A skilled sharpshooter who was equally skilled in the art of profanity, Calamity Jane is a legend of the west. We explore the real woman behind the icon.

The Covered Wagon of the Great Western Migration. 1886 in Loup Valley, Nebr. A family poses with the wagon in which they live and travel daily during their pursuit of a homestead.

Patrick Floyd Jarvis Garrett was born in Chambers County, Alabama, on June 5, 1850. When he was a child, his father, John Lumpkin Garrett, bought a cotton

Okay, so I’m working on my western script (again) and realized a common thread that runs through it. In the wild west their was no welfare. Doing some research and I’am realizing that t…

Mention the Old West, and most people have certain images which come to mind. Among the most popular images are those of cowboys, horses, cattle rustlers, lawmen, outlaws, gunfights, deserts, mining camps, gold, prairies, and mountains. And while many of these images are historically accurate, they have also been slightly twisted by Hollywood movies. Some images, however, are more movies than reality. Take, for example, a few other images which conjure up the Old West, those being whiskey, saloons, and poker. These images are accurate too, but probably not in the way most people think. And, there is no doubt that the public perception with regard to these images is far more driven by celluloid than the truth. In the movies we’re used to seeing a man push open the swinging doors of an ornately decorated and large clean saloon, belly up to the bar, and order a whiskey. As someone plays a piano in the corner, with dancing girls swirling around, the bartender takes out a clean bottle of bourbon, and fills a shot glass which is quickly consumed. The man then throws down a gold coin, and takes his bottle to one of the many gaming tables, and gets involved in a game of poker. The poker game then ends in a shootout, with dead bodies strewn about the floor. We’ve watched this scene a hundred times, if we’ve seen it once. The problem is that it’s not always an accurate or typical portrayal of the way it really was, so let me point out a few things about the Old West you may not know. Until the Old West got a little more sophisticated in the late 1800’s, due primarily to the great wealth created by railroads, mining camps, and, cattle towns, most saloons were not large, not very ornate, nor were they very tidy. Floors were often covered with sawdust, which absorbed everything from tobacco juice, blood, beer, and liquor, as well as holding down other displeasing odors associated with saloons of the time period. Not the least of these odors was caused by vomit, deposited on the floor after drunken patrons of the saloon “aired their paunches.” Likewise, instead of a jingling piano, it was probably just as common to see a barber chair in the corner of a saloon. The saloon’s management, by providing barber services, encouraged self-professed religious men with a respectable cover story of why they’d been seen entering a saloon. And, after a haircut and shave, if these men just happened to find themselves having a few drinks at the bar, no one would be the wiser. The saloon district in Austin, Texas was a place called “Guy Town.” And, the saloons in Guy Town were typical of those found in any city of similar size in the West during the mid to late 1800’s. One difference, perhaps, was that the saloons in Austin catered to some very influential clientele, given the fact that the Texas State Capitol was located in the city. State legislators, and other government officials, joined the common folk in enjoying the whiskey, woman, music, and gambling the saloons in Guy Town offered. Dropping a coin or two on the bar is another lasting image of the Old West, but drinks in the saloons were often purchased with gold dust instead of coins. This allowed the enterprising bartender to steal from the saloon’s owners by using various techniques to keep a little gold dust for himself. One such technique involved using his head, so to speak. Before starting his shift, the unscrupulous bartender would rub grease or liniment in his hair. After taking the gold dust in payment, there would always be a little of it left on his fingers and beneath his finger nails. The bartender would then nonchalantly rub his hand through his sticky hair. Later he would wash the gold from his hair, and by doing so, supplement his income nicely. The image of men sitting around a table playing poker is nearly synonymous with the Old West. But most saloons of the time period, especially in the early years, were relatively small, and only had room for a couple of gaming tables. Contrary to popular belief, poker, while played, was not the most popular game of the time period, and, in fact, prior to the early 1870’s, was rarely played at all. There was another card game which was far more popular, and because it has vanished from the gambling scene so completely, relatively few people today, including gamblers, have ever heard of it. Faro was the name of the game, and those who played were called “punters.” The game of faro was played on a table, and required special equipment which facilitated the game. As such, faro dealers made their money by traveling around the West with their gambling equipment, and setting up shop wherever they could. These dealers often rented space on a saloon floor, and, in return, gave a percentage of their winnings to the owner of the saloon. Unlike a poker game, in which each person playing banked their own game, and either won or lost according to the extent of their “investment,” in the game of faro, the game needed a financial backer, and the dealer himself staked his personal fortune as the faro bank. Punters playing faro were said to be “bucking the tiger,” and, because the game was easy to play, and, when played fairly, provided nearly the same odds to both the dealers and players, it was extremely popular. Because these even odds meant a lower take for the saloon, many dealers began cheating, and faro soon fell into disrepute. Many famous names of the Old West were faro dealers at one time or another, including Wyatt Earp, "Doc" Holliday, and Bat Masterson. In the Texas Hill Country, Austin’s own Ben Thompson owned several gaming concessions around the city, including the faro operation directly above the well-known Iron Front Saloon, which was located on the corner of Sixth and Congress. Ben Thompson, in addition to being a gambler and saloon owner, was a prolific killer, gunfighter, and, at one time, held the position of City Marshal of Austin. Thompson had honed his faro skills in various places around the West, including Abilene, Kansas, and he made a lot of money running faro games in his Austin gambling establishments. Another popular misconception of the Old West involves whiskey. As mentioned earlier, movies have often portrayed bartenders pulling clean bottles filled with bourbon out from behind the bar. While it is true, that good bourbon was available throughout the West at certain times and in certain places, it is truer still that the whiskey often served was some very bad stuff indeed. Called “Tarantula Juice,” “Coffin Varnish,” and “Stagger Soup,” the concoctions sold as whiskey were often made with cheap raw watered-down alcohol, and colored to look like whiskey with whatever was locally available, including, old shoes, tobacco, molasses, or burnt sugar. These whiskies were frequently given an extra “kick” by adding red peppers or, extra “flavor” by adding other things, like snake heads, which tainted the liquid. Now you understand what the cowboys, as portrayed in the movies, meant when they asked the bartender for a bottle of “your best whiskey.” They were asking for a bottle of real whiskey distilled in a place somewhere in the Eastern United States, like Kentucky, or, Pennsylvania. It is interesting to note that the best whiskey from out East, in a lot of saloons, meant rye whiskey, not bourbon. Rye was just as popular, if not more popular, as bourbon in those days. The popularity of rye whiskey has declined significantly since the days of the Old West, but unlike the game of faro, it never disappeared entirely, except, perhaps, during prohibition. And, unlike faro, there has been a comeback of late in the enjoyment of rye whiskey, with some new brands appearing on the shelves of liquor stores. One brand, however, which was around back in the West, is still being sold today, and that brand is Old Overholt. The rye whiskies produced by the Overholt Family go back to around 1810, and were widely available in the West. In fact, Old Overholt was reputably the favorite whiskey of the famous gambler and gunman, “Doc” Holliday, who was no slouch when it came to appreciating the finer things in life, including a good whiskey. Hollywood has portrayed violent confrontations with armed cowboys in saloons in hundreds of movies over the years. Usually, following an argument over a card game, the guns come out, and within a few seconds, men lay dead on a saloon floor, or stumble out into the street to die. There were, in fact, many shootings which actually did take place in saloons and which cost the lives of many men, including, some well-known characters from the Old West. “Wild Bill” Hickok, Morgan Earp, and Warren Earp, were just a few of the famous men who died from gunplay in saloons. Several legendary Texans also died by gunfire in saloons. Ben Thompson and John King Fisher were both ambushed and killed in San Antonio’s Vaudeville Theatre and Saloon in March of 1884, and the notorious killer, John Wesley Hardin, was murdered in El Paso’s Acme Saloon in 1895. Despite the reality that guns were indeed drawn and fired in Old West saloons, there is another reality which is seldom portrayed in the movies. Many towns, while not prohibiting weapons outright, did require guns be checked in with the law, behind the bar in a saloon, or, perhaps at a hotel or rooming house. But the requirement to check weapons did not do away with the gun violence entirely, as some men merely chose to conceal their weapons. For example, the famous outlaw, Sam Bass, was shot up and died in Round Rock, a town on the eastern edge of the Texas Hill Country, after refusing to surrender his concealed pistol in a general store. The local gun laws throughout the West did, however, help to hold down the number of shootings in saloons, where the whiskey flowed freely, and heated arguments over gambling and women were commonplace. History, as we perceive it, is an interesting thing, because what we believe to be true about history probably isn’t, since the fact and the fiction have become so intertwined. Nowhere is this more true than when observing the popular public perception of the Old West. In the end, the perception is what it is, and will be what it will be, but, hopefully, you’ve learned a few things you may not have known before about this fascinating period of American history.

To illustrate the dangers the Hill Country pioneers faced, here is the story of an early community called Strickling, and how it fits into Texas history.

During the heyday of the Old West drugs were pretty common and legal. The Chinese introduced opium when they came to America to build railroad

If the internet sometimes feels like the crowning achievement of American rear-view myopia—a disdain for any history that isn’t myth; the quest for forms of communication that annihilate reflection via equally instantaneous responses to events banal and of the utmost gravity—then it’s that much more exhilarating to discover this very American movie that interrogates recent history—the creation of what is arguably the most colossal internet phenomenon of our century’s first decade—in a manner that’s at once deeply reflective and gloriously impatient, and through a story that forsakes virtual communities for actual ones. Based on Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction bestseller The Accidental Billionaires, The Social Network opens with a riveting break-up scene rife with humiliation and rapid-fire banter—Todd Solondz by way of Howard Hawks—and closes with the smuggest half of this broken couple refreshing the other’s stubbornly oblivious Facebook page like a caffeinated laboratory mouse tapping his lever in vein hope of some paltry reward. Director David Fincher has described The Social Network as “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies,” and he’s not far from the mark. That young woman who left him at the bar with unflinching assurances of his asshole status will remain Mark Zuckerberg’s elusive Rosebud, the one who got away and stayed away, understandably so since only minutes after being dumped the future Facebook creator blogged about what a bitch she was before drunkenly creating a flamboyantly misogynist hotness rating site using photos of every girl on campus as the coup de gras. Unlike Orson Welles’ media giant and failed politician, Zuckerberg’s odyssey ends before he even hits 25, having already become the world’s youngest billionaire yet nonetheless still wearing plastic sandals with tube socks to his emotionally-heated legal proceedings. Kids: they grow up fast these days. Zuckerberg is portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, whose facility with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s brilliantly bracing dialogue is almost supernatural. Eisenberg is even less ingratiating here than he was in The Squid and the Whale, far too in control of his performance to concern himself with audience sympathy. He’s beautifully matched by Andrew Garfield’s diabolically shafted Facebook CFO—Zuckerberg’s former best friend, and probably the most sympathetic character in the movie—Justin Timberlake’s absurdly confident Napster creator—it was Timberlake killed the music industry!—and most especially by Armie Hammer’s dual role as the Winklevosses, the handsome and wealthy Harvard twins and human rowing machines who recruited Zuckerberg to do the nerd labour for their proposed Harvard student dating site and watched helplessly as Zuckerberg took their fragment of an idea and turned in into the biggest virtual place in the ether. I love the fact that Sorkin gives many of the best of his smart-ass lines to these guys, the characters who could be seen as the story’s biggest schmucks: “I’m 6.5, 220, and there’s two of me.” The completely convincing doubling of Hammer for these bits is not only the result of skillful acting but also fluid special effects, something Fincher knows his way around (even if the movie’s CGI breath during some ostensibly chilly outdoor scenes looks distracting and ridiculous). Yet one of the things that makes The Social Network so satisfying is the sense that Fincher has almost completely shaken off the technical show-offery that plagued some of his earlier work, most notably Panic Room. Delivering on the promise of his career make-over Zodiac, he emerges here as a nimble, eloquent and precise storyteller, never hitting the themes harder than necessary, locking his focus on faces of characters whose lives are going too fast for them to fathom, and gleefully compacting extremely wordy scenes into taut matches of wit and desperation. These scenes indeed allude to contemporary issues of dissolving privacy, fractured interaction and fast money, yet they so often resonate most potently as a study of masculine psychology barely past he gates of awkward adolescence.

In the latter part of the 19th century, before television, radio, or even movies with sound, traveling exhibitions were the biggest form of entertainment most people encountered. Oh yes, the circus! At the same time, newspapers and novels told of the adve

See big names like Miranda Lambert, Dierks Bentley, Luke Bryan, and Loretta Lynn live in concert.

#Nicodemus, Kansas was founded in 1877 at the end of the Reconstruction Period. It soon became one of the most famous mostly #black communities in the country formed by freedpeople migrating west. Nicodemus is located on the plains in the northwest corner of the state along the Solomon River in #Kansas. The six founders, W. H. Smith, ...

Old-timers Spriggs, Lamb, and Dillon are shown here panning for gold in Rockerville, Dakota Territory. The Black Hills area was a major hub of western mining. Boom towns appeared overnight, where gold dust was the medium of exchange for purchases made or drinks ordered. Photographed by John C. H. Grabill in 1889. All images reproduced on embossed canvas mounted to either 3/16” or 1/2” Ultra Board. Descriptive information provided on the back of each image. Notes- The watermark "HistoricalPhoto.com" will not appear on artwork itself.

A trip tracking the Texas author across the Lone Star State is sure to create memorable stories. The frontier town of Mobeetie was taking on some of the

Built by Coahuiltecan Indians, the Franciscan compound of San Antonio de Valero — what...

The stuff of legends — not to mention a symbol of lawlessness and greed — the Wild West was a hotspot for cowboys, cattle drivers and ranchers. It’s also where outlaws capitalized the uninhabited Texan wilderness, robbing stagecoaches and wagons as they ventured west to settle the territory.

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On December 16, 1881, a group of rowdy cowboys hurrahed Caldwell, Kansas. But it really was a ruse. The cowboys repeated the behavior the next day, but

File name: 08_06_003600 Title: Ezra Meeker, the oldest pioneer, in town with the Wild West show Creator/Contributor: Jones, Leslie, 1886-1967 (photographer) Date created: 1930 (approximate) Physical description: 1 negative : glass, black & white ; 4 x 5 in. Genre: Glass negatives Subjects: Wild west shows Notes: Title and date from information provided by Leslie Jones or the Boston Public Library on the negative or negative sleeve. Collection: Leslie Jones Collection Location: Boston Public Library, Print Department Rights: Copyright © Leslie Jones. Preferred citation: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Virginia City, unincorporated town, seat (1861) of Storey county, western Nevada, U.S., on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada range, 20 miles (32 km) south of Reno. Settled in 1859 and named for a prospector, “Old Virginia” Fennimore, it became a booming mining camp after the discovery of the Comstock Lode (chiefly silver) on nearby Mount Davidson. When the Nevada Territory was created by Congress in 1861, Virginia City had more than three-fourths of the new territory’s population. In the 1870s its population reached 30,000, and there were 6 churches and more than 100 saloons. In 1875 the town

Were Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok actually in love? Both were real-life legends of the American Old West, and indeed had been close acquaintance

The 19th century saw many individuals and families start fresh by traveling and settling out to the far travel via the Oregon Trail.