https://link.amazon/B0dlf2Syz There are some writers you read for the subject. Others you read for the writer. Julia Bricklin became the second kind for me somewhere around the middle of The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline. By the time I finished America's Best Female Sharpshooter, I had stopped checking what her next book was about before deciding to read it. Her new book, Badass Women of the West (Farcountry Press), comes out tomorrow. The premise is simple, and the book is

ESPN’s College GameDay set up this morning in front of Ayres Hall, and at noon the top-ranked Texas Longhorns kick off against the Volunteers inside a sold-out Neyland Stadium. By the box-score measure, this is hardly a rivalry at all. The two programs have met exactly three times, the last of them on New Year’s Day 1969, and every one of those games was played in Dallas. Today is the first time Texas has ever walked onto the field in Knoxville. But the football is only the n

"I do not believe much of what Mr. Bridger says — He exaggerates about Indians." That was the Army's assessment in the fall of 1866, when Jim Bridger, who was then sixty-two years old and half-blind after forty-four years on the frontier, kept telling anyone in uniform that Red Cloud had assembled the largest Indian alliance the northern plains had ever seen and meant to sweep the Bozeman Trail clean. Bridger had blazed a trail on the far side of the Bighorns specifically to

In August 1853, 150 armed men rode toward Fort Bridger carrying a treason warrant sworn out against a man who couldn't read it, against a name he couldn't write. Jim Bridger watched them take everything he owned through a spyglass from the hills above Black's Fork. That's where episode five of our Mountain Men series opens, and it's where twenty years of Bridger's life had been heading. This is the middle of the story, which is the part that most often gets skipped in pop cul

"Hulloa! Bridger, what's the matter now?" "Only some feathers in my back." The feathers were a pair of Blackfeet arrows. One came out clean. The other left a three-inch iron point buried in the bone near his spine. One Jim Bridger would carry with him for three years, through three trapping seasons and three rendezvous, because no man in the mountains had the surgical skill to pry it from the bone and dig it out without killing him. Bridger was twenty-eight years old. He'd be

At the end of the last episode, John Colter was standing naked on the bank of the Jefferson River, surrounded by hundreds of Blackfeet warriors, watching what was left of his friend John Potts being hacked to pieces. Then one of the chiefs pointed toward the open prairie and told him to go. Colter walked at first. Then he looked back and saw the young warriors stripping off their blankets and leggings. He understood. He was being given a head start. The third and final episod

Dolly Parton died today in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 80. If you live outside of Tennessee, you're likely going to be puzzled, in the coming days and weeks, by the way her passing is about to dominate your social media feeds. Because you're going to see post after post from people down here, all mourning this woman they've never met. Some of those posts will be maudlin. Corny. Some, God knows, will include folks holding up candles and crying and holding impromptu wak

In the winter of 1807, John Colter crossed the Continental Divide alone, on snowshoes, in temperatures that dropped to thirty below zero. He carried a thirty-pound pack, a rifle, and nothing else. Somewhere on the far side of the mountains, he descended into a valley no white man had ever seen and looked west at three jagged peaks rising straight off the valley floor — the mountains French trappers would later name the Tetons. He had no name for them and no one to tell. And w

In the summer of 1808, two veterans of the Lewis and Clark Expedition paddled their canoes up the Jefferson River, deep in Blackfoot country, checking beaver traps they'd set under cover of darkness. When John Potts insisted the sound of approaching hooves was only buffalo, he called his partner a coward for wanting to retreat. Moments later, five or six hundred Blackfeet warriors appeared on both banks. Potts was dead within minutes. His partner — John Colter — stood naked a

150 years ago today. On August 2, 1876, Jack McCall walked into Nuttal & Mann's Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood, stepped up behind James Butler Hickok, put a revolver a few inches from the back of his head, and fired. Wild Bill stiffened, fell back in his chair, and never made a sound. Texas Jack Omohundro had known him for eight years. They met in 1868, when a cattle drive left the young Virginian in Hays City, Kansas, where Hickok was serving as a deputy United States marshal. Fi

One hundred eighty years ago today — July 27, 1846 — a boy was born at Pleasure Hill, his father's farm on Cunningham Creek, a mile and a half west of the courthouse at Palmyra, in Fluvanna County, Virginia. He was the fourth of the twelve children John Burwell Omohundro and Catherine Salome Baker had together, and the first of them born in that house. They named him John Baker Omohundro. Nobody remembers that name. His own family mislaid it. Malvern Hill Omohundro, Jack's mu

One hundred and forty years ago today, on July 23, 1886, Giuseppina Morlacchi died at her farm in Billerica, Massachusetts. In her lifetime she was the most famous ballerina in America, "The Peerless" to the press, the woman who introduced the can-can to this country, the first Dove Eye in The Scouts of the Prairie, and the wife of Texas Jack Omohundro. She was buried from St. Joseph's in Lowell, three priests officiating, the attendance small. I had planned to publish a long

Edward Zane Carroll Judson died of heart failure at 4:20 in the afternoon on July 16, 1886 — one hundred and forty years ago today — at Eagle's Nest, his twenty-room mansion in the Catskills above Stamford, New York. The funeral two days later was the largest the village had ever seen. The New York Times counted more than eight hundred mourners. Special trains ran on the Ulster and Delaware to bring them in. Nearly two hundred Grand Army of the Republic men marched in the pro

A retrospective on the 2026 Texas Jack Association Roundup — and the road to Leadville 2030. I set out from Chattanooga just after five in the morning last Wednesday, driving north toward Richmond, hoping to beat the rush hour through Knoxville and Bristol. It's a long haul to make alone, but I wanted the time. This was my last Roundup as the Association's Vice-President. In October I take over as President, and somewhere, passing from my home state of Tennessee into the Old

On an afternoon in the middle of August 1887, a Liverpool police constable (number 925, the record keeps him that anonymous) arrested a cowboy in Whitechapel and marched him, along with his horse, to the main bridewell. The horse was the charge: the mustang had been ridden through the streets with an unhealed wound festering under the saddle, and the constable meant to have its rider up for cruelty. At the bridewell, though, the officials ran into a difficulty they were not u

On the night of June 3rd, 1876, one hundred and fifty years ago, the curtain came down at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware, and Texas Jack Omohundro and Buffalo Bill Cody walked offstage together for the last time. There was no announcement that this was an ending. No reviewer marked it. The two men had stood on stages together for four years, played hundreds of shows from Maine to Texas, and turned themselves from a scout and a cowboy into what Cody called "firs

A Facebook page called "History Haven, " — 165,000 followers, listed on the platform as a "Museum," with a publicly posted address at 2111 N Lacrosse St in Rapid City, South Dakota — published a post on May 4 about three of the most famous Westerners who ever lived. Within a few days it had picked up over 2,000 likes, 124 comments, and 249 shares. Two things you should know up front. The first is that 2111 N Lacrosse St in Rapid City is the Best Western Ramkota Hotel. Unless

Just four months after her husband Texas Jack Omohundro died of pneumonia in Leadville, his widow was training ballerinas in Philadelphia. This Philadelphia Record dispatch—reprinted in the New Orleans States and New Orleans Item on November 17, 1880—finds Mlle. Morlacchi at the stage door of the National Theatre, sorting some eighty hopefuls into Amazons for the spectacular drama Esmeralda. The reporter, taking her exclamations at face value, files her accent as French. She

In an essay I put up today at matthewkerns.com , there's a passage that a Dime Library reader might recognize as being in the house style: Any major American religion emerging in the 1830s was going to be violent and westward-moving. Not because of specific theology, but because that's what religion becomes under frontier conditions. When expanding territory meets religious authority meets secular resistance, you get Porter Rockwell. The violence isn't incidental to Mormon hi

On April 10th, John C. Reilly steps into the boots of William F. "Buffalo Bill" Cody in Heads or Tails , a new Italian-American Western from directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis. And I have to say, I'm excited. Reilly is one of those actors who seems incapable of giving a bad performance. Whether he's breaking your heart in Chicago , making you laugh until it hurts in Step Brothers , or disappearing into the quiet dignity of Stan Laurel in Stan & Ollie , the man