History

In June 1876, on the battlefield of the Rosebud in Montana Territory, the sound of General Crook’s soldiers opening fire rolled across the grass, and a Cheyenne warrior pitched from his horse, wounded, into the open ground between the lines. No one could reach him. The fire was too heavy. Then a woman spurred her … Read more

A photograph from 1915, kept quietly in an archive at Humboldt Redwood State Park, shows three men standing inside a tree. Not beside it, not in front of it, but inside it. The hollow trunk surrounds them like a room, its walls higher than a house. Above them, the opening swallows the sky, and the … Read more

Sheriff Ruben Galloway stood at the edge of a well on the Barrow property and smelled something that stopped him cold. It was late summer, and the heat pressed down through the trees, but the odor that reached him was not the ordinary smell of a dead animal or the rot of the timber. It … Read more

The Georgia sun beat down without mercy on the Whitmore plantation in the summer of 1843, its rays cutting through the humid air like divine judgment. The cotton fields stretched endlessly under the suffocating heat, while Spanish moss hung from the ancient oaks like torn remnants of forgotten prayers. Martha knelt in the makeshift chapel … Read more

The man’s skin burned over the fire for two and a half hours. He no longer screamed, because his vocal cords had long since reached the point where they could not carry it. Around him stood roughly a hundred people, watching, waiting, none of them looking away. This was not a coincidence, and it was … Read more

In a saloon in Newton, Kansas, a young man who was dying of consumption watched his protector get cut down by gunfire. James Riley was eighteen years old. He had followed Marshal Mike McCluskie everywhere, and McCluskie had taken him in. When a Texas cattleman shot McCluskie dead inside the Perry Tuttle saloon on the … Read more

Valentine T. McGillicuddy was a frail young physician whose time at Detroit’s Wayne County Insane Asylum had left him with a developing dependence on alcohol and a need for a new direction. By his early twenties, he had abandoned medicine for mapmaking, taking up work as a topographical engineer. His assignments took him across the … Read more

Fort Yuma, Arizona Territory, July 1874. Martha Summerhayes lies on a canvas cot on a dirt floor inside an adobe room, the thermometer on the wall reading 118 degrees. Her infant son is wrapped in a single wet cloth. She has not slept in two nights. The air does not move. Outside, the sun has … Read more

On the night of September 21, 1945, in the desert cold of Deming, New Mexico, a 24-year-old German corporal named Georg Gärtner made a decision that would define the rest of his life. He was a prisoner of war at Camp Deming, captured in Tunisia in 1943 and shipped across the Atlantic to the American … Read more