s share of popular interest seldom captured headlines beyond their immediate locales, while the popular actors of the Victorian era were familiar to untold thousands nationwide. The male and female celebrities of their day, such performers informed behavior, fashion, society and politics. Robinson herself often starred in melodramas steeped in morality and devoted to the Irish experience, thus helping homesick immigrants deal with the realities of a new world. Her dramatic choices underscored her fame, earning her the adoration of audience members, though on occasion the latter’s emotions got the better of them. For example, years after Robinson’s death a deranged fan, still distraught over the loss of the cultural icon, tried to dig up her grave in the New Helvetia Cemetery.

Among Robinson’s many mourners was Gold Hill News editor Alf Doten, an ardent fan and returning audience member for many of Sue’s Virginia City performances, who in his notice of her death correctly surmised, “Her path through life was not all sunshine.” On learning of her death, Doten rushed to a local photographer’s studio to purchase three pictures he’d taken of Sue, taking comfort in the images of the actress he’d admired from the flip side of the footlights. His gesture was a fitting tribute to a woman who had been thrust into the challenging life of a performer in the American West and risen to the top of her profession.

California-based writer Carolyn Grattan Eichin adapted this article from her 2020 book From San Francisco Eastward: Victorian Theater in the American West. For further reading Eichin also recommends Troupers of the Gold Coast: The Rise of Lotta Crabtree, by Constance Rourke.

Originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Fresh from robbing the Deadwood Stagecoach, the Sioux performers of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West changed into loose-fitting Chinese garb and attached long single braids to the backs of their heads, mimicking the clothing and hairstyle of the Boxers then rebelling halfway around the world. Thus was the stage set for the “Western Easterners” to man a wall and defend their position against U.S. Army re-enactors in a scene played out in Cody’s “Rescue at Pekin.”

Pittsburgh was the host city this day in late May 1901, and the big-city crowd did not disappoint. As the action unfolded, spectators stomped their feet so hard as to send vibrations through the grandstand. During the climactic scene, as the Army re-enactors scaled the artificial wall, the jingoistic roar from audience members swelled to ear-throbbing intensity, and they surged over the railings to join performers on the arena floor.

The drama depicted actual events of the ongoing 1899–1901 Boxer Rebellion. Emerging as a violent response to increasing foreign incursion into China, the Boxers (nicknamed for their martial arts skills, though officially known as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists) sought to eradicate all signs of modern progress (railroads, telegraph lines, etc.) and called for the liquidaton of foreigners, particularly Christian missionaries (and their Chinese converts).

On June 20, 1900, the Boxers besieged foreign embassies in the Legation Quarter of Peking (present-day Beijing), trapping within its walls nearly 500 foreign civilians, 400 military personnel and 3,000 Chinese Christians. Fifty-five days into the siege eight nations, including the United States, sent some 20,000 soldiers to relieve the siege. In battle that August 14 and 15 they defeated the Boxers and then divided the capital city into occupation zones, sending occasional punitive forays into the countryside. Not until Sept. 7, 1901, did representatives of the allied nations and China’s Qing empire sign the Boxer Protocol, officially ending the rebellion.

Ever the savvy showman, Cody was quick to draw a correlation between the Boxers and American Indians. As the rebels had resisted foreign incursion, he reasoned, so Plains Indians had resisted the westward tide of Anglo settlement, cutting telegraph lines, attacking railroad crews and battling U.S. soldiers. Fueled by superstitious ideology, the Boxers believed they could induce spirits to enter their bodies and render them invulnerable to bullets, much like Plains Indian adherents of the “Ghost Dance” movement believed their ceremonial shirts would protect them. The latter movement ended in tragedy on Dec. 29, 1890, with the battle turned massacre at Wounded Knee, S.D., all but ending the American Indian wars.

Buffalo Bill was a stickler for the authentic, wherever possible employing real soldiers, cowboys and Indians performing with real weapons. But as he had no access to real Boxers, the duty fell to those Sioux already in Cody’s employ. They were perfect for the role, one New York Sun reporter quipped, as they were “used to dying” in each show. “They die in the cowboy battles about the emigrant wagon, and they die again in the chase of the Deadwood coach,” he wrote. “They made no objection to…dying the death of Boxers this year.” A New York Evening Sun reporter noted, tongue in cheek, “Some of them seemed a little ill at ease in their Chinese makeup, but they kept themselves entirely in the landscape, positively refused to scalp a single member of the allied forces and never even indulged in so much as the ghost of a war whoop.”

American Indians had long featured in promotions for the Wild West, which urged potential ticket buyers to come see the “horde of warpainted Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux Indians” (though after convincing the infamous Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull to tour with him in 1885, Cody had hired only Sioux from the Pine Ridge Agency). Why did Plains Indians who had violently resisted “foreign incursion” agree to perform in the Wild West shows? For starters, those working for Buffalo Bill earned a decent wage, while employment prospects on and around the reservations were limited. In addition, room, board and travel were free. Finally, performers’ immediate families were welcome to join them on tour.

In the fall of 1900, drawn like so many Americans by the dramatic events in China, Cody proposed to his theatrical manager, Nate Salsbury, that they incorporate a reenactment of the allied victory over the Boxers in the forthcoming season of the Wild West. The pair put their heads together and came up with “The Rescue at Pekin.”

On April 2, 1901, opening night, they debuted the Chinese-themed spectacle at New York’s Madison Square Garden. After a fortnight’s run Cody took the show on the road, and by the time the season wrapped in late October the troupe had performed in arenas from upstate New York to the South and across much of the Midwest. In 1902, with few changes to the program, Cody and company performed for audiences in the Western half of the country.

The twice-daily shows were an enormous draw, attracting on average some 20,000 to 30,000 patrons, not counting those turned away at the gate. The audience often exceeded the population of the host cities, as people from surrounding areas packed the stands. The June 4 edition of Pennsylvania’s Reading Herald reported that crowds began to gather in the early morning, by showtime transforming into a “great huddled mass.”

As the battle between the Boxers and the soldiers marked the grand finale of each performance, Cody and Salsbury spared no expense. “It was indeed an enormous and costly undertaking,” author John R. Haddad writes, “requiring 100 horses, large amounts of gunpowder and explosives, the latest in cannons and firearms, and of course the massive wall of Peking that loomed majestically over one end of the arena.” The cast alone, including the braided Sioux “Boxers,” numbered 500.

The performance lacked for nothing. Whether it was authentically cast or accurate in every detail was beside the point. Cody and company were, above all else, entertainers, and whether clad in Western buckskins or Chinese silks, they seldom disappointed the huddled masses. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Of all the city slickers ever to venture into the 19th century American West, Oscar Wilde towered above the rest, preening like a peacock with his ostentatious wardrobe, his philosophy of art and his knack for spilling printer’s ink across the pages of Western newspapers. In the parlance of the cowboy, Wilde exemplified the “swivel dude,” a gaudy fellow worthy of a second look or a tip of the hat. The flamboyant poet and playwright not only turned heads with his eccentric outfits, but also left Westerners scratching their noggins over his esoteric lectures on “The Decorative Arts” and “The House Beautiful.” For the better part of two months in 1882 Wilde pranced his way across the frontier, a wholly different breed of pioneer.

Arriving in New York City on Jan. 3, 1882, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde spent 51 weeks touring the United States and Canada, traveling 50 of those days west of the Mississippi River. Twenty-seven years old when he arrived, he had accomplished little beyond graduating from Magdalen College, Oxford, self-publishing a play and a thin book of poetry, and ingratiating himself into London’s high society with his quick, sardonic wit. During college and afterward Wilde evolved into both a disciple and a proponent of aestheticism, a philosophy best summarized as “art for art’s sake.” Proponents, or aesthetes as they were called, valued form over function. Aestheticism countered the function-intensive machines of the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian belief that literature and art should provide moral and ethical lessons and restraints on society.

While other aesthetes made greater contributions to the philosophical movement, none was more visible than Wilde, largely due to his extravagant dress and a peculiar fixation on sunflowers and lilies as “the most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decoration—the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy.” Wherever he spoke in America, runs on florist shops depleted the supply of those two flowers, as fans and skeptics alike were eager either to laud or mock Wilde with them.

Among the skeptics, dramatist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan parodied the aesthetes with a “fleshly poet” named Reginald Bunthorne, the lead character of their 1881 comic opera Patience—the follow-up to their hit comic operas H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance. On the back of the duo’s latest success, their producer, Richard D’Oyly Carte, decided to take Patience across the pond to North America. Doubting that Americans would understand the play’s satire, Carte sought an “advance poster” of aestheticism to promote it. Wilde was the natural choice, as Carte was already serving as the poet’s booking manager.

Likely massaging Wilde’s ego with a suggestion his poetry was also popular in the United States, Carte persuaded the Irishman to assume the mantle of the fictional Englishman Bunthorne for a lecture tour. The clincher was Carte’s offer of half the net profits.

What Wilde excelled at most in his young adulthood was self-adoration and self-promotion, often erasing the line between fame and notoriety. When he arrived in New York, the young nation’s biggest celebrity was dime novel hero Buffalo Bill. By the time the aesthete returned to Britain, Wilde—if not eclipsing the future Wild West showman as a household name—had certainly drawn more news coverage than William F. Cody. At very least Wilde was the first celebrity who became famous merely for being famous, launching the superficial celebrity culture that permeates American popular culture to this day.

“lord of the lah-de-dah”

Wilde stood 3 inches over 6 feet. Protruding from his elongated, colorless face was a prominent nose over coarse lips that sheltered greenish-hued teeth, discolored from too many Turkish cigarettes and too few toothbrushes. His thick eyebrows shaded attentive eyes, and a long mop of tawny brown hair brushed against his shoulders. “He looks better in the dark, perhaps” quipped one St. Louis journalist. A portrait of Wilde printed in the competing Leavenworth Times prompted Kansas’ Emporia Daily News to observe, “If it is anything like correct, there will be no chance for Oscar to get a wife in this neck of the woods.”

What Wilde lacked in looks, he made up for with a voguish wardrobe that ranged from dark formal suits to gaudy shirts and cravats in vibrant purples, greens and yellows. For his first appearance west of the Mississippi he chose a more subdued outfit, his trademark knee britches in black over black silk stockings and patent leather pumps with large silver buckles. Above that he wore a white shirt and white waistcoat topped with a long-tailed black coat and white kid gloves.

His presentations, though, were neither as bright nor as entertaining as his attire. Wilde read his speeches in a monotone voice with a verbal quirk accentuating every fourth syllable. In advance of his February tour date in St. Louis the Globe-Democrat reported, “Curiosity to see Oscar Wilde is greater than to hear him.” Following his lecture there to an audience of 1,500 a subhead in the paper’s coverage pronounced, A Large and Fashionable Audience Bored by His Talk on Art. The reporter, like many other Western newsmen, christened Wilde “the lord of the lah-de-dah.” Others just labeled him an “ass-thete.”

After St. Louis and side trips to Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Wilde on March 20 took the transcontinental railroad for talks in Sioux City and Omaha before lecturing the philistines of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento and Stockton. Aboard the westbound train Wilde enjoyed the company of actor John Howson, then traveling to San Francisco to play Bunthorne in the West Coast production of Patience. Whenever Wilde wearied of facing the applause or jeers of spectators who thronged train stations to gawk at the aesthete, he’d send out a costumed Howson to greet the folks instead.

After nine days in California, during which he stayed in San Francisco’s luxurious Palace Hotel, Wilde headed back east, stopping first in Salt Lake City, where a Herald reporter attended his lecture and penned a scathing review:      

“What is the attraction about this strange specimen of humanity? Oscar is not handsome and is strikingly awkward; as an elocutionist he violates every rule of rhetoric and is painfully dreary in his manner of expression.…Only in the matters of exhibiting decidedly vulgar front teeth and displaying an abundance of not even wavy hair is he a success.”

Wilde then moved on to Denver, Leadville, Colorado Springs, Kansas City, St. Joseph, Topeka, Lawrence, Atchison and Lincoln before wrapping up on April 29 with a whirlwind tour of five Iowa communities. In June he returned west for appearances in Fort Worth, Galveston, Houston and San Antonio. By the time he ended his Texas swing, Wilde had cleared $5,605, or nearly $170,000 in present-day dollars. That total did not include the money he personally charged admirers to attend their local functions.

Puzzling the Press

Wherever he went, Wilde made time for newspaper reporters, receiving them in his hotel suite after they had properly provided their calling card to his manservant. Describing his audience with the apostle of aestheticism, a San Antonio Light reporter “found Mr. Wilde taking the world easy in his room at the Menger; he was dressed in drab velvet jacket, blue tie, white waistcoat, light drab trousers, scarlet stockings and slippers. A table covered with books, a lemonade—with a stick in it—and a huge bunch of mammoth cigarettes made up the array that confronted our aesthetic reporter.”

Wilde flattered reporters to their faces and then demeaned them behind their backs, prompting Tucson’s Arizona Daily Star to observe, “The average reporter may not have a very exalted idea of art, but he knows human nature too well to stick himself in knee breeches and call it brains instead of brass.” In the end, Wilde and the press used each other—the aesthete to enhance the fame he craved, the reporters to sell papers.

Audiences either revered Wilde for his intellect, even if they didn’t understand it, or ridiculed him for his eccentricities. “Oscar Wilde, the apostle of the beautiful, is here,” The Topeka Daily Capital gushed, “and there is no doubt that he will have a full house. Topeka is essentially aesthetic, and to hear the great exponent of true culture is an opportunity which may never occur again.” Nebraska’s North Bend Bulletin was considerably less flattering in its report of the lecturer’s forthcoming stop in nearby Fremont: “Oscar Wilde is coming. It’s just awful.”

Besides his dry, droll delivery, Wilde’s standard topics on art and beauty seldom resonated with people scratching a living from the earth. For instance, as decorative flourishes in the home the aesthete recommended tiny porcelain cups over their heavier crockery cousins—this to listeners who set tables with often little more than tinware. Further, he prescribed tiled, not carpeted, floors; porcelain, not cast-iron, stoves; and wainscoting, not papered walls. Such advice might have had greater application east of the Mississippi, but out West, to people living in adobe jacals or log cabins, it lacked pertinence.

Less forgivable was lord lah-de-dah’s condescension toward people unable to broaden his fame and wealth, conduct that grated on Western sensibilities. “Oscar Wilde was more bother than all the women who ever rode in a railroad car,” one Chicago-based train conductor recalled. “He had an idea that he was the greatest man America had ever seen.…He was the vainest, most conceited mule I ever saw. He wouldn’t drink water out of the glass at the cooler, but sipped it out of a silver and gold mug he carried with him.”

High Times in Leadville

Wilde’s impromptu April 13 visit to Leadville, Colo., endured as the most colorful of the aesthete’s stops across America. Though it was not on his original itinerary, Wilde squeezed in an appearance between lectures in Denver and Colorado Springs after no less a figure than Lt. Gov. Horace A.W. Tabor, the “Bonanza King of Leadville,” offered the poet a tour of his Matchless silver mine.

Wilde recalled the silver boomtown as “the richest city in the world…[with] the reputation of being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver. I was told that if I went there, they would be sure to shoot me or my traveling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing they could do to my traveling manager would intimidate me.”

When he reached Leadville (elev. 10,158 feet) after a bumpy 150-mile, six-hour train ride, he felt understandably lightheaded, nauseous and short of breath. A doctor called to his Clarendon Hotel suite identified his malady as “a case of light air,” or altitude sickness as it is known today. The doctor prescribed medicine and rest while Leadville anticipated his appearance.

The aesthete eventually recovered enough to dress in color-coordinated knee britches, stockings, shirt, fancy cravat, dress coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Before striding across the covered bridge that connected the hotel’s third floor with the ritzy Tabor Opera House, Wilde unpacked his copy of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, reasoning that if he were too weak to deliver his lecture, he could read passages from it to attendees. What could be more appropriate? he thought, for like the hardscrabble miners in the audience, the great Renaissance artist also worked in silver.

As the minute hand slipped well past Wilde’s scheduled appearance, the Leadville Daily Herald recalled, “a whole house of curiosity seekers,” some having paid as much as a $1.25 for reserved seats, fidgeted impatiently. When the lecturer did finally show, the Herald reporter wrote, he “stumbled onto the stage with a stride more becoming a giant backwoodsman than an aesthete.” Placing his speech and the Cellini autobiography on the podium, Wilde launched into a variation on his decorative arts spiel.

As the lecture dragged on, the audience grew noticeably restless, so Wilde turned to the autobiography, drawing a reprimand from a boisterous miner questioning why Wilde hadn’t invited Cellini to speak for himself.

“He’s dead,” Wilde explained.

“Who shot him?” replied the curious miner.

Somehow the lecturer made it through his talk without taking a bullet, though the Herald reporter took a potshot at Wilde in print, writing, “The most notable feature of Mr. Wilde’s lecture was the rather boisterous good humor of the audience.”

After the lecture Wilde returned to the hotel to change into more practical clothing and grab a coat for his tour of town and the Matchless. With Mayor David H. Dougan and select Tabor employees acting as guides, the lecturer stepped into the crisp night air, which seemed to revive him. Wilde saw and heard Leadville’s nightlife, a cacophony of drunken carousers, brass bands, tinkling pianos, spinning roulette wheels, screeching women proffering nocturnal delights and boardwalk barkers for saloons bearing such colorful, albeit sometimes misleading, names as the Red Light, Silver Thread, Tudor, Little Casino, Bon Ton, Board of Trade, Chamber of Commerce and Little Church, the latter of which boasted a mock chapel as its entrance.

The tour was an eye- and earful for Wilde, who followed his guides into Pop Wyman’s rollicking saloon. Rumor had it Wyman had killed several men in his younger years and carried a change purse made from a human scrotum. Wilde complimented the saloon owner for a sign over the piano reading, Please Do Not Shoot the Pianist; He Is Doing His Best, calling it “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.” He later elaborated on the message, writing, “I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were clearly established in the case of music,
my apostolic task would be much simplified.”

From Wyman’s the mayor had the party loaded in wagons and driven 2 miles to the Matchless, where mine superintendent Charles Pishon accompanied Wilde down shaft No. 3 in a metal ore bucket lowered 100 feet into the pitch black by a cable-and-pulley system. A dozen miners greeted their guest, showing Wilde silver in its natural state and letting him drill the start of a new shaft they dubbed “The Oscar.” Quipped Wilde, “I had hope that in their grand, simple way they would have offered me shares in ‘The Oscar,’ but in their artless, untutored fashion they did not.”

The mining soiree ended with an early morning supper, Wilde wrote tongue in cheek, “the first course whiskey, the second whiskey and the third whiskey.” By the time those gathered had emptied all the bottles, their foppish guest had impressed his hosts for his ability to hold liquor without any visible signs of inebriation. Finally re-emerging from the mine, Wilde returned to the hotel for a brief rest before boarding a train to Colorado Springs to deliver a speech just 14 hours later. He was no worse for the wear.

Heading for Home

On writing about his experiences out West, Wilde largely mocked the “barbarians” he had striven to enlighten. “Infinitesimal did I find the knowledge of art west of the Rocky Mountains,” he recalled, illustrating his criticism with the story of a miner who had struck wealth beyond his education and turned to culture to flaunt his riches. After ordering a replica of the Venus de Milo from Paris, Wilde wrote, the nouveau riche miner “actually sued the railroad company for damages because the plaster cast…had been delivered minus the arms. And, what is more surprising still, he gained his case and the damages.”

Americans likewise found fault with Wilde as he prepared to leave the States that December. Wrote one acquaintance, “He is guilty of all sorts of petty meanness, such as perpetually begging cigarettes from acquaintances and never offering any himself; eating dinners with indefatigable industry at other people’s expense, sneaking out of paying cab fares; and ‘working’ his friends shamelessly for whatever he can get out of them.”

Yet, for all his snobbery, Wilde still found a noble quality among the Westerners, observing, “The West has kept itself free and independent, while the East has been caught and spoiled with many of the flirting follies of Europe.”

By the time he left New York City for home, Wilde had traveled some 15,000 miles through 30 of the 38 United States, leaving in his wake more than 500 major newspaper features and countless Westerners scratching their heads at what they had seen and/or heard. His fame briefly surpassed that of Buffalo Bill, at least until Cody started his Wild West show the next year. Nine years after returning home Wilde finally attained the literary notoriety he’d craved with publication of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Unlike other city slickers who visited the American West, Wilde conned more folks than outwitted him, and he left with more money than he had yet earned. Despite the Irish peacock’s biting condescension, his annoying arrogance and his numerous faults—or perhaps because of them—Wilde could claim the title of the Wild West’s all-time slickest dude.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine. For further reading, author Preston Lewis recommends Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity, by David M. Friedman; Oscar Wilde Discovers America (1882), by Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith; and Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann.

Virtually every Old West aficionado is familiar with Buffalo Bill Cody’s popular Wild West shows, which traveled the United States and across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During Cody’s 1890 and 1906 European tours throngs of Italians in arenas from Rome to Bologna thrilled at the showmanship of Buffalo Bill and his revolving cast of characters. The 1906 tour was the last to Europe for Buffalo Bill, who a decade later teamed with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Real Wild West but by then was too frail to travel overseas.

Within decades Americans huddled faithfully around TV sets in living rooms nationwide to indulge a seemingly insatiable fascination with Western lore and dramatized portrayals of real-life cowboys, Indians, cavalrymen and gunmen. Though few channels were on the air by the mid-1950s, dozens of Western series aired weekly, at least one or more nightly. Western junkies could also take in Saturday afternoon B reruns of black-and-white “oaters” on the small screen at home or the latest Technicolor weekend matinees on the big screens at local movie theaters.

Meanwhile, another American harboring a fascination with the Old West embarked on a tour of Europe, searching for a gunmaker who could replicate the Colt 1851 Navy per-cussion revolver, the weapon of choice of Wild Bill Hickok, among other Western gunfighters. Val J. Forgett Jr.—gun collector, Civil War re-enactor and owner of the New Jersey–based Service Armament Co.—ultimately found what he was looking for in Italy. In 1957 Forgett founded Navy Arms, a subsidiary cap-and-ball revolver line within Service Armament, and a year later rolled out his first Colt Navy replicas in unison with gunmakers Vittorio Gregorelli and a young, astute Aldo Uberti from the northern Italian firearms manufacturing center of Gardone Val Trompia. Forgett’s first imports didn’t bear the later obligatory Italian proof marks but were merely stamped GU, or G&U, for Gregorelli and Uberti. In 1959 Uberti began producing replica firearms under his own trade name. He and Forgett were the driving forces behind the enduring popularity of Italian-made replica Old West firearms. It took the American entrepreneur and the skilled Italian gunsmith to make many a would-be gunhand’s dream an affordable reality.

Around the same time, with the centennial of the American Civil War fast approaching, the North-South Skirmish Association (N-SSA) found its ranks expanding. N-SSA’s competitive shooters (Forgett among them) were in dire need of usable guns, as the supply of wartime arms had begun to dry up. Blame the collector market, which had snapped up most original firearms of the era, in turn driving up prices on those remaining in circulation. Particularly scarce and expensive were Confederate firearms, which had been produced in far fewer numbers. Thus, in 1960 Navy Arms introduced a pair of percussion revolvers based on the Colt Navy and dubbed the “Yank” and the “Reb.” The steel-framed Yank adhered to the styling of the Colt Model 1851, while the brass-framed Reb faithfully recreated the Griswold & Gunnison, a Southern copy of the Colt Model 1860. Fine examples of either can reap well into the five figures today.

Uberti’s and Forgett’s respective lines continued to expand, leading to a second generation of replicas of the “smoke wagons” of old. In 1973 Navy Arms introduced copies of the Winchester Models 1866 and 1873, the first of the company’s replica lever-action rifles. Over the decades at least a dozen different Italian gunmakers have entered the replica arms market, including Davide Pedersoli and Giuseppe Pietta, introducing everything from Colt Single Action Army “Peacemakers” to Spencer carbines. Uberti’s present-day line includes dozens of models.

Another Italian export that drove the popularity of Old West replica arms was the “spaghetti Western” film subgenre, a darker take on the traditional Western, whose productions were directed and scored by Italians, co-starred Italians and were filmed in both Italy and Spain. The heyday of these popular big-screen adventures (roughly 1964–78) brought to superstardom such American actors as Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef and featured full-screen closeups of the co-starring firearms.

Any sharp-eyed, gun-savvy viewer can quickly discern an Italian replica from an original. For example, many replica Colt Single Action Army revolvers are fitted with brass trigger guards—an option unavailable on original Peacemakers, though most percussion-era revolvers did have brass trigger guards. Colt 1851 Navy revolvers could be special-ordered with silver-plated guards, while the fluted 1861 Navy—another hard-to-find original Colt on the collector market—had blued-steel trigger guards. To their credit, Uberti and other Italian makers equipped later iterations of their replica Peacemakers with the correct steel trigger guards.

One thing is as sure as shooting, the Italian connection reverberates to this day in the ranks of such competitive shooting organizations as the N-SSA and the Single Action Shooting Society, not to mention on the big and small screen. Despite reports to the contrary, the decades-old transatlantic fascination with the Old West is alive and well. 

The Rev. Dr. Taylor Filmore Ealy faced many struggles, most not of his own making, while a Presbyterian medical missionary between 1874 and 1881—first at Fort Arbuckle, on the Chickasaw Reservation in Oklahoma Territory; then in volatile Lincoln, New Mexico Territory; and finally at Zuni Pueblo, also in New Mexico Territory. Some of that time he kept a journal. Daughter Ruth drew on his journal entries, as well as the recollections and correspondence of her father and mother, Mary, to write Water in a Thirsty Land—first privately issued in 1955 in a limited edition of 40 copies.

Editor David Thomas resurrects the Ealy chronicle as Vol. 10 of Doc45’s Mesilla Valley History series. In his excellent introduction Thomas provides not only overviews of the three Western locales where the Ealys lived, but also brief biographies of the major figures in Ruth’s narrative. Perhaps of greatest interest is the time the Ealys spent in Lincoln, as the family arrived on the day murdered English rancher John Tunstall’s body was brought into town. It was the latter’s murder that triggered the 1878 Lincoln County War, and it was the Rev. Dr. Ealy who delivered Tunstall’s funeral oration at the home of Alexander McSween. Forty-one days later the doctor and family witnessed the killing of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman, and the Ealys were also present for the five-day shootout in Lincoln that culminated with the burning of the McSween house and Alexander’s murder. In his journal Ealy noted that Colonel Nathan Dudley, the commander at Fort Stanton, “refused to protect McSween and ordered his men not to fire over Dudley’s camp, or he would turn the cannon on them. My wife read his note to reply to McSween’s request for protection. McSween’s house, where his party had taken refuge, was deliberately set on fire.”

Such violence is what ultimately drove the family out of Lincoln. The Rev. Dr. Ealy then spent nearly three years as a missionary teacher at Zuni Pueblo, 150 miles west of Albuquerque. There was no gunplay there, but Ealy experienced plenty of cultural shock. “He had gained the respect of many of the Indians who more and more were beginning to realize the value of an education,” wrote Ruth (who was born in East Waterford, Pa., in 1877 and died in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1959). “The religious dances still interfered with the school attendance, it is true, but the children seemed to be enjoying their schoolwork. He had learned to like his Indian friends.” It was—and remains—mighty dry country, and Ealy often noted in his journal how the Zunis danced day and night for rain. 

Water in a Thirsty Land

By Ruth R. Ealy, edited by David Thomas, Doc45 Publishing, 2022

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To the disbelief of gaping onlookers in the packed stands at El Toreo, Mexico City’s largest bullring, American rodeo performer Bill Pickett clung to the horns of a massive Mexican bull ironically named Frijoles Chiquitos (“Little Beans”). Watching from a safe distance in the saddle atop jittery horses were cowhand Vester Pegg and siblings Joe and Zack Miller, proprietors of the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Real Wild West. Matadors, including the famed Manuel Mejíjas Luján (aka “Bienvenida”), also stood by as Bill grappled with the snorting, gyrating wild beast, which Mexican and Spanish bullfighters alike typically fought from a more dignified distance. Funny thing is, Pickett wasn’t even supposed to be there. Days earlier he’d been working one of the Miller family ranches back in Oklahoma.

It was early December 1908, and the Real Wild West had come off a grueling tour of the United States. Instead of heading home to lick their wounds, however, Joe and Zack Miller took the show south of the border. Though still two years from the onset of the Mexican Revolution, that southern neighbor was already in turmoil. The troupe endured several intrusive (and costly in bribes) searches by customs officials before arriving in Mexico City on December 11. The streets of the heavily populated capital were clogged with Roman Catholic pilgrims preparing for the next day’s Our Lady of Guadalupe observance, marking the 1531 visions of the Virgin Mary to believers in that Mexican city. The observance also marked the start of the show’s two-week run at the circus arena in Porfirio Díaz Park.

Low attendance and gouging fines for Pickett’s failure to appear, though “The Dusky Demon” was prominently featured in advertisements, led Joe to telegram brother George, back at the 101 Ranch, with instructions to have Pickett travel down by train immediately. Shortly after the bulldogger arrived and began performing, Joe and the show’s press agent, W.C. Thompson, stopped in at the Café Colón, a popular eatery among matadors and local reporters, where Joe hoped to gin up publicity for the show. When a table of matadors directed their laughter at the gringos, Joe asked what they found so humorous. They told him they had attended the show that afternoon and were unimpressed with Pickett’s antics in the ring, comparing him to a novice bullfighter. An indignant Miller challenged them on the spot to go toe to toe with Pickett in a bulldogging event. On behalf of the group, Bienvenida accepted and agreed to show up at the circus arena at 10 the next morning. But neither he nor any other matador took up the challenge, claiming the arena promoters forbade them from taking any such foolish risk.

After several days of verbal exchanges, challenges and braying newspaper ads, Miller bet the arena promoters Pickett could remain alone in the ring for 15 minutes with their fiercest fighting bull and spend at least five minutes of that time grappling barehanded with the beast, wrestling it to the ground if possible. If Pickett succeeded, the Millers would collect the gate receipts for the day. Joe also made a 5,000-peso side bet. The publicity from his wager and newspaper coverage led promoters to move the bulldogging spectacle, scheduled for December 23, to the far larger El Toreo. Within days Mexico City’s largest venue had sold out.

On the afternoon of the 23rd Pickett trotted into the arena atop his favorite horse, Spradley, to a cacophony of cheers, boos and hisses from an estimated 25,000 onlookers. As the blare of the opening trumpets faded, the gate to the corrals swung wide, and Frijoles Chiquitos stormed into the ring. When the bull saw Pickett and raced across the arena toward him, Bill saw right off that his terrified hazers would be of no use.

Steering Spradley in close to Frijoles Chiquitos, Bill sought to maneuver into position to leap on the bull’s bulging neck. Each time the rampaging beast gave them the slip. Suddenly, the bull swung around and charged rider and horse from behind. Spradley could not evade the rush, and one of Frijoles Chiquitos’ horns ripped open the horse’s rump, causing it to stumble. Taking advantage of the distraction, Pickett dove from the saddle. Locking on to the bull’s horns, he wrapped himself around its writhing neck and rode Frijoles Chiquitos as the crowd rose to its feet in anticipation. The bull tried everything it could to free itself of Pickett, to no avail. For several  agonizing minutes it wildly shook its great head, slashing with its horns, as the determined bulldogger clung tight, looking for an opportunity to take the animal to the ground.

Likely bemoaning their decision to bet against the do-or-die Yankee, the crowd turned on Bill and began pelting him with whatever was at hand. Fruit, cushions, rocks, bottles, even bricks rained down from the stands. After taking a rock to the side of his face and a beer bottle to the ribs, a bleeding and dazed Pickett released his iron grip on the raging Frijoles Chiquitos and lay on the arena floor grimacing in pain. Rushing in, his 101 Ranch hazers finally distracted the bull long enough to help Bill to his feet and out of the ring.

The crowd’s delight at Pickett’s failure turned to disappointment on learning he’d made it to the 5-minute mark, thus winning the wager. With his seven and a half minute ride the bulldogger had earned the show a whopping 48,000 pesos (north of $450,000 in today’s dollars), not to mention Joe’s side bet. The day after Christmas the show wrapped up its lucrative run in Mexico City and headed back north. Joe canceled a scheduled show in Gainesville, Texas, and as the train arrived in Bliss, Okla., weary troupe members clapped and cheered at being home. The big payday had helped buffer an otherwise tough financial year, and the show’s future seemed bright.

A Working Ranch

Most Western historians cite 1881 as the year 101 Ranch patriarch Colonel George Washington Miller first seared his brand on cattle. A notorious namesake San Antonio saloon is said to have inspired the brand. Whatever the truth, that first bitter wisp of burnt hide launched a story for the ages, as the 101 was destined to become one of the most recognizable names in both ranching and Western entertainment.

A Kentucky native, Miller fought for the Confederacy in his 20s and moved west after the Civil War, initially settling in southwest Missouri and driving cattle from Texas to the railheads in Kansas. Miller later moved his herds to land leased from the Quapaw tribe in Indian Territory (present-day northeast Oklahoma) while residing just across the border in Baxter Springs, Kan. He cultivated a relationship with the Ponca tribe when it was briefly displaced to the Quapaw Agency. Miller suggested the Poncas settle on land farther west in the Cherokee Outlet. After the federal government forced ranchers out of the outlet in 1893, the Poncas did just that, and Miller leased their land for his operations, setting up headquarters near the tribal hub at New Ponca (renamed Ponca City in 1913). The 101 Ranch ultimately comprised 110,000 acres.

After Miller succumbed to pneumonia in 1903, wife Molly had the ranch turned into a trust, with Joe, Zack and George as equal partners and shareholders. From then on the trio ran the whole shooting match. At the time of their father’s death Joseph Carson Miller was 35 years old, Zachary Taylor Miller 25, and the youngest, George Lee Miller, 21. Each brother developed unique interests and skills, enabling them to divide oversight of the 101 effectively and without rancor. Together they remained focused on realizing their father’s dream to build the nation’s largest and most influential ranch.

The rich soil already grew a range of crops, while livestock included cattle, bison, hogs, poultry and several breeds of horse. The brothers continued to experiment with crops and added an electric plant, a cannery, a dairy, a tannery, a store, a restaurant and several mills. Promoted as the “greatest diversified farm on earth,” the ranch prospered well into the early 20th century.

Of course, oil too played a role. Ernest W. Marland, of Marland Oil Co., spearheaded the search for crude deposits on the family spread and helped form the 101 Ranch Oil Co. That highly successful venture substantially increased the Millers’ profit margin.

All-important downtime served to seed the brothers’ entrance into show business.

What became the Real Wild West had its roots in late summer or early fall 1882 in Winfield, Kan., where Colonel Miller, Mollie and their children had recently moved. Miller and hands had just finished a cattle drive up the Chisolm Trail from Texas. Meanwhile, Winfield city leaders were planning an agricultural fair and wanted entertainment. Miller proposed his cowboys put on a roping and riding exhibition, and the event planners enthusiastically accepted his offer. Miller’s “roundup,” as he called it, proved a roaring success.

The business of running a sprawling ranch intervened, and it wasn’t until 1904, a year after Colonel Miller’s death, that the 101 hosted its next roundup. This time it was the Miller brothers’ brainchild.

That year Joe Miller visited the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Mo. While there he and leading Oklahoma newspapermen met with the board of directors of the National Editorial Association, hoping to convince the board to hold its 1905 convention in Guthrie. To sweeten the pot, Joe told the directors the 101 Ranch would host them and put on a big Wild West show in their honor. The board bit and approved the proposal.

The Millers thought it best to prepare for the 1905 event by holding a roundup in the fall of 1904. Pleased with the enthusiastic turnout, the brothers planned the 1905 roundup, which they grandly dubbed the Oklahoma Gala. Dozens of trains were needed to help transport the more than 65,000 people who attended the elaborate opening parade on June 11. It was the largest crowd yet assembled for an event in Oklahoma.

The June gala ended with a reenactment of a wagon train attack by 300 Indians. Gunfire and bloodcurdling screams rose from the arena floor as wagons caught fire and settlers closed with their assailants in mortal combat. More credulous onlookers feared they were witnessing a real massacre. Then, out of nowhere, a posse of cowboys rode to the rescue, guns blazing. As the act drew to a close, the performers gathered at the center of the arena to a standing ovation. The Miller brothers joined the troupe to bask in the crowd’s appreciation.

Over the next two decades the Millers hosted annual roundups at the 101, seating up to 10,000 spectators in an arena just across from ranch headquarters. The program always included roping, riding and bulldogging, as well as Indian dances and other Western cultural offerings. The brothers employed top cowboys from across the region, and Pickett and other well-known 101 Ranch hands went on to stardom in Hollywood Westerns.

The “Show Business Bug”

Planning for the June 1905 Oklahoma Gala had another unexpected offshoot, for Joe caught the “show business bug” in a big way. Looking ahead to the June gala, he and Zack arranged to have some of their performers join Colonel Zack Mulhall and his touring Western troupe in a series of shows that April at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Appearing before packed houses in one the biggest venues of the era gave the brothers an opportunity to learn the production aspects of a touring show. It also afforded their performers rehearsal time for the upcoming gala. Among the Miller hands appearing at the garden was Will Rogers, then a relative unknown. Indeed, Mulhall initially turned down Rogers, who had to enlist the help of the colonel’s wife, Mary, to secure a spot on the program.

It is ironic, then, that while the Madison Square Garden run proved successful for Mulhall, Rogers benefited all the more from his appearance. The turning point came amid the sixth show when a steer got loose and entered the stands. Thinking quickly, Will lassoed the wayward animal and guided it back to the arena floor, saving the day. The publicity generated by his courage, talent with a lariat and wit prompted a shrewd promoter to offer him a starring role, performing his rope acts solo on vaudeville stages in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Joe, Zack and their well-rehearsed performers returned to Oklahoma to finish preparations for the gala. Taking a page from Mulhall, the Millers generated a marketing blitz, published in newspapers and spread through contacts nationwide, describing what attendees could expect on June 11. The lineup included bulldogger Pickett, trick rider Lucille Mulhall (the colonel’s daughter), expert horseman and crack shot Tom Mix and a supporting cast of almost a thousand performers, many from the local Ponca and Otoe tribes.

The 101 Real Wild West was one step from becoming one of the most popular traveling Western entertainment troupes of its era.

Taking the Show on the Road

Encouraged by their successful 1905 gala, and at the urging of Oklahoma neighbor Gordon W. “Pawnee Bill” Lillie—who’d already made a name for himself as the founder and proprietor of Pawnee Bill’s Wild West—the Millers took their show on the road full time in 1907. Favorable publicity from an early run in Kansas City, Mo., caught the notice of Theodore Roosevelt. The “Cowboy President” was already acquainted with the Millers from prior visits to their ranch. (On his invitation Mix had ridden in the president’s 1905 inaugural parade alongside Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War “Rough Riders,” sparking a rumor the 101 Ranch hand had been a Rough Rider himself.) Roosevelt persuaded the Millers to bring their show to Norfolk, Va., as part of the Jamestown Exposition. At the close of that 100-day run the exposition promoters helped land the Real Wild West a two-week run at the Chicago Coliseum. The publicity from 1907 led to the busy but grueling 1908 tour, starting at Brighton Beach, N.Y. Through 1916 the Millers and their performers were at the top of their game as crowds grew ever bigger, drawn by a spreading fascination with cowboys, Indians and all things Western.

In 1916 the Millers merged their production with Cody’s arena show and toured as Buffalo Bill (Himself) & the 101 Ranch Wild West Combined, though the nation’s growing involvement in World War I put the tour on hold later that year. Cody died soon after, on Jan. 10, 1917. Going back on the road in 1925, the Real Wild West toured throughout the United States and abroad, traveling to Mexico, Canada, Europe and South America.

Through the 1920s, however, the 101 Ranch Real Wild West, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West and other touring shows drew ever smaller crowds, leading to severe financial losses. By then such productions faced stiff competition from the film industry, as well as proliferating circuses and rodeos. Making matters worse for the Real Wild West, Joe Miller died in 1927, followed two years later by the death of brother George. Then came the Great Depression, which drastically cut into profits from the ranch and show. Zack alone could not pull the operation out of its tailspin, and in 1931 the 101 Ranch and its associated businesses went into receivership. A year later much of the land was divided and leased, and authorities auctioned everything of value to cover debts. On Jan. 3, 1952, a nearly destitute Zack Miller died.      

Today one may visit the site of the ranch headquarters, though all that’s left are a few weathered buildings, the foundation of the Miller home (known in its prime as the “White House”) and a few historical markers describing what once was. An excellent nonprofit named the 101 Ranch Old Timers Association continues its work to keep the ranch and show legacy alive. Its members support a wonderful museum housed within oilman E.W. Marland’s Grand Home in Ponca City and host annual events and tours for the public. And so the show goes on.

New Mexico–based E. Joe Brown is an award-winning author of novels, short stories and memoirs. For further reading he recommends The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West, by Michael Wallis, and The 101 Ranch, by Ellsworth Collings and Alma Miller England.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

By the early 1850s gold fever had spread across the American West. Southwestern Oregon Territory was no exception, as placer miners had descended on Coyote Creek in what today is Josephine County. Camps sprang up, and the goldfields remained a beehive of activity until gold strikes in neighboring Idaho in the 1860s drew the miners away. But the Coyote Creek diggings would experience a resurgence, and a town would be born of it.

After a few short years the excitement in Idaho faded. Miners returned to Coyote Creek to find 500 Chinese laborers working the old claims for 10 cents a day plus rice. The miners demanded their claims be returned, and the Chinese contractor yielded. Again, small camps sprang up, including one named Goldville.

By the late 1870s placer mining had given way to more efficient hydraulic mining, bringing a whole new flood of gold seekers. Among them was the Rev. William Ruble, who arrived with his wife, sons Bill and Schuyler and their families. The Rubles were Campbellites, aka Disciples of Christ, committed to restoring an early form of Christianity that adhered to strict doctrine. Disenchanted with the evils of society, they had taken to the Oregon Trail in 1853 and landed first in Salem, where they took up farming and the nursery business.

Over the span of a dozen years the Rev. Ruble bought up the majority of mines and claims in the area. He also set up mining businesses for his sons. William and son Schuyler invented the Ruble hydraulic elevator, designed to separate coarse rock from finer material in a placer mine.

The Rev. Ruble and sons set about improving Goldville and founded it as the town of Golden in 1890, the post office opening in 1896. After building the family residence and a Campbellite church, the Rubles added a school, a general store and other homes. Theirs was a monumental effort at civilizing the area, though some miners, particularly single ones, were less enthusiastic about the mores of its founders. The Campbellites did not permit the busy saloons and brothels of other prosperous camps, nor is there a record of the town ever hosting a dance. Miners seeking such pleasures had to travel to the town of Placer, a few miles south on Graves Creek, which did a booming business in sin.

Golden itself remained relatively small, never home to more than 200 or so people, with another several hundred in the surrounding area. Despite its dearth of entertainment, the town held on for nearly 30 years, only to fade as the ore faded in value. Perhaps sensing its decline and his own, the Rev. Ruble left in 1901, his sons and their families soon following his example. The founder of Golden died in Salem in 1905.

A year later Golden school reported three dozen students in attendance. But the exodus continued, and the post office shuttered in 1920. Mining dribbled along into the mid-20th century, but the town faded into a ghost.

Today the Campbellites’ quaint and attractive 1892 Golden Church still stands. Nearby is the Rubles’ house, also built in 1892. Also surviving is a 1904 general store, an outhouse and the remains of other outbuildings, including the carriage house.

There are no extant businesses in Golden, but the church is always open. Nearby is a small cemetery, though oddly enough no residents of Golden reside in it. In fact, no one has found eternal rest there, for the little graveyard sprouted up as a small-screen stage set. In 1972 the producers of the popular Western series Gunsmoke filmed an episode in Golden, one scene requiring a cemetery, and the rest is TV history. Visitors unaware of its short history still leave coins and trinkets atop the fictitious grave markers. The town and its pretend cemetery have since served as a backdrop for other Western productions.

In the 1990s concerned residents formed the Golden Coyote Wetlands to preserve the town and adjacent creek. Owned today by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, Golden is a state heritage site and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Those interested in a longer visit can stay in a nearby campground off Coyote Creek Road, which runs through town.

Despite its lack of what many miners considered “essentials,” Golden survived more than 130 years to earn protected status for coming generations. Most ghost towns of southern Oregon weren’t as fortunate, having fallen into ruin or been stamped out of existence beneath the ever rolling wheels of progress. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

To this day virtually everyone in the United States has heard of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Even those not expert or passionate about the Western frontier era recognize him as one of the most iconic figures of American history. Buffalo Bill also remains fairly well known throughout Europe, for the Iowa-born scout turned showman extraordinaire brought his Wild West across the Atlantic Ocean eight times—four times between 1887 and ’92, and four more between 1902 and ’06. In arenas across the Old World honored guests and paying patrons alike filled the stands to thrill at buckskinned cowboys taming wild horses, warbonneted Indians attacking stagecoaches, soldiers on horseback waging mock battles, and eagle-eyed women and men showing off their shooting prowess. Among the countries to embrace Cody was Italy.

Judging by period newspapers, photographs and the surviving statements of spectators, quite a few cities on the Italian Peninsula were afflicted by “fever of the West.” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West came to Italy twice—during his second European tour, in 1890, and during his third European tour, in 1906. The first time his caravan of wagons bearing hundreds of employees and animals made just six stops. Popular demand swelled the second tour to 119 performances in 37 towns. The basic ticket cost 2 lire, or slightly less than $11 in today’s currency. For the best seats one paid 8 lire, or about $45, not a paltry amount. Most venues hosted two shows a day—one in the late morning, another in the evening. Seldom was there an empty seat in the house.

On its first Italian tour Buffalo Bill’s Wild West debuted in Naples on Jan. 26, 1890, for a 22-day run. Journalists were astounded at the appearance of Indians who until very recently had been at war. “That which may seem to the everyday Neapolitan to be a kind of game, an idle display of skill,” one Neapolitan newspaper wrote with a flourish, “is nothing less than a common necessity of everyday life in a country where acrobatic agility, boundless audacity and prowess are conditions for survival.”

The highlight of the tour was the 18-day run in Rome, the “Eternal City,” ancient capital of Italy. Its leading citizens welcomed Cody into the most elegant salons, where he impressed with his gentlemanly manners and “romantic grace.” He set up camp in the Roman meadows, near Vatican City, after reportedly declaring the crumbling Colosseum unfit for his show. Vatican authorities initially rejected Buffalo Bill’s request for an audience with Pope Leo XIII, as his entourage was too large. The showman offered concessions, and on March 3 he and a handful of select employees and performers were granted entrance to the Sistine Chapel and met the pope.

An article in the next morning’s New York Herald described the meeting as “one of the strangest spectacles ever seen within the venerable walls of the Vatican,” adding it took place “in the midst of the scene of supreme splendor, crowded with the old Roman aristocracy and surrounded with the walls immortalized by Michelangelo and Raphael.” American Indians with painted faces, clad in blankets and feathers and carrying tomahawks and knives, must have been an engaging if disconcerting sight as they knelt and made the sign of the cross while the pope blessed them. The newspapers presented Cody’s Indian performers, most of whom were Catholic, as “civilized,” though one Sioux woman reportedly fainted from the excitement as the “medicine man sent by the Great Spirit” passed by. Other accounts had one of the Sioux greeting the pope with a war whoop, kneeling to receive the blessing and then rising again with a whoop, enough to either “make the pope slightly pale” or “wrest an intrigued smile from him.” The parties then exchanged gifts. Buffalo Bill presented Leo a bouquet and a garland of flowers mirroring his coat of arms, while the pope gave Cody rosaries and medals bearing his pontificate. Leo’s gifts may have had the desired effect, as on Jan. 9, 1917, the day before his own death, Buffalo Bill converted to Catholicism.

“It has been a much greater success than we had hoped for,” Cody said of the stopover in the capital. “They said they had not had so great excitement in Rome since the days of Titus.”

On March 12 the Wild West began an eight-day run in Florence, where, despite poor weather, ticket holders from towns as widely scattered as Sienna, Empoli, Livorno, Pisa, Pontassieve, Prato and Pistoia packed the amphitheater. The show also hit Bologna, Milan and Verona. One day in mid-April Buffalo Bill and his top billing sharpshooter, Annie “Little Sure Shot” Oakley, hired a carriage and went to Venice, where an uncharacteristically nervous Oakley balked at riding a gondola. An Indian remained ashore with her as a bodyguard while Cody and others hopped aboard to take in such timeless sights as the 11th century St. Mark’s Basilica (a cathedral housing the remains of the namesake evangelist and gospel writer) and the 14th century Doge’s Palace (a onetime residence for the dukes who ruled Venice between 726 and 1797 and whom Cody compared anachronistically to U.S. presidents). Back ashore the reunited party ate fried fish.

After performing in Paris in 1905, Cody’s globe-trotting show, rebranded as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World, opened its second Italian tour in Genoa on March 14, 1906. Other tour stops included Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, Bologna, Turin, Livorno, Pisa, Parma, Ravenna, Verona, Como and two dozen other towns. For one day only, April 27, the troupe performed in Asti, this author’s small hometown. The tour closed May 11 in Udine (some may argue for Trieste four days later, but that Italian town on the far northeastern border was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918).

Promoters in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of northern Italy, put up a massive poster to advertise the show’s April 11 tour stop. It worked like a charm, drawing a crowd of more than 10,000 to the two-hour performance. On April 21 the show stopped in the Piedmontese town of Alessandria, again bringing a flood of spectators eager to see the drama of the American frontier come to life. Though Alessandria’s population numbered just 7,000, the two Saturday shows packed the stands with 30,000 ticket holders.

Weeks in advance of the show’s arrival in Turin, capital of the northwestern Piedmont region, local newspapers ran daily dispatches about the Wild West. “Colonel Cody spared nothing to let the people of Turin know that the arrival of his crew and the staging operations constituted an interesting spectacle in themselves,” wrote La Gazzetta del Popolo on April 5. Two weeks later the paper shared another breathless tease:

“The celebrity of the plains, the king of all, will reproduce among us the deeds accomplished across the American continent, will show himself in the ability to kill the Sioux and will end the show with the apotheosis of peace and the dance of the nations.”

When the show finally rolled into Turin on April 22, the wagons, livestock and most performers encamped on a sprawling tract of 40,000 square acres, while Cody himself and other troupe members stayed in town on via dei Pellicciai (“Furriers Street”). The latter district’s delighted residents took to singing a rhyming refrain in Corsican dialect: “Alé, alé, anduma a balé, ch’a j’é l’America an via dij Plissè!” which roughly translated means, “Come on, come on, let’s go dance now that America is in Furriers Street!” Buffalo Bill reportedly liked the tune so much that he sang it during the final performance in Turin.

After wrapping up its tour of Italy in mid-May, the Wild West headed east to Austria, the Balkans, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine before returning through Poland to Bohemia (the present-day Czech Republic), Germany and Belgium. By the time Buffalo Bill gave his farewell performance of the 1906 season in Ghent on September 21, he’d become an international celebrity, and kids on street corners across Europe were playing cowboys and Indians.

Buffalo Bill’s tours of Italy certainly had a profound and lasting influence on the Italian vision of the American West (think “spaghetti Westerns” and replica firearms). Cody himself, however, had only tenuous connections to Italy. On March 6, 1866, the 20-year-old Union Army teamster had married Missouri native Louisa Frederici (1844–1921), but her family had its roots in the Lorraine region of northeastern France. Buffalo Bill did name his favorite Springfield Model 1866 trapdoor rifle “Lucretia Borgia,” but that is thought to have been a lark. The illegitimate daughter of a future pope, the namesake Italian noblewoman rose to prominence during the Renaissance. Rumored to have poisoned several lovers, Lucretia Borgia was both beautiful and deadly. Likely hearing her name in passing, and doubtless regarding his Springfield as beautiful and deadly (at least to elk and bison), Cody had Borgia’s name inscribed on the rifle’s lock plate. (What remains of the rifle is on display at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.)

When he set out in the entertainment world, Cody appeared onstage with Giuseppina Morlacchi (1836–86), a celebrated prima ballerina and popular dancer from Milan, who made her American debut in New York City in October 1867. By December 1872 she had joined the cast of dime novelist Ned Buntline’s touring Western melodrama Scouts of the Prairie, co-starring Buffalo Bill and fellow scout John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, whom Morlacchi would marry the following summer. Another Italian, Naples-born photographer Carlo Gentile, snapped and sold promotional cartes de visite of cast members, while his adopted Apache son appeared onstage. In 1873 Buntline left the troupe, and Cody enlisted friend James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok to join the aspiring showman, Morlacchi and Texas Jack in a new touring play called Scouts of the Plains. The productions served as a training ground for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and his later success across the ocean blue.

Wild West aficionado and artist Lorenzo Barruscotto hails from Asti, in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. For further reading he recommends Four Years in Europe With Buffalo Bill, by Charles Eldridge Griffin, as well as the Italian language books Buffalo Bill in Italia, by Mario Bussoni, and Quando Buffalo Bill venne in Italia, by Nicola Tonelli.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

Center stage in a northern Colorado museum is an unmistakable symbol of the West. Faint lettering on the driver’s box of the historic stagecoach reads U.S. Mail, attesting to its original purpose, while covering nearly every square inch of its woodwork are scrawled signatures, hinting at its raucous second career in Wild West shows. Among the signatures is that of down-home humorist Will Rogers.

While it can prove challenging to chisel facts from Western lore, this coach and its storied past endures, thanks to Frank C. Miller Jr. The sharpshooter turned Wild West showman once described how he acquired the coach:

“In the late ’80s and ’90s it was on the ‘Bill’ show (meaning the Buffalo Bill circus) on his many tours, but as it became so old that it would not stand up under the hard knocks required of ‘Indian holdups,’ it was traded for a more modern model. I fought hundreds of Indian battles from the top of the coach myself on the shows. European royalty rode in the coach, as well as Teddy Roosevelt and President [William Howard] Taft, and I believe you will still find Will Rogers’ name written on the back.…When the new coach was put into use, I bought the old coach from Cody and sent it home and have owned it ever since.”

Built in 1874 by the Abbot-Downing Co. of Concord, N.H., the light coach is more correctly called a mud wagon. A basic, unglamorous conveyance, it was made to transport passengers and mail over rough-hewn trails. Given the lack of a paper trail tying the wagon to either Miller or Cody, it is difficult to verify Frank’s story. He may have glossed over the facts, but a kernel or two of truth remains.

A renowned marksman, trick shooter and roper, Miller claimed to have toured with Cody in Europe, though which tour is unknown. As he was 40 years younger than Buffalo Bill, Frank probably would have been too young to join any but one of Cody’s last European tours, between 1902 and ’06. The mud wagon would have been retired by that time, as period advertising featured the Wild West’s more elegant Concord stage, with its higher profile and oval body. Dubbed the “Deadwood Stagecoach,” the latter is on exhibit at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.

Franklin Carl Miller Jr. was the third of four children born to immigrant parents. His Danish father and Swedish mother had independently followed the promise of gold to the north-central Colorado mining settlement of Black Hawk, where they married in 1876, later moving to the growing frontier town of Fort Collins, where Frank was born on May 11, 1886. The Millers prospered, running a saloon, a mercantile store and, later, a garage.

Taking a page from Cody, showman Frank became a skilled self-promoter. Local newspapers are peppered with notices of his performances, dinner guests and encounters with notable figures, including a visit to Cody’s foster son, Johnny Baker. Miller worked for Zack Mulhall’s Wild West show and headlined with the Irwin Brothers’ Cheyenne Frontier Days Wild West, which billed him as the “Most Marvelous Marksman in the United States.” When that show closed in 1917, Frank bought a ranch northwest of Fort Collins and married Florence “Peggy” Leedle, a gal who loved the spotlight as much as he did. She performed on horseback, crooning songs, and they adopted a son, Franklin, who went by “Teddy.” Naming their spread Trail’s End, the Millers developed it into a dude ranch, offering fishing, Western entertainment and a menagerie of trained wild animals, including bears and wolves. Newspapers announced regular visits from such celebrities as humorist Rogers, circus performer and actor Fred Stone, sharpshooter Captain A.H. Hardy and novelist Rex Beach.

Miller held performances both on the ranch and in neighboring towns. Central to his show was the mud wagon, which he rode in parades and holdup re-enactments. When the wagon deteriorated, he had it loaded onto a flatbed trailer and performed from atop that.

Just when his show seemed to peak, Miller’s life went into a tailspin. First, wife Peggy left him. Next, at the tail end of the Great Depression, he lost Trail’s End to bankruptcy. Finally, the unthinkable happened. In 1946 son Teddy, who’d joined the Army, was killed in a motor pool fire while stationed in occupied Berlin. He was 19.

It was at that low point the mud wagon, among Teddy’s favorite family keepsakes, took on new meaning. As a memorial to his son and the six other soldiers killed in the fire, a grief-stricken Miller presented the coach to the city. It was initially housed in a small purpose-built brick building with a viewing window.

Today, most of the 150-plus visible signatures on the coach are difficult to read or trace, and many bearing earlier dates are questionable. While there is no way to verify the validity of Rogers’ signature on the upper left rear panel, neither can it be discounted. Miller and the humorist certainly knew each other. Most other signatures appear to be those of tourists or perhaps Trail’s End visitors or show hands. Most date from between the 1910s and ’40s and represent citizens of states across the West and Midwest.

Miller lived out his life in Fort Collins’ Linden Hotel, across the street from the red sandstone building that once housed the family saloon and store. In exchange for his room and board he painted Western scenes and visited schools, regaling young listeners with stories of the Old West and his encounters with Cody and Rogers. On Nov. 21, 1953, Miller, 67, died of a heart attack.

In the mid-1990s Miller’s memorial mud wagon underwent conservation. It has since been housed at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, where it symbolizes the many facets of the Old West. With its ties to mail and passenger service, Wild West performances, and perhaps even showman Cody and humorist Rogers, the mud wagon has gained the celebrity Miller had long envisioned. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

A historian with a brush and a palette, David Wright considers it his mission to depict America’s frontier era with precision. “We historical artists march to a different drummer,” explains Wright [davidwrightart.com] from his home studio in Gallatin, Tenn. “We tell a story. It’s our obligation to future generations to paint our subjects with as much accuracy as possible.”

Wright’s insistence on authenticity has found him riding Wyoming’s Wind River Range on horseback and hunting moose on Canada’s Aulneau Peninsula dressed in brain-tanned buckskins and bearing a frontiersman’s guns and accoutrements. “Such experiences enable me to see things from a much closer perspective than if I were just using past masters like Alfred Jacob Miller, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer as references,” he explains. “Landscapes, rifles, bead and quillwork or Indian tattoos—I want it all to be historically dead-on.” His quest draws him to museums and archives, while his home reference library is also extensive.

“The cliché ‘The more I learn, the less I know’ really is true,” he says. “As long as I am a student of history, I’ll never quit learning.”

Rosine, Ken.—the birthplace of Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass”—was a country hamlet when Wright was born there in 1942. Idyllic remembrances of flint ridges, cornfields and tobacco rows flood his memories. “My first interests were hunting and fishing and have been all my life.” Always he drew, aided by his mother’s creativity.

“Mom would lay a sheet of paper on her lap and draw,” Wright recalls, then she would take his hand and trace the sketches. At age 9 he won a local art show. After high school he took classes at a Nashville advertising school, then studied watercolor in Italy. The latter move, ironically, kindled his interest in the frontier when he spied a 1777 French musket for sale, bought it and fired it, the flintlock’s smoke and flash awakening latent nostalgia.

By 1962 Wright was back Stateside, drawing for the Nashville Banner and Nashville Tennessean until drafted into service in Vietnam. In 1964 and ’65 he flew more than 100 missions as the door gunner on Bell UH-1 Iroquois (aka “Huey”) helicopters. While in-country he sketched everyone from schoolchildren to Montagnard highlanders and soldiers—though never combat scenes. “Life changes your outlook on things,” the artist says.

On returning home, Wright resumed commercial artwork while freelancing on the side. He experienced another awakening when he joined the rugged fraternity of the American Mountain Men, further sparking his interest in the fur trade as he dressed the part and learned frontier skills.

“Utilizing the day’s firearms and tools gives me an edge in seeing what the lives of our frontier forebears were like,” he explains. “I know what it’s like to build a cabin, split rails, hunt with a flintlock and be freezing in buckskins. I know how wool feels in a snowstorm and how wet leather clings to you.”

Wright’s first mountain man portrait, for Gray Stone Press, sold out. Encouraged, he shifted his focus to portrayals of heroic frontier figures. By 1978 he was following his own muses and garnering national acclaim.

The Eiteljorg Museum, in Indianapolis, has devoted an expansive retrospective to Wright’s work and recognized him with several awards. The Booth Western Art Museum, in Cartersville, Ga., named him an artist of excellence. His art also hangs in Nashville’s Tennessee State Museum and the visitor center of Kentucky’s Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The Hamilton Collection commissioned Wright to render a series of four collector plates depicting American Indian women. “It is pleasing to be accepted in such a widespread market,” says the artist.

Still, every season finds Wright in the woods, sometimes alone, sometimes with kindred spirits, reliving some footnote of frontier history to preserve in photos, sketches and mental images to inform his paintings. “Every day is a blessing,” says the artist turned mountain man. “Make the most of it.”

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Who was Etta Place?

She was the lover and perhaps wife of Pennsylvania-born Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid,” and a peripheral associate of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang headed up by Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy.” But little is known about her origins and less about what happened to her after Sundance and Butch were killed in South America.

Larry Pointer, author of the 1977 book In Search of Butch Cassidy, wrote that Etta’s identity is “one of the most intriguing riddles in Western history.”

Place was likely born in 1878 and as an adult was described as having “classic good looks,” with a nice smile and a refined bearing, a description confirmed by a full-length portrait of her and Longabaugh—some say the couple’s wedding picture—taken in February 1901 at Joseph B. De Young’s photo studio at 815 Broadway in New York City. She spoke in an educated manner and knew how to handle a rifle.

She had met Longabaugh a year or two earlier and may have been involved in some of the Wild Bunch robberies, scoping out a bank in advance or holding the group’s horses during a heist. But the New York City picture, historian Thom Hatch wrote in his 2013 book The Last Outlaws, “hints of proper high teas, Central Park carriage rides and evenings at the theater.”

Even her name is probably false. “Place” was the maiden name of Longabaugh’s mother, Annie, and Sundance sometimes used the alias “Harry Place.” It has been suggested she took to using the first name “Etta” in South America after Spanish speakers mispronounced “Ethel,” which may or may not have been her actual first name. The Pinkertons variously referred to her as Ethel, Eva, Rita, Etta and Betty Price.

In a letter to friend David Gillespie shortly after the gang’s June 2, 1899, train robbery near Wilcox, Wyo., Longabaugh enclosed a copy of the portrait of himself and Place, whom he described as his wife and a “Texas lady.” The Pinkertons, who spent a lot of time and effort pursuing the Wild Bunch, always believed Etta was from Texas, which fits with her noted skills with horses and firearms. In 1906 William Pinkerton, his detectives having traced Place to Fort Worth, asked that city’s police chief to “find out who this woman is.”

Based on the theory Etta’s real name was Ethel and she hailed from Texas, researcher Donna Ernst compiled a list of all women named Ethel born in or around Fort Worth and San Antonio between 1875 and ’80. Over time she eliminated each as a contender for the youthful Etta Place.

Except one.

That one was Ethel Bishop, who resided with four other women in what was probably a brothel near notorious madam Fannie Porter’s San Antonio pleasure palace, a known Wild Bunch hangout. Another oft repeated story suggests Butch rescued Etta from a brothel when she was 16. Longabaugh biographer Ed Kirby believes Place was the daughter of one Emily Jane Place of Oswego, N.Y., who was related somehow to Sundance’s mother. Still others have suggested Etta was in fact Colorado rancher Ann Bassett, a Wild Bunch associate known to have vied with sister Josie for Cassidy’s affection.

Could Bassett have won Sundance’s attentions as well?

Probably not. By 1903 Bassett had married Hirum “Hi” Henry Bernard and that same year was arrested (and later acquitted) on a charge of cattle rustling while Place was in South America.

On Feb. 20, 1901, after posing for their portrait, Place and Longabaugh boarded HMS Herminius in New York, disembarking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 23. Traveling with them was Cassidy, using the alias “James Ryan” and claiming to be Etta’s brother. In 1902 Place and Longabaugh returned briefly Stateside for Etta to seek treatment of an unknown disease, and again in 1904, when Pinkerton operatives believed she visited family in Texas. In 1906 Place returned Stateside for keeps, possibly due to her illness. Sundance returned to South America, where most historians believe he and Butch died in a 1908 shootout with soldiers in Bolivia.

Meanwhile, Etta vanished.

Several researchers have suggested she became a brothel operator in Fort Worth under the name Eunice Gray. But in an article in the October 2010 Wild West Donna Humphrey-Donnell noted she’d seen an alleged portrait of the young Gray, and the woman in that photo definitely “was not the same woman seen in the famous New York City portrait of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.”

In 1909 an unidentified woman fitting Etta’s description asked a U.S. diplomatic official in South America for help in obtaining Longabaugh’s death certificate. But she never returned to his office. At most, however, the incident only proves Place was alive in 1909.

Other theories have since surfaced: that Etta was the wife of legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard; that she relocated to Paraguay and remarried; that Longabaugh had survived the 1908 shootout in Bolivia and lived happily ever after with Place in Alaska; that Etta died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; or that she was either killed during a domestic dispute or took her own life in Argentina in the 1920s. In 1970 Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betensen, told Los Angeles Times reporters that her brother had not been killed in Bolivia as thought, and that Etta had lived out her days as a schoolteacher in Denver.

In the end, speculation, guesswork and coincidence aside, we only know for certain she was a pretty woman who once carried on a romance with the Sundance Kid and then disappeared from the pages of history.

Nothing more.

To this day similarly incredible tales circulate about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stories relating their escape from the Bolivian gunfight and their subsequent lives of anonymity in various locales out West or in South America.

Like the theories surrounding Etta Place, though, they are unsubstantiated and probably false.

But tempting. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

Each year since 1961 Western Writers of America has bestowed on a respected individual its Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in the field of Western history. Previous Wister recipients include Oscar-winning director John Ford and actor John Wayne, Pulitzer-winning Kiowa poet and novelist N. Scott Momaday, historian Robert M. Utley and such bestselling novelists as Elmer Kelton and Tony Hillerman. Named for the author of the acclaimed 1902 novel The Virginian, the Wister is WWA’s highest award. The 2024 recipient is Quintard Taylor, a leading scholar in the history of the black experience out West. 

Professor emeritus and the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt professor of American History at the University of Washington, Seattle, Taylor is the author of In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West: 1528–1990 (2024) and editor of the anthology African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 (2003). He was born in 1948 in Brownsville, Texas, where his great-grandfather was born into slavery, his father managed a cotton plantation and his mother worked at menial labor. Taylor himself holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In 2007 he founded BlackPast.org, an online encyclopedia of black history boasting 55 million users. 

“Dr. Taylor’s work reflects the evolving and dynamic understanding of the black experience in the American West, a topic that had been long overlooked,” said Max McCoy, WWA’s executive director. “As a pioneer in the effort to bring that experience to a wider audience, he richly deserves this, our highest award.” 

Established in the early 1950s to promote the literature of the American West, the nonprofit WWA has approximately 600 members worldwide, including writers and editors of fiction, nonfiction, songs, poems and screenplays. WWA will honor Taylor and its other award recipients at its annual convention, scheduled for June 19–22, 2024, in Tulsa, Okla.

Picture the colorfully costumed members of the Western quartet Riders in the Sky, and you may catch yourself humming the melody of “Woody’s Roundup,” from the 1999 Disney/Pixar film Toy Story 2. But there’s far more to the Grammy-winning band and its founder, Douglas “Ranger Doug” Green. The Chicago-born musician, arranger, songwriter, singer and yodeler holds a master’s degree in literature from Vanderbilt University and is the author of two music histories, Country Roots: The Origins of Country Music (1976) and Singing in the Saddle: The History of the Singing Cowboy (2002). (His article “Sing, Cowboy, Sing!” a history of the singing cowboy, appeared in the October 2018 Wild West). The tireless 78-year-old performer is also the host of the Sirius XM radio program Ranger Doug’s Classic Cowboy Corral, centered on vintage cowboy music. Often compared to the Sons of the Pioneers, albeit with a whimsical twist, Riders in the Sky [ridersinthesky.com] has been touring for five decades, released more than 40 albums, performed for radio and film, and won two Grammy Awards. Green recently spoke with Wild West from his home in Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, Tenn.      

Was the singing cowboy of the Old West a real figure or a myth?

Real in the sense that any time men are stranded in isolated situations they will sing and compose. There are lumberjack songs. There are sailor shanties. So, yes, some of the cowboys did sing at the time. Some of them played the fiddle. I don’t know if they played the guitar, but I imagine a few did. It existed. But, yeah, it wasn’t as romantic as played on-screen.

What led you to write Singing in the Saddle?

My interest in singing cowboys. Nobody had ever written a book on the phenomenon. There had been a couple of articles, but nobody had done a detailed study.

Do you have a favorite singing cowboy from the golden era of Western film?

As a kid I liked Tex Ritter, in that he seemed just a little bit more authentic. But, of course, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers have been huge inspirations to me. The Sons of the Pioneers more than anyone. That harmony just tore me up, and I still love it.

Do you have a favorite Western song?

If I had to pick one, I’d say “Woody’s Roundup,” because it’s made me so much money [laughs]!

Points for honesty! What about a classic like “Streets of Laredo”?

That’s an old Irish tune, I understand, and an unforgettable melody. It’s long been one of my favorites to sing.       The song I like, “Green Grow the Lilacs” (Ritter made a hit record of it), is also based on the Irish melody “Green Grows the Laurel.” It’s very sentimental to me because my mom used to sing it. All my kids and all my grandkids have grown up with it as their lullaby song.

What spurred your interest in Western music?

My mother’s family were Finnish immigrants, and their amusement was listening to the National Barn Dance [a precursor of the Grand Ole Opry], out of Chicago. My mother played a little bit of piano, but she sang beautifully. Two of my uncles—Hank and Arvid—played guitar, and I still have Hank’s guitar. First guitar I ever played. I was hoping it would be a pearly Martin, but it turned out to be a ’37 Montgomery Ward.

Whose idea was it to form Riders in the Sky?

Mine. I tried a couple of times with a couple of guys, but they either didn’t have the passion for this kind of music or weren’t the finest singers. But “Too Slim” [Riders in the Sky bassist Fred LaBour] and I had been friends for years and played in folk and bluegrass and junk bands that put a few dollars in our pockets and had fun. He and I started the group on Nov. 11, 1977.

You mix old songs with new ones. Why?

We didn’t want to be a historical throwback. We wanted to add to this tradition. Most of our records have two, three or four original songs.

What’s the future for Riders in the Sky?

Well, obviously this career is going to come to an end sometime. As long as the four of us [Green, LaBour, fiddler “Woody Paul” Chrisman and accordionist Joey “Cow-Polka King” Miskulin] stay healthy—we’re all in our 70s—we just don’t see any reason to stop. Our voices aren’t like when we were young, but we’re coping with that. I’m one of the most blessed guys on earth. 

Adding insult to injury, a Pawnee scout for the U.S. Army shot in 1869 by a member of his own command was for decades denied a marker reflecting his Medal of Honor for the same action. What makes the oversight worse is that Sergeant Mad Bear (Co-Rux-Te-Chod-Ish) was the first American Indian ever awarded his adoptive nation’s highest honor. Thanks to the diligent research of Wild West contributor Jeff Broome, the scout may finally have his day in the sun. 

In the summer of 1869 Major Frank North and his company of Pawnee scouts were in pursuit of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers under Chief Tall Bull along Kansas’ Republican River. On July 8, according to Mad Bear’s citation, the sergeant “ran out from the command in pursuit of a dismounted [Cheyenne]” when badly wounded by the bullet fired by a fellow scout. But when North’s brother Luther wrote a memoir mentioning his own stint as a commander of the scouts, he recorded Mad Bear’s name as Traveling Bear, and the confusion lingered. 

Enter Broome. During research toward his 2003 book Dog Soldier Justice, relating the captivity ordeal of Susanna Alderdice amid the same conflict, he discovered the misattribution of Mad Bear’s medal. The Medal of Honor Historical Society of the United States notified Veterans Affairs of the error, and the latter ultimately concurred. A private marker stands atop Mad Bear’s grave at the North Indian Cemetery in Pawnee, Okla. The Pawnee Nation must first remove it before the VA will place a military marker designating him as a Medal of Honor recipient. So it appears Mad Bear’s luck is about to change.

Books

Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal (1931, by Stuart N. Lake)
Though ex-publicity agent Stuart Lake interviewed ex-lawman Wyatt Earp on several occasions, this ostensible biography is laced with fabrications. One shouldn’t blame Earp. Lake was out to create a folk hero and sell books, and in that he succeeded admirably. Frontier Marshal served as the origin story for several Hollywood films, as well as the popular 1955–61 TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O’Brian. 

Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend (1997, by Casey Tefertiller)
This is the most balanced extant account of Wyatt’s life and the one book a newcomer to the topic should read before any other. More seasoned readers don’t have to agree with everything Tefertiller writes to appreciate his well-researched narrative.

A Wyatt Earp Anthology: Long May His Story Be Told (2019, edited by Roy B. Young, Gary L. Roberts and Casey Tefertiller) 
This collection of essays provides an overview of Earp’s life and corresponding history from diverse viewpoints. Among those with dueling opinions about the famed lawman are two of the editors who compiled the anthology. Casey Tefertiller considers Earp a heroic figure, while Roy Young thinks him a liar. (Gary Roberts lands somewhere in the middle.) It’s worth bearing in mind that no matter how many people repeat a falsehood attributed to Earp, it doesn’t mean the lie originated with him. 

Wyatt Earp: A Biography of the Legend (2002–10, by Lee A. Silva)
This meticulously researched and documented multivolume work is the authoritative account of Earp’s life. It is a shame author Lee Silva did not live to complete the work.

Murder in Tombstone: The Forgotten Trial of Wyatt Earp (2004, by Steven Lubet)
The trial of the book’s title—examining the actions of Wyatt Earp, brothers Virgil and Morgan Earp, and Doc Holliday at the headline-grabbing gunfight near the O.K. Corral—was actually a pretrial hearing under Justice Wells Spicer to determine whether to present the case to a grand jury. Author and attorney Steven Lubet goes through the hearing in meticulous detail to explain why Spicer ruled as he did, in favor of the defendants.

John Peters Ringo: Mythical Gunfighter (1987, by Ben T. Traywick)
Tombstone town historian and author Ben Traywick was certain of two things about Johnny Ringo: that the gunfighter’s reputation was based on very little, and that Wyatt Earp killed Ringo. While there’s little evidence to prove Wyatt was there when Johnny’s number came up, Traywick’s insistence it wasn’t suicide holds up pretty well under scrutiny.

Movies

Tombstone (1993, on DVD and Blu-ray) 
This George P. Cosmatos film is arguably the greatest Western ever made. It’s not good history, but it perhaps comes closer than any other version. If you think Wyatt Earp (played by Kurt Russell) and Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) were villains, you’ll hate it. If you recognize them as flawed men who stood up to a politically connected gang of rustlers and assassins, you’ll love it.

Wyatt Earp (1994, on DVD and Blu-ray) 
Director Lawrence Kasdan’s vision of Wyatt Earp (Kevin Costner) and Doc Holliday (Dennis Quaid) also sticks to the facts more closely than previous depictions. Unfortunately for viewers, Wyatt comes across as uptight, and Doc as dark and dislikable, though Quaid did turn in a brilliant performance. While some historians support this take on the relationship between the real-life lawman and gunman, it remains hard to believe they were close friends.

My Darling Clementine (1946, on DVD and Blu-ray)
This John Ford classic features winning performances by Henry Fonda (Earp) and Victor Mature (Holliday), though it bears little semblance to the historic events in Tombstone, particularly the subplot about an imaginary “Clementine” (Cathy Downs) whom the tubercular doctor (not dentist) abandons for her own good. Unfortunately, this is the only account many contemporary viewers learned.

Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957, on DVD and Blu-ray) 
This John Sturges film also rates as great entertainment with little historic value. Burt Lancaster (Earp) and Kirk Douglas (Holliday) turn in powerful performances, bound together less as friends and more as men of honor—a plausible way of viewing the pair. But Ike Clanton never led the Cowboys, and Tombstone didn’t ship cattle, having lacked a rail line at the time. Sung by Frankie Laine, the title ballad will ring in your ears for years to come.

Mention Deadwood and what often pops to mind are sordid scenes straight out of the namesake HBO television series—and to be fair, such scenes aren’t far from the truth. In 1874, on the mere rumor of gold in the Black Hills, prospectors came to the region in droves. Then, in the fall of 1875, such seekers did turn up an especially rich gold deposit in the northern Black Hills. That sparked the stampede to what became known as Deadwood Gulch, as miners staked claims and set up camp in a ravine choked with dead trees.

As happened in many mining camps, Deadwood soon had its share of gambling halls and bordellos. When trail guides “Colorado Charlie” Utter and brother Steve arrived with the first wagonload of prostitutes on July 12, 1876, the sporting women soon had more customers than they could handle. From then on a regular stream of wagons brought prostitutes to town.

Receiving scant regard or care from either their employers or clientele, such women were often subject to abuse. On one headline-grabbing occasion, when a customer started to beat her bloody, a Gem saloon prostitute known as Tricksie (yes, Deadwood fans, there really was a working girl named Tricksie) shot the man through the head. According to Deadwood pioneer and memoirist John S. McClintock, the attending doctor threaded a probe all the way through the shooting victim’s skull. McClintock dubiously claimed to have run into the man on the street some weeks later, though the memoirist didn’t share (or perhaps didn’t know) Trixie’s fate. Such was the miserable welcome prostitutes could expect.

Looking the Other Way

Residents of early Deadwood desperately needed law and order. They got the right man in the spring of 1877 when Dakota Territory Governor John L. Pennington appointed hardware store owner and former Montana lawman Seth Bullock sheriff of Lawrence County. No longer was violent crime tolerated. However, prostitution continued to get a conspicuous pass. After all, it represented a thriving industry in a mining camp where men dominated the population and nine out of 10 women were painted ladies. Thus the brothels of Deadwood became an open secret. The swath of dance halls, gambling dens, saloons and brothels along both sides of lower Main Street, on the north end of town, became known as the “Badlands.” In the typical business arrangement, saloons and variety theaters occupied the first floors, while brothels operated upstairs. By the turn of the century the Badlands occupied an entire block of two-story buildings on the west side of Main.

The district’s prostitutes did not have an easy go of it. Among the worst abusers was Al Swearingen, proprietor of the Gem, who opened his saloon/theater/brothel soon after arriving in the spring of 1876. The women who worked for Swearingen were justly afraid of him, as he was notoriously cruel and domineering. Lured to the Gem on the false promise of respectable employment, unsuspecting women found themselves stranded with no money. Those with no other option were virtually sucked into the life of prostitution.

In the face of violence and degradation, many prostitutes turned to drugs and alcohol, which only deepened their despair. To address their pain and control depression, doctors often prescribed such habit-forming drugs as opium, laudanum and morphine, unintentionally sending the women on a further downward spiral into addiction. In other instances employers drugged their working women to better control them. Suicide attempts became so commonplace among prostitutes in the Badlands that Dr. Frank S. Howe, early Deadwood’s only physician, carried a stomach pump with him on calls to the red-light district.

A Booming Business

By the mid-1880s the boomtown counted more than a hundred brothels. Among the most popular, aside from the Gem, were Fern’s Place, The Cozy Rooms, the 400, the Beige Door, the Three Nickels and the Shasta Rooms. The madams of these notorious establishments included such standouts as May Brown, Eleanora Dumont, Dora DuFran, Belle Haskell, Mollie Johnson and “Poker Alice” Ivers.

DuFran (born Amy Helen Dorothea Bolshaw in England in 1868) was perhaps the best known and certainly the most successful. Dora and her husband, a gambler she met on arrival, operated a string of brothels across the region, from the Dakota boomtowns of Deadwood, Rapid City and Lead to Belle Fourche and Miles City, Mont. Rumor has it DuFran even coined the term “cathouse” for a brothel. Early on she befriended Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary), and the pair grew quite close. On occasion Jane worked for Dora, though the former’s refusal to bathe and habit of wearing men’s clothes served to limit her appeal to both customers and the madam herself, who insisted the girls who worked for her practice good hygiene and dress. When a middle-aged Calamity reconnected with DuFran in 1903, Dora hired Jane as a cook and laundress for her Belle Fouche brothel, Diddlin’ Dora’s. By then Calamity was suffering from the effects of alcoholism and a hard life, and Dora cared for Jane up till her death that summer. In 1932 DuFran, writing under the pseudonym d’Dee, published a 12-page biography titled Low Down on Calamity Jane. Of her late friend Dora wrote:

“It’s easy for a woman to be good who has been brought up with every protection from the evils of the world and with good associates. Martha wasn’t that lucky. She was a product of the wild and woolly west. She knew better than anyone where she made her mistakes, and she didn’t rate her virtues as highly as her friends did.”

“Queen of the Blondes”

Another madam with a reputation for charity was Mollie Johnson. Scarcely 23 and already a widow when she arrived in Deadwood, Johnson remarried poorly and was deserted by her second husband before setting up a brothel on Sherman Street in 1878. While there were plenty of prostitutes in town from which to choose, Mollie was partial to hiring those with flaxen hair and became known as the “Queen of the Blondes.” Her establishment soared in popularity, rivaled only by the low-down Swearingen’s Gem.

Like the Gem, Mollie’s joint also provided entertainment. Unlike Swearingen, however, Johnson fancied her bordello as a high-end place and pulled out all the stops. All her girls were talented singers, dancers and balladists. Mollie herself also performed, as a shadow dancer. Wearing very little clothing, she would gyrate behind a screen on which her shadow was projected by a bright light. By all accounts, she brought down the house.

Mollie’s place proved so popular that even respectable society took note. In an 1879 dispatch headlined Sweet Sounds From a Bitter Source, a reporter for the local Black Hills Daily Times warned readers of its temptations:

“At the dead of night, when all nature is hushed in sleep, this reporter is frequently regaled, while on his way home, by the gentle cadence of sweet songs which floats out upon the stillness of the gulch like the silvery horns of elfland faintly blowing. Vocal music, wherever heard or by whatever thing or being produced, is entrancing to this sinner; hence the aforesaid sounds are sure to arrest his step at the corner and compel him to lend his ear to the mellifluent melody which steals out from Molly Johnson’s harem. But he doesn’t draw any nearer, for he knows that Where the Sirens dwell you linger in ease / That their songs are death, but makes destruction please; and he travels on, disgusted with himself because his virtuous life possesses such a skeleton element of fun, yet wonders that such a voluptuous harmony is tolerated by the divine muse of song to issue from such a b-a-d place.”

Reputation aside, its owner set out to prove that good can take root even in such a bad place. The proverbial “hooker with a heart of gold,” Johnson cared for her girls as if they were family. A case example dates from the summer of 1879 when one of Mollie’s favorite girls, Jennie Phillips, fell desperately ill. Author Chris Enss relates the story in her 2023 book An Open Secret. That July 6 Phillips and other girls from the bordello were on a buggy ride in the country when they encountered a tollgate whose owner had chained a feral cat to a tree. When Jennie picked up and tried to soothe the animal, it bit her on the lip, and within days she was bedridden. Though Mollie tended her daily, the young woman died some weeks later.

Beside herself in grief, Mollie had Jennie’s body laid out in a coffin and placed in the parlor of the brothel while she made funeral arrangements.

Then the unthinkable happened: A blaze swept through town, quickly engulfing Mollie’s house of ill repute. Yet the madam refused to evacuate until Jennie’s coffin had been safely removed. The next morning Mollie had Jennie interred in Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery. By Christmas a new $7,000 brothel had risen from the ashes of the old brothel, and Mollie had donated money to churches to buy presents for needy children.

One Happy Ending… and Many Sad Ones

Most soiled doves dreamed of a better life. Annie Hizer, one of Mollie’s girls, managed to realize her dreams. Known to her clientele as “Little Buttercup,” Annie had a regular customer in Black Hills physician Dr. Charles W. Meyer, and before long the two fell in love and were married. Held at the local opera house on March 7, 1880, their ceremony was a town affair, with city officials and military personnel in attendance. Mollie and her girls served as maids of honor.

But Little Buttercup’s happy ending was the exception rather than the rule. Take, for example, the sad fate of Nellie Stanley, a 23-year-old working girl at Belle Haskell’s brothel, the 400. A polite young Chicagoan with a typically hard backstory, she was somewhat of a loner. On the evening of March 19, 1894, complaining of a headache and sore throat, Nellie retired to her room, where she took an overdose of the painkiller Antikamnia. When fellow working girls found her unconscious, Belle summoned a doctor to the 400, but nothing could be done. Nellie was dead. Those who knew her best were certain she’d committed suicide. Sadly, such was a common occurrence in brothels.

Like other houses of ill repute, Belle Haskell’s 400 was the genesis of other tragedies. When one 1893 love triangle ended in murder, however, even the seasoned madam was shocked. The trouble arose after one of Belle’s girls, 16-year-old Austie Trevyr (born Mary Yusta to a wealthy family in Lincoln, Neb.) took up with gambler Frank DeBelloy, the longtime lover of Gem saloon girl Maggie McDermott. For his part, DeBelloy was content to play both hands.   

That December 17 Austie scrawled out a seemingly innocent invitation to Maggie to join her and Frank for drinks at the local Mascotte saloon. There, in a drunken fit of jealousy, Austie shot and killed Maggie. She was immediately arrested for premeditated murder. At trial the following spring a jury convicted Austie of manslaughter, the judge sentencing her to three years and seven months in the state penitentiary at Sioux Falls, S.D. In 1897 local news reports had the recently sprung Austie first returning to the 400 before leaving that summer for a women’s seminary back East, seemingly a reformed soiled dove.

An Enduring Institution

By 1889 legislators and lawmen across the Dakotas were targeting brothels and gambling dens and the activities that supported them. The South Dakota Legislature struck the first blow that year by outlawing the sale of alcohol, a move anticipating federal Prohibition by three decades. In 1898 Governor Arthur C. Mellette followed up with a provision to the state constitution outlawing gambling and prostitution, but purveyors of such vice simply went underground. By the time Prohibition took effect in 1920, Deadwood’s brothels had gone aboveground, quite literally, in speakeasies up behind painted doorways over respectable businesses on lower Main.

In 1951 law enforcement officials raided Deadwood’s brothels, but demand meant they were soon back in business. In 1952 the state’s attorney for Lawrence County prosecuted the brothel operators in the latest attempt to shut them down. This time the madams hired attorney Roswell Bottum, a former state representative, who managed to get the women acquitted on a technicality. Another raid and round of prosecutions in 1959 also failed to close the brothels.

Not until the spring of 1980 did federal and state authorities working in tandem manage to shut down the last four remaining Deadwood brothels. A group of citizens paraded down Main Street in support of the madams, much like lonesome miners did the day the Utter brothers’ wagon train brought the first sporting girls to town in 1876.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Linda Wommack, from Littleton, Colo., is the author of several books on Colorado history. For further reading she recommends An Open Secret: The Story of Deadwood’s Most Notorious Bordellos, by Chris Enss and Deadwood History Inc., and Pioneer Days in the Black Hills, by John S. McClintock.

Much has been written about the July 13, 1882, death of Arizona Territory gunfighter Johnny Ringo, most of it wrong. Writers have inserted their assumptions as facts. Thus, the story often goes that Johnny found himself alone in a trackless waste on a hot day in mid-July without water. Despondent, his horse having run off, left without water, Ringo committed suicide.  

In fact, Ringo died within 20 yards of a well-traveled road, having just reached Turkey Creek, the first available water source within many miles. He was within a quarter mile of the ranch of B.F. Smith, in the western foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains, and those on the ranch heard the shot that killed Johnny. Furthermore, July is a month of monsoon rains. In Arizona that means the wind comes from the southwest, from the Pacific and Gulf of California, bringing almost daily thundershowers that fill ponds and cause washes and streams to run. The rain cools the land, which at Turkey Creek is at 5,400 feet elevation—a far cry from the blazing desert around Phoenix, at 1,100 feet.   

As the Epitaph account reveals, Yost estimated that within a quarter hour 11 men were on the scene. They comprised a “coroner’s jury.” That term may mislead present-day readers. These were 11 everyday men who reported their findings to the coroner in Tombstone by letter. They had no forensic training. They were in a hurry to be done with the affair and get back to work, to bury a body already starting to stink. They did not wish to be called to Tombstone, miles distant, for lengthy court proceedings.  

Ringo was known to several of the men. The Epitaph published their findings. Johnny was found in a seated posture leaning against a tree. His boots were missing. “He was dressed in [a] light hat, blue shirt, vest, pants and drawers. On his feet were a pair of hose and an undershirt torn up so as to protect his feet.” He wore two cartridge belts, one for pistol and one for rifle. The revolver belt was upside down. There was no holster for a pistol, nor was it a Buscadero rig. His rifle propped against a nearby tree, his pistol clasped in his right hand. There was a bullet hole atop the left side of his skull. “A part of the scalp [was] gone,” the paper noted, “and part of the hair. This looks as if cut out by a knife.” There was no mention of powder burns or stippling on his head.

Black powder burns slowly and keeps burning as the bullet emerges from the barrel. In his 1966 song “Mr. Shorty,” Marty Robbins sang, “The .44 spoke, and it sent lead and smoke, and 17 inches of flame.” This isn’t far off the mark. A close-range pistol shot with muzzle held to temple likely would have ignited Ringo’s hair and left an awful mess. The coroner’s jury might have left such details out of their report to spare family members and the public, or perhaps because they simply didn’t think it important. After all, the effects of close-range pistol shots was common knowledge in that era.  

The Epitaph report surmised the circumstances:  

“The general impression prevailing among people in the Chiricahuas is that his horse wandered off somewhere, and he started off on foot to search for him; that his boots began to hurt him, and he pulled them off and made moccasins of his undershirt. He could not have been suffering for water, as he was within 200 feet of it, and not more than 700 feet from Smith’s house. Mrs. Morse and Mrs. Young passed by where he was lying Thursday afternoon, but supposed it was some man asleep and took no further notice of him. The inmates of Smith’s house heard a shot about 3 o’clock Thursday evening, and it is more than likely that that is the time the rash deed was done. He was on an extended jamboree the last time he was in this city.”  

The following Tuesday Ringo’s horse was found with one of his boots still hanging from the saddle. The Chiricahua folks were mistaken. Johnny hadn’t, while searching for his horse, taken off his boots because they hurt. He still had the horse when he took them off. The strips of undershirt wrapped around his feet were clean, not dirtied by any walking about. He was close to water and aid, not helpless and alone in a desert. The newspaper also noted Ringo was subject to frequent melancholy and had abnormal fear of being killed. He was paranoid, but that doesn’t mean people weren’t pursuing him with the intent to do him harm.  

What Really Happened on Turkey Creek?

The spot where Ringo was found, sitting beneath an oak tree on the banks of upper Turkey Creek, is idyllic, shaded and alive with the sound of trickling water. Though peaceful, it was not at all secluded. It was on the road to Galeyville, which passed a nearby pinery and sawmill. Several passersby spotted Johnny’s body, each believing he was only resting.

In his 1927 book Tombstone: An Iliad of the Southwest author Walter Noble Burns added several details. “[Ringo’s] six-shooter, held in his right hand, had fallen into his lap and caught in his watch chain,” Burns wrote. “Five chambers of the cylinder were loaded; the hammer rested on the single empty shell.” Of course, Burns was writing an adventure tale and not a history. Nonetheless, some four decades after Johnny’s death he did conduct research in Tombstone and Cochise County, speaking to people who had direct knowledge of the events.

The spent cartridge may mean Ringo had fired the fatal shot. However, it could easily be symptomatic of resting the hammer on a spent cartridge for safety. As a young Wyatt Earp once learned to his chagrin, resting the hammer on a live cartridge could lead to accidental discharge of the weapon; in his case, as he leaned back in a chair, his revolver tumbled from the holster and landed on the floor. That Johnny’s pistol was resting in his lap, tangled in his watch chain, is more intriguing. It’s hard to imagine the pistol, had he shot himself, falling in that position instead of at his side. Forensic studies show that suicides often continue to grip the weapon, so that by itself is not evidence of postmortem tampering by a third party. As Ringo lacked a holster for his pistol, he must have worn it tucked beneath his cartridge belt. Thus, in a seated position, it might well have become tangled as he tried to draw.

There is much peculiar in how Johnny was clad. He’d taken off his boots and hung them from the saddle of his horse, which wandered off. He’d also taken the time to strip off cartridge belts, vest and shirt, then removed and torn up his undershirt to bind his feet. Walking barefoot in Arizona is a painful experience at best. Stones, cacti and stiff grass, not to mention various critters and the hot ground, make such barefoot forays ill-advised. Cowboys do not, as some have written, hang their boots from the saddle to keep out scorpions. On reaching a destination, they remove the saddle from the horse, placing it on the ground, and then wipe down the horse with dry grass. Moreover, Johnny had re-dressed himself, buckling on his cartridge belts (one upside down) and binding his feet as if preparing to pursue his horse.

That leaves the question of why he took off his boots in the first place. Let’s consider his situation. He’d been on an extended spree in Tombstone. When friend Billy Breakenridge met Ringo at South Pass in the Dragoons, Johnny had two bottles of whiskey and offered Billy a drink. By the time he was approaching Turkey Creek, Ringo had crossed many dry miles and was either severely hungover or still drunk. He and his horse both needed a drink of cool water. It seems likely Ringo took off his boots and hung them from the saddle to keep them dry while he waded into the creek to cool his feet and splash water on his face. Likewise, the horse would have waded in for a drink.

What came next is an educated guess. The horse panicked and broke away at some sound in the dense brush. It might have been a bear or someone stalking Ringo. In any event, Johnny had to chase down his horse and didn’t care to do that barefoot. He climbed the steep bank to the tree where he was found, undressed himself to remove his undershirt and then re-dressed, wrapping his feet in preparation for a long walk.

At that moment one of two things occurred. Suddenly despairing of catching his horse, Ringo resolved to kill himself. He must have been certain succor would not have been available at Smith’s ranch or from the many passersby. Alternatively, the noise from the brush that had startled his horse might have been someone stalking him. That someone climbed the bank while Ringo was distracted with his clothing. Hearing the approach of a stranger, Johnny reached for his pistol. The stranger, still only partway up the slope, fired upward from a distance of 10 feet or more, striking Ringo in the temple, the bullet emerging from the top of his skull. The stranger then took out his knife and carved off part of Johnny’s scalp as a trophy.

Who Could Have Done It?

The above proposed scenario for Ringo’s final hour accounts for all the evidence, providing a logical explanation for much that was odd in how he was found. As to whether Johnny suddenly decided to kill himself after losing his horse or was killed by a third party, who can say? Murder seems plausible, maybe likely.

There are many candidates for Ringo’s murderer. Some think Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday might have been responsible. They could have been there. If Constable Fred Dodge, acting as their spy in Tombstone, had telegraphed that Johnny was on a binge and would soon return to Galeyville and his San Simon ranch, there would have been time for Earp and Holliday to travel over by train, especially given Johnny’s circuitous ride home. Even taking an indirect route, the pair could have made the trip by train. The mouth of Turkey Creek was a choke point, by which Ringo would have passed within a few hundred feet. However, a secret only remains a secret if only one person knows it. Wyatt and Doc surely would have been recognized as they left the train. Many co-conspirators would have to have been brought in on such a plan.

Most other candidates seem even less likely, due to implausible motives. Except for Buckskin Frank Leslie.

Leslie appears nowhere in the historical record before 1878. He arrived in Tombstone in 1880, a man in his late 30s who had adopted the persona of an Army scout, which he claimed to have been for more than a decade. Yet, there is no evidence he was a scout before moving to Tombstone. Buckskin Frank was a congenial sort of fellow around the campfire, which probably accounts for his acceptance as a scout on later expeditions. In 1885 he was hired to guide Captain Emmet Crawford’s command in pursuit of Geronimo but was, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Charles F. Lummis, “directly discharged because of his inability to tell a trail from a box of flea powder.” Leslie also served as a dispatch rider, bringing “wildcat dispatches” to Tombstone, his presumed skill scoffed at by Crawford’s superior, Brig. Gen. George Crook.

Lummis, who met Frank in Tombstone, probably had the right of it in his 1886 Times article:

“Leslie is a peculiar case—one of the types of a class not infrequently met on the frontier. A man apparently well educated, gentlemanly and liked by all who know him; with as much “sand” as the country he ranges—but a novelist who can make a little truth go as far as anyone in the territory.”

In the spring of 1880, a few weeks after Cosmopolitan Hotel chambermaid Mary Jane “May” Evans married, she took up with Leslie—neither, apparently, being respecters of the sanctity of matrimony. That June 22 May’s husband, Mike Killeen, was mortally wounded—probably by Frank, though under confusing circumstances—and scarcely a week later May was Mrs. Frank Leslie. The marriage was not a happy one, as Frank, a womanizer, strayed. Perhaps May had seen through the false front and threatened his he-man persona. That might explain the abuse she suffered at his hands.

In 1881, while Earp and friend Holliday temporarily cooled their heels in jail after the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, Doc’s longtime companion Big Nose Kate twice gave Ringo a tumble. Johnny, too, was no respecter of other men’s territory, and the following spring he and Frank were at loggerheads over a woman.

In July 1882, as Ringo returned from his extended spree in Tombstone, witnesses spotted Leslie trailing him near Turkey Creek. That November 14 Johnny’s friend Billy Claiborne, who’d fled from the O.K. Corral fracas, picked a gunfight with Leslie after Frank ejected him from a saloon for obnoxious drunkenness. Claiborne ended up dead in that fight. At the time some said Billy had accused Frank of killing Ringo, while years later multiple sources claimed Leslie boasted of having killed Ringo. Taking a scalp trophy would have fit right in with his persona.

Leslie’s life only took a downturn from there. By 1889 he and May had divorced, and Frank had absconded to his ranch in the Swisshelms with former prostitute “Blonde Mollie” Edwards, a younger woman. That July 10, on returning home after a spree, Frank entered the ranch house to find Mollie and a young ranch hand in discussion. Drawing his gun, Frank killed Mollie and wounded the ranch hand. No motive was given, but Mollie had mentioned wanting to return to “city life” in Tombstone, and perhaps 40-something Frank was feeling his age and believed she was sweet on the boy. Though no respecter of other men’s prerogatives, Frank was jealous of his own. Pleading guilty to first-degree murder, he was transported to Yuma Territorial Prison in January 1890. On Nov. 17, 1896, having serving nearly seven years behind bars, Leslie was pardoned by Arizona Territory Governor Benjamin J. Franklin.

In 1916, after two decades of further adventures and failed marriages, Buckskin Frank Leslie was interviewed by a reporter from The Seattle Daily Times. He stated his age as 74 and said he was planning a trip to Mexico. When and where he died is anyone’s guess, as he vanished from the record as suddenly as he’d appeared on it.   

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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For further reading, author Doug Hocking recommends “Buckskin Frank” Leslie, by Don Chaput; They Called Him Buckskin Frank, by Jack DeMattos and Chuck Parsons; and John Peters Ringo: Mythical Gunfighter, by Ben T. Traywick.

“She was a voluptuous creature.” So said veteran San Francisco police detective Ben Bohen in 1890 when recalling Belle Cora (depicted at right), the most notorious woman of Gold Rush–era California. The beautiful and cultured Cora ran San Francisco’s preeminent bordello. Among her clients and friends were influential politicians, businessmen, lawyers and judges. But when Belle’s lover shot and killed a prominent U.S. marshal, she found herself in direct conflict with not only the city police and prosecutor but also the feared 1856 Committee of Vigilance. Despite such formidable adversaries, in the end her true nemesis proved to be another woman, a California pioneer of an entirely different cloth.

The Coras Head West

San Francisco’s Gold Rush vixen was born Arabella “Belle” Ryan in Baltimore, Md., in 1828. Belle and sister Anastasia, two years her senior, were orphaned in childhood. The Ryan girls attended grammar school, but as teens they went to work in a dressmaking shop. Detective Bohen, a few years Belle’s junior, also grew up in Baltimore and knew the Ryans. As he later explained, the sisters often delivered gowns from the shop to the “hurdy gurdy” girls in a nearby bordello. “The girls were compelled to go to and from this place frequently, and in time developed a desire to lead the free and rollicking life of the women for whom the dresses were intended, and shortly afterward commenced a career of dissipation.”

In 1848 a restless Belle boarded a steamship bound for Charleston, S.C., where she took up with a lover. Her choice of companions was poor, for he was soon killed. Belle then boarded another ship, this one bound for New Orleans. There, as Bohen recalled, “She met Charles Cora. He was a prosperous gambler and was struck by her beauty.” Twenty-year-old Belle was indeed attractive, with a round face, thick brown hair, hazel eyes, a fair complexion and a plump, well-endowed figure. She in turn fell for the dashing gambler.

Cora was a well-known figure in the card rooms of New Orleans. Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1817, he immigrated to America with his family as a boy. One of his gambler friends, J.J. Bryant, later said Charles’ parents had abandoned him in the wide-open town of Natchez, Miss. “He was an ignorant Italian boy,” Bryant said, “and had been picked up and raised by a woman who was the keeper of a house of prostitution in Natchez.” Before turning 30 Cora had plied the Mississippi River as a successful and wealthy gambler. In 1846 he drifted back downriver to settle in New Orleans, where he became noted for his success at the faro tables.

Cora stood 5 feet 7 inches and was heavyset, with hunched shoulders, dark hair and a drooping mustache that covered his mouth. Like most gamblers, he dressed immaculately, accessorizing with an embroidered vest and a top hat. He was also quarrelsome. In May 1847 Cora got into a brawl and assaulted a New Orleans police officer. Five months later he engaged in another fracas in a New Orleans dance hall and landed in jail. A year later Cora met Belle Ryan, and from then on the pair lived together as man and wife, though they never legally married.

At the time Charles and partner Sam Davis were running a faro bank on Carondolet Street, near the French Quarter. In the spring of 1849, in a precursor of later events in San Francisco, Cora assaulted a man who’d insulted Belle. In revenge the man turned in Cora and Davis, who were arrested and charged with running an illegal gambling house. After a much-publicized hearing a judge released the pair after each paid a whopping $5,000 bail bond, roughly equivalent to $200,000 in today’s dollars.

News of the huge gold strike in California was then sweeping the globe. Resolving to join the Gold Rush, Charles and Belle boarded a gulf steamer, crossed the Isthmus of Panama, and took another steamship north to California. Fellow passenger E.L. Williams recalled that Cora and three companions started trouble aboard ship until the captain finally clapped all three in irons. Rumor had it Cora and cohorts carried on them $40,000, with which they planned to start a faro bank in San Francisco. In late December the steamer sailed through the Golden Gate.

Belle and Charles surely found ramshackle San Francisco a far cry from Baltimore or New Orleans. The harbor of the roaring boomtown was crammed with hundreds of abandoned vessels, their crews having jumped ship and left for the goldfields. Its 25,000 inhabitants were overwhelmingly young and 90 percent male. Most lived in canvas tents and rough wood-frame houses. A promising sight to the disembarking couple, however, were the dozens of saloons, gambling halls, fandango houses and bordellos.

An Incident at the Theater

In 1849 women were so scarce in San Francisco that when a member of the fairer sex strolled down the board sidewalks, crowds of lonesome, homesick miners would flock out of the saloons and gambling tents, hats in hand, just to catch a glimpse. Prostitutes accounted for much of the scant female population.

Leaving San Francisco for richer grounds, Belle and Charles took a ship bound up the Sacramento River to Marysville, gateway to the Sierra Nevada goldfields. There, in partnership with one James Y. McDuffie, they opened a gambling hall and bordello called the New World. “I remember seeing a bet of $10,000 made at poker by Charles Cora,” recalled one Forty-Niner who patronized the New World. “He won his bet.”

In 1852, flush with cash, the couple returned to San Francisco, where Belle took to using her paramour’s surname. There, at the corner of Dupont (present-day Grant Avenue) and Washington streets, in what today is Chinatown, she opened a brothel in one of the ubiquitous wood-frame houses.

As women remained scarce, men flocked to Belle Cora’s bagnio, which became the most successful of the more than 100 brothels in town. Though plain on the outside, its interior was replete with fancy furnishings and even fancier courtesans. Among the clientele were prominent merchants and political figures, including the mayor. As Belle prospered, she lavished money on Charles, which he quickly lost in the faro dens. The modish madam also tapped her newfound wealth to buy a fancy carriage, in which she enjoyed riding about town with her girls and to the theater with her husband—that is, when he was in town.

As he had on the Mississippi, Charles roamed widely, following the gambling circuit to Marysville, Sacramento and around again. On Oct. 26, 1852, he got into a quarrel with a dangerous gambler, Thomas Moore, at the El Dorado saloon in Sacramento. Both men jerked out Colt revolvers, one walking out into the street, while the other stood in the brick doorway. Customers scattered as the two opened fire. Fortunately for Cora, none of Moore’s shots found their mark. A police officer soon arrived on the scene and arrested both men. Each was released after forking over a $1,000 bond, and neither faced prosecution.

In the spring of 1855 Belle moved into a new, two-story brick building at 27 Waverly Place. By then San Francisco had greatly modernized. Replacing the tents were multistory brick buildings on streets paved with cobblestones and illuminated by gas lamps. The improvements prompted miners and merchants alike to send for their wives and families, bringing more and more respectable, middle-class women to town. The latter development brought Belle no end of trouble and scorn. At the same time Charles remained fiercely protective of her.

On the night of Nov. 15, 1855, Belle and Charles attended a play at the American Theater, with seats in the exclusive first balcony. In the row directly in front of them was William H. Richardson, 34, the U.S. marshal for northern California, accompanied by his 22-year-old wife, Lavinia, and a female friend. The Richardsons had been married for two years, and Lavinia was six months pregnant. Richardson, like many San Francisco pioneers, was a former soldier, a heavy drinker and quick to take up an insult or a quarrel. Neither he nor his wife had any idea a notorious madam was sitting directly behind them.

At intermission the lights went on, and Lavinia and her friend noticed men in the pit below leering at them and laughing. Lavinia complained to her husband, and Richardson went down to confront the offenders. The men explained they had not been looking at Lavinia, but rather at Belle Cora, just behind her. A furious Richardson stormed back to the balcony and demanded Charles and Belle leave at once. When they refused, the marshal complained to the theater manager. The latter declined to eject such wealthy patrons, so the Richardsons left in a huff.

The next evening William Richardson happened across Charles Cora in the Cosmopolitan saloon. Both had been drinking, and they exchanged angry words. Cora then announced to onlookers, “This man is going to slap my face!”   Richardson replied with a grin, “I promised to slap this man’s face, and I had better do it!”

At that, their respective friends stepped in and separated the pair.

The next evening, November 17, Cora was drinking in the Blue Wing saloon on Montgomery Street. As was his custom, he carried a pair of single-shot derringers in his pockets. When he heard that a man outside was asking for him, Cora stepped through the door and found Richardson waiting on the sidewalk. The marshal was also armed, carrying a concealed derringer and a silver-sheathed bowie knife.

In conversation, the two walked to the corner of Clay and Leidesdorff streets, where Cora suddenly pushed Richardson into a doorway.

“What do you mean to do?” exclaimed Richardson. “Do you mean to shoot me?”

“No, but I want to talk to you,” declared Cora. The gambler instead seized the marshal’s collar with his left hand, then yanked out a derringer and thrust it into Richardson’s breast.

“Don’t shoot!” the marshal pleaded with his assailant. “I am unarmed!”

Cora fired once, and the bullet tore into Richardson’s chest, a mortal wound. Cora held the marshal upright for long moments, then abruptly dropped his corpse and strode up the street.

Arrested almost immediately, Cora was scarcely in jail before outraged citizens had gathered outside, calling for his lynching. Belle was overcome with anxiety, for she well knew that on the California frontier murderers were generally sentenced to death by hanging. She was determined to save her man from the noose.

Witness Tampering

At the coroner’s inquest two days later the first witness called was 35-year-old Maria Travis Knight, who, like her husband, came from a respectable, well-to-do New England family. In testimony confirmed by other eyewitnesses, Maria described the killing and swore Richardson had not been holding a weapon when shot. Her testimony was critical, as she’d been passing down the same sidewalk and was standing only steps away when the fatal shot was fired.

Belle grew frantic when Charles was indicted for murder, his trial set for Jan. 3, 1856. She sent a prominent attorney to the Knight home. Explaining that his client was overcome with grief, the lawyer beseeched Maria to meet with Belle. At first Knight refused, but when a family member appealed to her Christian sense of duty, Maria finally consented.

The next evening, guided by a confidante of Belle’s, Knight climbed a vacant lot to the rear of the notorious bordello. “A long path through a beautiful flower garden led to a door of the house, which was opened from within by two servants,” Maria recalled. “Behind the servants stood the madam, who called herself Mrs. Cora. She was smiling and cordially invited us to enter.” Forty years later Knight recalled her hostess vividly. “She was superbly attired in black silk with costly laces,” Maria wrote. “Although she possessed the grace of a highly cultured woman, I shrank from her and wanted to run, but feared to make an attempt to escape.” After 10 minutes of casual conversation, Belle poured her visibly anxious guest a glass of wine.

“You seem nervous,” Belle said sweetly, “and the wine will help you.”

But middle-class women did not socialize in brothels, and they did not drink alcohol.

“I have never tasted liquor of any kind,” Knight told Cora.

“[Belle] quietly put the glass on the tray and then sat down by me,” recalled Maria. “She talked about the weather, her health and trivial things, and then most particularly inquired after my own health.” Belle then briefly left the parlor and returned with a cup of tea, saying, “I have brewed it expressly for you.”

By then Knight was overcome with fear, suspecting both the wine and the tea were poisoned. Again she refused. After more small talk, Belle finally turned to the topic of Richardson’s death. Maria replied with the same account she’d given at the coroner’s inquest. Then Belle asked, “What did Richardson have in his hand?”

“Nothing whatever,” Maria responded. “I distinctly saw that his fingers were extended and that it would be impossible to hold anything with his hands wide open.”

Belle cross-examined Knight, trying to get her to change her story, but Maria wouldn’t budge. Seething with anger, Belle abruptly stood and loomed over her guest. “Woman, if you expect to get out of this house alive, you must say that you saw Richardson with a pistol in his hand! That is the only ground we have to save my husband’s life.”

Though terrified, Knight managed to reply in an even tone, “Madam, I did not see a pistol in Richardson’s hand, and I cannot say that I did.”

An enraged Belle rushed to the parlor door and swung it open. Two men burst through the doorway. Knight recognized one of them—Dan Aldrich, a well-known gambler. He held a steel dagger in his hand. Maria later testified that Aldrich towered over her with the knife and growled threats. “My life would be spared if I would accept $1,000 and leave the country,” she recalled the trio telling her. “I must also promise never to return.”

Frantic to escape, Maria readily agreed. Belle told her they would later reveal where the bribe money was buried. Knight then rushed from the bordello and down the long hillside to her home. As soon as she’d recovered her wits, she reported the whole affair to the prosecuting attorney. Meanwhile, Belle set out to bribe other witnesses. She also hired three of the most prominent lawyers in California, paying them $5,000 each to defend Charles.

When the trial began a few weeks later, Knight was again a key prosecution witness. Charles Cora’s lawyers produced a parade of witnesses for the defense. Several of his gambler friends from New Orleans swore he had a reputation there as a peaceable man, which was false. Few of the defense witnesses had appeared at the coroner’s inquest, yet two men in turn took the stand and claimed Richardson had had a knife in hand when shot. On cross-examination both admitted they had visited Belle at her brothel before the trial, though each insisted he’d not been bribed.

Though it was clear there had been witnesses tampering and bribery, the trial resulted in a hung jury. San Franciscans were shocked. Knight had testified not only that Richardson hadn’t had a weapon in hand, but also that Belle Cora had threatened her life and tried to bribe her. Her account was plainly true, for no respectable woman would ever admit having set foot inside a brothel. Public shock turned to outrage when evidence surfaced that Belle had also offered a bribe to at least one of the jurors. “Rejoice, ye gamblers and harlots,” wrote crusading newspaper editor James King of William in ridicule of the verdict. “Assemble in your dens of infamy tonight and let the costly wine flow freely, and let the welkin [heavens] ring with your shouts of joy!”

The editorial struck a chord, for the city had been under the thumb of corrupt Tammany Hall politicians from back East. The latter’s enforcers, known as “shoulder strikers,” were ruffians from the street gangs of New York. That May 14, while Cora languished in jail awaiting a new trial, a crooked politician named James P. Casey mortally wounded King, who had exposed Casey as an ex-convict from New York. In short order upward of 8,000 men, many of them veterans of the Mexican War, reorganized the city’s famed Committee of Vigilance. Seizing weapons from state militia armories, they took control of San Francisco’s government. Their headquarters, a two-story building on Sacramento Street fortified by a sandbag breastwork, was known as “Fort Gunnybags.”

On May 18 more than 1,500 vigilantes surrounded the jail and, at the point of a heavy cannon, seized Charles Cora and James Casey. Two days later, within the confines of Fort Gunnybags, the prisoners were tried by the vigilantes and sentenced to death. Belle’s money and influence were irrelevant. On the day of execution, May 22, Charles asked a Catholic priest to give him the last rites. The father refused unless he first married Belle. She promptly came to Fort Gunnybags, where the priest performed the wedding. An hour later Cora and Casey, with nooses draped around their necks, stepped onto gangplanks protruding from two second-story windows. Within moments both plunged to their deaths.

Over the next two months the vigilantes hanged two more murderers and rounded up some 40 shoulder strikers and other hard cases, placing many aboard ships bound for Central America and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Belle Cora returned heartbroken to her bagnio on Waverly Place. Perhaps to deal with her grief, Belle took opium. She soon became addicted to it and later to chloroform. In myth and popular history the madam gave up her wild life and lived quietly in San Francisco. That was hardly true. She continued to run her bordello another six years. In 1857, when a policeman tried to make an arrest in Belle’s place, one of her girls broke a bottle over the officer’s head. Two years later another of her courtesans was arrested after promenading downtown in a revealing “French square neck” dress. Several other disturbances and scandals took place at her brothel. Then, in 1862, Alexander Purple, a thug whom the vigilantes had run out of town in 1856, cut his throat in the basement of Belle’s brothel after she’d rejected his advances. He later died.

Two weeks later, on Feb. 18, 1862, Belle herself died at the bordello from the effects of the habitual abuse of chloroform. California’s most notorious woman was only 35 years old.

What became of Belle’s nemesis, Maria Knight? In 1859 she divorced her husband, months later marrying prominent sea captain Samuel J. DeWolf. Six years later, on July 30, 1865, DeWolf’s steamer, Brother Jonathan, ran aground and sank off northern California, taking with it DeWolf and most of his 244 crewmen and passengers. A year later Maria stopped by the art studio of Gideon Jacques Denny, San Francisco’s foremost marine painter, to buy an oil on canvas of Brother Jonathan, when Denny’s ex-wife walked in and spotted the pair talking. Overcome with jealousy, the woman pulled a pistol and fired as Maria fled for her life. The widow DeWolf outran the bullet and lived to age 86, dying in 1906. In later years she often regaled listeners with the story of her run-in with Charles and Belle Cora. She was the last living eyewitness to the deadly quarrel that helped ignite the nation’s largest vigilante movement.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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San Francisco-based writer John Boessenecker is a special contributor to Wild West and the author of 12 books about the American West. For further reading see his book Against the Vigilantes: The Recollections of Dutch Charley Duane, as well as The Madams of San Francisco, by Curt Gentry, and History of California, by Theodore Henry Hittell.

In the end William “Billy” Dixon cared far less about being a legend or hero than he did about the vibrancy of life he had experienced on the Great Plains. Death had flirted with the famed frontier scout and buffalo hunter on more than one occasion, but it was in those harrowing moments he had felt most alive.  

A reflective Dixon recalled one of those life-defining episodes in his autobiography, dictated shortly before his death and published in 1914. His mind drifted to his days as a young buffalo hunter at Adobe Walls, a remote outpost of hunters, skinners and tradesmen in the Texas Panhandle. There, in the predawn hours of June 27, 1874, Dixon caught a glimpse of a large body of shadowy objects near a timberline beyond the settlement’s grazing horses. They were moving toward the outpost. Dixon strained his eyes but couldn’t define anything in the murky light. Suddenly, the advancing body “spread out like a fan” and unleashed a collective, thunderous war whoop that “seemed to shake the very air of the early morning.”  

Hundreds of mounted Comanche, Kiowa and Southern Cheyenne warriors then burst into view, charging furiously in full regalia. The fearless Comanche Chief Quanah Parker led the pack. Dixon described the scene with vivid, romantic prose—splashes of bright red, vermillion and ochre on the warriors and their horses…scalps dangling from bridles…fluttering plumes of magnificent warbonnets…and the bronzed, half-naked bodies of the riders, glittering with silver and brass ornaments as they emerged from the fires of the rising sun. “There was never a more splendidly barbaric sight,” Dixon confessed. “In after years I was glad that I had seen it.”  

Dixon had witnessed one of the last great thrusts by the Plains tribes in defense of their way of life—an ancient, nomadic existence tethered to the once mighty herds of buffalo. By the time of the 1874 Second Battle of Adobe Walls, however, the herds were vanishing at an alarming rate. Dixon, like the buffalo, miraculously survived. He emerged from battle that day as the “hero of Adobe Walls,” having dropped a warrior from his horse with a legendary rifle shot of more than 1,500 yards. In the ensuing decades Dixon became increasingly cognizant of the unique history he had experienced on the Great Plains. Above all he came to appreciate the magnitude those events had had on the development of the American West.

“I fear that the conquest of savagery in the Southwest was due more often to love of adventure than to any wish that cities should arise in the desert, or that the highways of civilization should take the place of the trails of the Indian and the buffalo,” Dixon said. “In fact, many of us believed and hoped that the wilderness would remain forever. Life there was to our liking. Its freedom, its dangers, its tax upon our strength and courage, gave zest to living.”

Memories of that life flooded Dixon’s mind. Fortunately, Billy’s greatest champion—his wife, Olive—convinced him to preserve his remembrances for future generations in an as-told-to autobiography. Starting in earnest in the fall of 1912, she faithfully recorded Billy’s running narrative on notebooks scattered throughout their homestead in Cimarron County, Okla. She even kept a notebook in the corral in case her taciturn husband became reflective about the past, ever mindful of his reluctance to fuss over his adventures. Sadly, Billy never read the final manuscript. He caught pneumonia during a winter storm and died shortly afterward at home on March 9, 1913, at age 62. Fellow members of his Masonic lodge buried Billy in the nearest cemetery on Texas soil, in the Panhandle town of Texline.

“Little did we suspect that Death—the enemy from whom he had escaped so many times in the old days—was at hand,” Olive wrote in the preface to his autobiography, “and that the arrow was set to the bow.”

Having inherited her husband’s hefty mantle, Olive faithfully labored over the next 43 years—until her own death—to preserve and promote his legacy. Her love and unwavering dedication to Billy, a man 22 years her senior, is consistently evident in her private letters, published articles, lectures and memorial projects. In the immediate aftermath of his death she dedicated her efforts to publishing his life story. First, Olive enlisted the services of Frederick S. Barde, the “dean of Oklahoma journalism,” to compile Billy’s remembrances into an orderly manuscript originally entitled Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon. She then borrowed $500 at 12 percent interest to pay for the printing—a mighty sacrifice for a widow of seven children. Twelve years would pass before Olive finally paid off her banknote, but any hardships proved worthwhile where her husband’s legend was concerned.

Historians and old-timers alike declared the book an instant frontier classic. University of Oklahoma history professor Joseph B. Thoburn, who became one of Olive’s closest friends and confidants, viewed the timing of her work on the book as “almost Providential.” In one letter to Olive he declared, “Posterity will always owe you a debt of gratitude for your persistence in persuading your husband to tell his life story for publication. So much valuable historical material of this class had been lost in the West because the story of a man’s life was permitted to die with him.”  

Thoburn spoke truth. If not for Olive’s perseverance, large swaths of Billy’s remarkable life story would never have been recorded. The autobiography alone provided Dixon’s firsthand accounts and context for two of the American West’s most thrilling episodes—the June 27, 1874, Second Battle of Adobe Walls, and the Sept. 12, 1874, Buffalo Wallow Fight.  

Buffalo Wallow

At Buffalo Wallow—a sideshow of the Sept. 9–14, 1874, Battle of the Upper Washita River—Dixon, fellow civilian scout Amos Chapman and four enlisted men of the 6th U.S. Cavalry defended a patch of naked ground against a large band of Comanche and Kiowa warriors. For their actions Dixon and the others received the Medal of Honor. Billy’s blunt but gripping narration of the battle to Olive provided the backstory behind the medals.  

Dixon described how he and his companions were carrying dispatches from McClellan Creek, in the Panhandle, to Camp Supply in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), some 150 miles to the northwest. They’d been sent by Colonel Nelson A. Miles, then commanding the 5th U.S. Infantry and the 6th Cavalry, whose rations were running dangerously low amid the Red River War, the ongoing campaign to subdue the southern Plains tribes. At sunrise on September 12, their second day out, the small party crested a knoll within plain sight of the Comanches and Kiowas. The warriors quickly encircled the men.    

“We were in a trap,” Dixon recalled. “We knew that the best thing to do was to make a stand and fight for our lives.” As the men dismounted, Private George W. Smith gathered the reins of their horses, only to be shot a moment later. He fell face down. At that the horses bolted. A fierce, close-quarters firefight ensued, as Dixon, Chapman, Sergeant Zachariah T. Woodhall and Privates Peter Roth (or Rath) and John Harrington fended off an estimated 125 warriors.  

Scanning the open plains for any shelter, Dixon spotted a depression some yards distant where buffalo had pawed and wallowed. As the men sprinted for it under fire, one shot dropped Chapman, who fell with a moan. Roth, Woodhall, Harrington and Dixon kept running till they reached the wallow, then desperately stabbed and clawed at the earth with their knives and hands to throw up a crude earthwork around its perimeter. “We were keenly aware that the only thing to do was to sell our lives as dearly as possible,” Dixon said. “We fired deliberately, taking good aim, and were picking off an Indian at almost every round.”  

Chapman and Smith—the latter presumed dead—remained where they had fallen. One of the men cried out for Chapman to make a dash for the wallow, but the scout replied that a bullet had shattered his left knee. Dixon refused to leave Chapman stranded. Despite intense volleys by the enemy, he finally reached his fellow scout, hoisted Chapman on his back and bore the larger man to the safety of the wallow. Chapman later told a dramatically different version of who saved whom that day, a claim the reserved Dixon never contested publicly while alive, much to Olive’s dismay.  

Around 3 p.m. merciful fate intervened, as sheets of cold rain provided the defenders with welcome water and pelted their assailants, prompting the Comanches and Kiowas to retreat for warmth and cover out of rifle range. By dawn the next day the warriors had vanished. The break came too late for Smith, who’d been mortally wounded with a punctured lung. In the dark of night Dixon and Roth had manhandled the private back to the wallow, where he died without complaint. Decades later Billy spoke of the cool courage displayed by every man that day and mournfully told his wife that Private Smith still lay buried out on the windswept plains.  

Tireless Work

The knowledge that Smith’s grave, as well as the battle site, remained unmarked overwhelmed Olive with a sense of responsibility to honor the memory of Billy and his contemporaries. With that singular mission in mind she leapt from one project to the next. She wrote to magazines and newspapers, often to correct details in published articles about Billy’s life. In 1922 she became a charter member of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Society and two years later spearheaded the society’s efforts to mark the 50th anniversary of the Second Battle of Adobe Walls.  

On June 27, 1924, more than 3,000 celebrants descended on the remote Adobe Walls battlefield, by then part of the Turkey Track Ranch in Hutchinson County, Texas. They arrived in automobiles, wagons and on horseback, all to pay homage to the memory of a heroic and successful last stand by 28 men and one woman (Hannah Olds, the wife of cook William Olds) against “the flower and perfection” of the Plains tribal warriors.  

Andy Johnson of Dodge City, Kan.—one of two living defenders—attended the celebration with a pistol fastened to his waistband. He later regaled the crowd with a stirring account of the battle as airplanes circled overhead. Naturally, Johnson’s story of Dixon’s legendary long shot received prime treatment, though the claim later drew skepticism in some quarters. Olive also made brief remarks, crediting others for the historic occasion. The crowd cheered lustily when a 10-foot-tall monument of the finest Oklahoma red granite was unveiled. Inscribed on it are the names of each Adobe Walls defender.  

The successful event only fueled Olive’s commitment to her cause. She had already begun lobbying the society to mark the site of the Buffalo Wallow Fight while simultaneously searching for a publisher to reprint Billy’s book. Despite the book’s critical acclaim a decade earlier, Olive’s hunt for a publisher proved slow and unnerving. In a Dec. 27, 1925, letter to Thoburn, she went so far as to declare that if she couldn’t secure a publisher soon, she would be forced to “sell my land in Cimarron County.”  

Two years passed before Olive celebrated those two signature achievements—the release of a revised edition of Billy’s autobiography, by Dallas-based P.L. Turner Co., and the placement of a monument at the Buffalo Wallow battleground, 22 miles south of Canadian, Texas. She even successfully lobbied the U.S. War Department to provide a grave marker for Private George Smith.  

Still, Olive couldn’t rest. Two years later she made the intensely personal decision to have her husband’s remains reinterred to Adobe Walls. On June 27, 1929—55 years to the day after the storied battle with allied warriors led by Quanah Parker—a police escort led a funeral procession three hours from Texline to the battleground. Reverent spectators lined the route, removing their hats as the caravan passed. A headline in the Amarillo Daily News proclaimed, Col. Billy Dixon Gets Last Wish: Buried at Site of Adobe Walls. Never mind that Dixon had no military rank; he didn’t need one to be remembered.  

Immortalized in Print

The model of a devoted widow, Olive ensured her husband’s name would echo through time. She did so tirelessly, lovingly and with humility. Recognizing her immense contributions to the history of the Texas Panhandle, author John McCarty sought her permission to write a biography about her life with Billy, and his vision culminated in the 1955 publication of Adobe Walls Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive Dixon. Initially, Olive had balked at the idea. “Throughout the time when interviews and research were bringing out the story of her life,” McCarty wrote, “Mrs. Dixon steadily maintained that there was nothing distinctive about her or her experiences; she even protested that there would be no interest in a story of her life, as she had done nothing out of the ordinary. All her disclosures were slanted toward one recurring theme: ‘My husband was a great man.’ But she took no credit for Dixon’s achievements.”  

Olive died in Amarillo a year later, on March 17, 1956—43 years and eight days after her beloved Billy left this earth. Death stole her swiftly. That evening she had joined daughter Edna and son-in-law Walter Irwin for dinner at a popular barbecue restaurant. On the drive home Olive quietly slumped over on her daughter’s shoulder. She never regained consciousness.  

As a child growing up in Virginia, Olive had dreamed of a time when she could “mingle with people who were really doing things in an unusual way.” Stories of the expansive cattle ranches on the Great Plains fueled her imagination, until in 1893, at age 20, she boldly joined brother Archie King in Texas for the adventure of a lifetime. He worked as a cowhand for a Hutchinson County spread, living with wife and child in a crude log-and-sod structure dug out of a bank on Johns Creek some 20 miles from the ranch headquarters. She also visited brother Albert, who wrangled for a neighboring spread.  

Olive instantly fell in love with the West, and soon after with one of its icons. Her childhood dream was realized. She’d sought adventure, embraced the pioneer spirit and then married the love of her life. Olive, like her husband, had lived a life worth remembering.   

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Ron J. Jackson Jr. is an award-winning author from Rocky, Okla., and a regular contributor to Wild West. For further reading he recommends the autobiography Life and Adventures of “Billy” Dixon, as well as Adobe Walls: The History and Archeology of the 1874 Trading Post, by T. Lindsay Baker and Billy R. Harrison; Adobe Walls Bride: The Story of Billy and Olive King Dixon, by John L. McCarty; and Billy and Olive Dixon: The Plainsman and His Lady, by Bill O’Neal.

There’s an element of truth to the maxim “the hat makes the man.” In the 19th century West, for example, certain headgear served to identify their wearers at a glance. Soldiers had the shako, firefighters the leatherhead, Indians the warbonnet and vaqueros the sombrero. But perhaps no other topper in history has symbolized a people and their region in such a defining way as the cowboy hat. See it stamped on a box, in neon outside a storefront or in a popular present-day email “emoji,” and one immediately thinks of the American West.

Yet, the cowboy hat wasn’t the most prolific lid of its time or place. In a 1957 editorial headlined The Hat That Won the West, in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, writer-historian Lucius Beebe disputed that the cowboy hat was ubiquitous out West, a notion he deemed an invention of artist Frederic Remington. “The authentic hat of the Old West,” Beebe wrote, “was the cast-iron derby, the bowler of Old Bond Street and the chapeau melon of French usage.” He then pointed to such derby wearers as lawman Bat Masterson, stagecoach robber Charles E. “Black Bart” Boles, Wells Fargo chief detective James B. Hume and, tellingly, “Remington and his imitators” as proof of his assertion.

Regardless, the cowboy hat remains the iconic symbol of the West. And the name that has become synonymous with it is Stetson. Ironically, John B. Stetson was an Easterner, and the factory that initially steamed, shaped and shipped tens of millions of hats bearing his name was in Philadelphia, though the company that produces them under license today is, fittingly, in Texas.

Stetson (1830–1906), the son of a New Jersey hatmaker, was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a young man and resolved to close up the family shop and venture West for the climate and to see its vaunted beauty before dying. In 1861 news of the Pikes Peak Gold Rush drew him and fellow hopefuls to the Colorado goldfields. Stetson arrived, so the story goes, amid heavy downpours and so crafted a beaver felt hat of his own design to keep dry. It featured the trademark wide brim, high crown and waterproof lining since associated with his name. The style proved so popular among the Western outdoorsmen Stetson encountered that the emboldened entrepreneur returned East in 1865 to resume hatmaking.

The first design off the line in his Philadelphia factory was the “Boss of the Plains” (see above). It proved instantly popular and dominated the market for the next couple of decades. As Stetson owners took to adding personalized touches—a dent here or a curved brim there—the company took note and rolled out additional styles.

Stetson got a big boost in the 1880s with the advent of international celebrity in the person of William Frederick Cody. Cody was already a fan of Stetsons, custom versions of which he wore onstage in the early 1870s in touring productions organized by dime novelist Ned Buntline. Within a few years of launching his own Wild West arena shows in 1883, Buffalo Bill was plastering his Stetson-capped image on signboards from San Francisco to Saxony. The hatmaker couldn’t buy better advertising.

The birth of the silver screen and its Western stars further amplified the popularity of the Stetson, one of which the company named for the actor who made it popular—the Tom Mix.

Today the cowboy hat endures, and scores of hatmakers big and small continue to craft styles that symbolize the Old and New West. We trace its history below.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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