The Wild West Extravaganza

In the fall of 1874, about three hundred men of Canada's newly formed North West Mounted Police were lost on the prairie, watching their horses die and searching for a whiskey fort they couldn't find. Their rescue came in the form of a short, bow-legged horse trader named Jerry Potts. The son of a Scottish fur trader and a Blood woman named Crooked Back, Potts lost his father...

In July of 1881, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett in a darkened bedroom at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was just twenty-one years old, possibly younger, and had spent the better part of three years among the young women of Fort Sumner, earning a reputation as something of a ladies' man. That same year, rumors swirled that Paulita Maxwell, the teenage sister of ...

Was the Civil War fought over slavery or states' rights? Today we’ll examine the primary sources: the secession declarations of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas, the ordinances of the other Confederate states, Alexander Stephens's Cornerstone Speech, Jefferson Davis's own words to the Confederate Congress in 1861, and Lincoln's letters on slavery and the Union....