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

I don’t remember the first year my friend Tony invited me up to his house for the Fourth of July. I know what the plan was. It was the Fourth, it was his mom’s birthday, and we were going to grill out, eat some of his dad’s smoked pork ribs, shoot off some fireworks, and drink some beers. That was the invitation. That was the door. But when Ron and Ann Hicks opened that door, they opened it wider than I knew. Because the invitation they extended to me, they extended to my wif

The news of Robert "Bobby" Carradine’s passing at 71 is a heavy blow, not just because of the legendary acting dynasty he belonged to, but because of the specific, gentle light he brought to the screen. His niece, Martha Plimpton, shared a beautiful tribute noting that of all the eight Carradine brothers, Bobby was "the absolute best" because of his inherent decency and heart. She credited his talent to his kindness—a rare, nonjudgmental love that made everyone around him fe

Robert Duvall was more than an actor. He was an anchor. As news of his passing at 95 (on February 15, 2026) circulates, it’s hard not to look back at a career that feels less like a filmography and more like a map of the American cinema over the last 60 plus years. Duvall was the ultimate craftsman. He was the "actor's actor" who managed to be a household name without ever losing the chameleon-like mystery of a character performer. Duvall’s film debut was as Boo Radley in the

In April 1876, "Texas Jack" Omohundro was in the home stretch of a marathon. He and Buffalo Bill Cody were eight months into a grueling dramatic tour that had begun in Philadelphia the previous August. By the time the troupe arrived for their three-night stand in Rochester on April 10th, they had already traversed the Eastern Seaboard, dipped deep into the South through Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama, crossed into Texas, and battled a Northern winter through the Midwest and O

On February 14, 1884, Theodore Roosevelt suffered an unimaginable tragedy, losing both his wife and mother on the same day, in the same house. Theodore Roosevelt 1884 Just two days earlier, his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to their daughter. Theodore, who was at that time a young state assemblyman serving in Albany, was urgently called home to New York City because his mother, Mittie, had fallen gravely ill with typhoid fever. By the time he arrived, ho

In 2000, I boarded a plane for the first time, heading to Los Angeles to meet my friend Amanda and begin our trek following Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature tour. I was a California novice, so she convinced me that Disneyland was a mandatory stop. We eventually made it to the front of the line for the Mad Tea Party, and as we were ushered into our teacup, the next four people in line piled in with us. I sat down, reached for the center dial to spin, and looked up straight into

It is often said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Though that phrase has often been misattributed to Oscar Wilde, it was actually included in a collection of aphorisms by charles Caleb Colton, printed in 1820, 34 years before Wilde's birth. Sometimes, attribution, like imitation, can be tricky. In the world of history, writing, and research, it has a different name: plagiarism. Recently, a post by @Dr_TheHistories / @archaeohistories (Dr. Mohammad Firoz Khan