Typically I start my day at the office dressed like a person going to…an office. I’ve got two deadlines for books to meet today, so I went with a casually look. Kaki pants, golf shirt, golf hat. Seems like years that I’ve been able to play a round of golf, but the clothes make me read more…

I’ve been so busy finishing the Sam Sixkiller book, publicizing the next book signing, and compiling photos for the completed manuscript I’ve neglected other areas of the job, namely updating sections of the website. Finding photographs for the Sixkiller book has been the most time consuming. Most of the pictures I need are at the read more…

Review by Ken Crocker I was a history buff in school. But in hindsight, I realize that the thinning out of history was well under way by the time my interest piqued. For example, history of frontier exploration was very watered down. Topics in this area were very limited and abbreviated. I must say that read more…

In the Wild West, where law was often non-existent, vigilantes often took “enforcement of the law,” as well as moral codes into their own hands. The term vigilante stems from the Spanish equivalent, meaning private security agents. Vigilantes were most common in mining communities, but were also known to exist in cow towns and in read more…

American cowboy Will James once said, “Whenever there is (trouble), we’ll depend on ourselves. We’ll take care of it – when it comes, not after it’s too late. I think that’s what Mysterious Dave Mather was thinking on this day in 1884, when he got a few shots at Tom Nixon inside the Opera House read more…

It’s so easy to romanticize what it would have been like to live in the Old West. I do it daily. I mostly contemplate enacting a bit of frontier justice on today’s lawbreakers, but even that wasn’t as I good as I dream it was. Let’s take a look a rural life in the wild read more…

It always bugged me that I wasn’t naturally talented at anything. I always wanted to be a natural athlete. To throw farther, run faster, jump higher – the first time out at whatever the sport might be. It would have been nice to have the instant skill to be a great chef or seamstress. Or read more…

This is a big day in the history of the American Old West – beginning with a major happening that occurred in 1881. Sheriff Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. A year later, Johnny Ringo was found dead of a gunshot wound to his head up read more…

In 1889, Buckskin Frank Leslie came home to his ranch bad drunk from a week long toot in Tombstone. He got into an argument with his girlfriend, Blonde Mollie Williams who he had seen in town with another man. After telling Frank how worthless he was and how much more of a man the person read more…

Another day working on the second edition of Hearts West: Mail Order Brides of the Frontier. I sincerely do not know how mail-order brides were able to marry a man they never physically met until an hour before their wedding. They had no idea if the description the man gave of himself was accurate. And read more…