Mr. Wells seems to have held a different life philosophy than my mother who always countered my argument to be allowed to do something “because all my friends were doing it” with “If everybody else jumped off the Smoky Hill River bridge, would you?”
Read more
I just finished reading Deb Goodrich Bisel‘s latest book The Civil War in Kansas: Ten Years of Turmoil. I’m a native Kansan and a student of history, but I can honestly say I learned some things about Kansas that I didn’t previously know.
Read more
The statement in question refers to relics found at a Plains Indian wars battle site of the 1870s:
The fact that the majority of the Indian cartridges are Spencers [.56/56; .56/52; .56/50] that were not manufactured after 1866 suggests that they were conserving the cartridges they had and even going to great length to curate their ammunition.
Read more
I’ve heard it called hooch, white lightning, moonshine, mountain dew, corn squeezings, but never “wet groceries” until I read it in Hoig’s Fort Reno, 138.
Can anyone add other names to the list?
Read more
Nineteenth-century prairie fires were awesome and awful. They were one of Mother Nature’s events that completely mesmerized me during my research for The Deadliest Woman in the West. Before settlers broke the prairie, there was an immense carpet of grass from Canada to the Rio Grande and bordered on the east by the Mississippi River and on the west by the Rocky Mountains.
Read more
Dad has completed the manuscript for his new book about George Armstrong Custer and is now wrapping up the editing process. Soon it will be off to publication. He has done extensive research for this project which will be readily apparent in the text.
Read more
BENNINGTON — A voracious reader from childhood, Rod Beemer remembered the day in 1960 when he purchased an entire set of the Encyclopædia Britannica with his own money.
It was a proud moment until his mother, a teacher, found out how much her 18-year-old son had spent on the multivolume set — nearly $700.
“My mom told me she could have bought the books for half the price,” he said.
Read more