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 the museum is...

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 was Milanese,...

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 history — it's what...