On the evening of September 18, 1854, a large group gathered at Major M.P. Rively’s store on Salt Creek, near Leavenworth, Kansas. Four months earlier, Congress had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and created two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. The Act also stated that going forward the citizens of each territory, rather than Congress, could determine for themselves if slavery would be allowed. The citizens of Kansas Territory want

Carlos Montezuma as Azteka on tour with Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill in 1872. Carlos Montezuma was born Wassaja, a Yavapai, in 1866. When he was five, Akimel O'odham raiders captured him and sold him into slavery. An Italian photographer named Carlo Gentile soon bought him for thirty dollars—about seven hundred in today's money. But instead of treating him as property, Gentile adopted the boy, renamed him Carlos Montezuma, and gave him an education as they traveled the frontie

Transcript of an article from the San Antonio Express-News, published on February 22, 1925. A lonely American cowboy adrift in South America happened to run plump into a typical Wild West show. Through this meeting—a sort of reunion with home folks—he was launched on a career which ended finally in his becoming one of the greatest—perhaps the greatest—wit and comedians of his day. Few people know that Will Rogers helped the British to win the Boer war, and that, if it hadn't

Episode 4 in a 6 part Legends of the Old West series which I wrote on Buffalo Soldiers. The Trans-Pecos desert of West Texas in 1880 was a blistering furnace, a land of jagged ridges and dry basins where survival was measured in drops of water. For over a year, the legendary Apache chief Victorio had turned this punishing landscape into a weapon, striking with lightning speed before vanishing back into the mountains. He was a master strategist who knew every hidden wash and