Restored Mesker facades still grace buildings in Western towns. “I just did not want anything bad to happen to it,” Barbara Corson says about the building she purchased and renovated in McGregor, Iowa, in 1981. “I knew it was special just by the way it looked.” As it turns out, Corson had rescued a superior …
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Thanks to his sweetheart, the sheriff’s niece, he strolled out of jail. In September 1881, after 21-year-old fugitive William Franklin Martin was captured in Tennessee and returned to Missouri to face a murder charge, the startling story of his escape with the help of the Laclede County sheriff’s 16-year-old niece, and the love-struck pair’s hasty …
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The late artist’s Smoke Signal still draws attention. An Apache warrior lifts his blanket from a fire and looks skyward at the rising smoke. It’s a scene straight out of a B-Western movie, but in Allan Houser’s imagination and sculpture it’s authentic, noble and stunning. Like most of his works, Smoke Signal pulls you in. …
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They served among various Northwest Indians beginning in the 1840s. In the 1840s in what would become Montana, Father Anthony Ravalli often rode an Indian pony to reach the places he was needed, even on those days it was necessary to tilt the wide brim on his hat to shield his face from the bitter …
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He witnessed the killing of Crazy Horse, but his account vanished. Billy Garnett witnessed a lot of Indian wars history, and he was born to see it from both sides. Garnett was the only son of a Confederate general killed at the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, but his mother was an Oglala Lakota, and Billy …
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CHIEF JOSEPH I read Candy Moulton’s article “Chief Joseph’s Guiding Principle, in the April 2014 issue, with appreciation. I am fifth generation from missionaries Henry and Eliza Spalding, who in 1836 went west with the Whitmans. The Spaldings settled with the Nez Perces, the Whitmans with the Cayuses. The Spaldings’ older daughter was at the …
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Nobody disputes that in 1864 Major Edward W. (“Ned”) Wynkoop wanted to kill Indians—that is, before he had a change of heart that September, as detailed in Louis Kraft’s “Wynkoop’s Gamble to End War” (see P. 44). And nobody disputes that it took a brave man, albeit an officer acting without orders, to approach the …
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