wild woman

Ella Lazinka was an eastern Oregon cowgirl who won the world championship cowgirl relay race at the Pendleton Round-Up in 1912.  The following year she returned to defend her crown. The cowgirls’ relay race was run over a three-day period, two miles each day, with the rider changing horses every half-mile, mounting, dismounting, unsaddling, and...

Little Joe was not what he seemed to be.  In fact, he was not a he at all.  But that fact was not revealed until much later. Josephine Monaghan was born to a prominent Buffalo, New York, family in 1847.  As a teenager she had a love affair, became pregnant and fled to New York...

Water sloshed out of buckets that were being passed quickly between the people standing in front of a house fire in the tiny town of North Platte, Nebraska. The water was frantically tossed onto the flames rising from Buffalo Bill Cody’s home. It was the winter of 1891. With the help of friends and neighbors,...

Night had fallen over Tombstone, Arizona, and every restless and rowdy character in the vicinity of the southwestern town had poured into the saloons and gambling dens to while away the hours until dawn arrived. The doorways of the numerous taverns that lined Allen Street were illuminated with smoky kerosene torches. Signs that hung over...

When suffragette Susan B. Anthony boarded the passenger car of the Union Pacific Railroad in Ogden, Utah, in late December 1871, the train was filled to capacity.  Men, women, children, livestock, baggage, and crates containing food and supplies were all being loaded onto the vehicle bound for Chicago. Weary and carrying an oversized satchel bulging...

The town of Deadwood, South Dakota Territory, in 1876, was a mixture of makeshift-tents erected by enthusiastic gold seekers, timber collectors, freight wagon owners, and owners of bawdy houses operated by some of the area’s most notorious madams. Ribbed by thick, tree-filled mountain chains and bleak valleys, the popular mining camp was the ideal destination...

On February 3, 1843, well-known and well-respected frontiersman and scout Christopher Houston Carson (better known as Kit Carson) escorted his bride, Maria Josefa Jaramillo, from Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Taos, where they were married, to their new home not far away.  Maria was Carson’s third wife. He was thirty-three years old and she...

Seventeen-year-old Geronimo rode quickly out of a rocky canyon near Clifton in southern Arizona, chasing half a dozen wild horses.  The animals’ hooves pounded hard into the parched earth, leaving dusty impressions behind. It was desperately hot, and foam flecks of sweat bounced off their backs, evaporating into the air before having a chance to...