Commentary and stories from the towns, farms, and ranches of the modern West
Editor's note: I'heading for North Dakota today, which brought all this up... When I was young, my folks would take us to visit my aunt and uncle on their Ranch in Wyoming. They had a marvelous old house with a steep roof and whitewashed wood siding. It was huge and warm and always filled with …
One of the most effective lawmen of the old west wasn’t Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok. It’s a Federal Marshall who worked out of Judge Parker’s court in Fort Smith, Arkansas. His job was hunting outlaws in the 75,000 square miles of Indian Territory - what is now the state of Oklahoma. This …
Do you remember sheepherder wagons? I recall seeing them off in the distance, out on the prairie, in those Wyoming hills west of Cheyenne. They were found on open range around the west, on land where cows don’t do well but sheep thrive. That sheep wagon, with its white canvas top, was a beacon in …
Ballarat, California is a town on the edge of nowhere, a collection of mud huts and tin shanties in one of the most hostile deserts in the world. The town was born to serve those fortune hunters known as the Rainbow Chasers. The Rainbow Chasers hunted minerals all around the Mojave Desert. One of the …
If you’re traveling in the midwest, there’s a building in Mitchell, South Dakota, that you might want to stop and see. The folks in Mitchell say it’s the World’s Only Corn Palace, and it’s been around for more than a hundred years. The Corn Palace was built as a way to prove to the world …
