In 1870, an estimated 30 million buffalo roamed the American plains. By 1890, fewer than a thousand remained. The hunters who drove this near extinction were not primarily after hides. They were…
In the winter of 1880, somewhere outside Tombstone, Doc Holliday ate a bowl of prairie dog stew and complained it needed more salt. The dish itself was unremarkable, crude but effective, the kind of thing a man ate when the alternative was nothing at all. But the complaint, recorded by the men who were with … Read more
In December 1988, a young mother named Cathy Swartz was found murdered in her Three Rivers, Michigan apartment, her nineteen-month-old daughter unharmed in her crib. The scene was bizarre: the…
The young mother lay on the bedroom floor, covered in blood, a massive wound across her neck. In the crib nearby, her baby daughter slept, unharmed. On the wall above the scene, invisible to the naked eye until investigators aimed a special light at it, someone had written words that would haunt this case for … Read more
In October 1971, a priest drove into a Virginia hollow where every house kept a dog—except one. The dog there had walked onto the porch at midnight twelve days earlier, laid its muzzle on its…
The old priest gets to the question at last, on the third afternoon, after the tea has gone cold and the light has shifted off the fence. He is ninety-four. He has spent fifty-four years carrying one sentence he refused to repeat to anyone who had not sworn to keep it. The last man in … Read more
In October 1928, reporter Marlon Ash Croft rode into a West Virginia hollow called Widow’s Valley, where three federal revenue agents had vanished in eighteen months. The last one left his mule…
The chair was warm when Marlon Ashcroft sat down. He felt it through the fabric of his trousers before he settled, a heat that had no business being there, because there was no one else in the yard. He had watched the porch for a full minute before stepping onto it. The old woman in … Read more
In 1980, nineteen-year-old Bobby Shafran walked onto a college campus he had never visited, and a stranger threw her arms around him, calling him Eddy. He had never met Eddy Galland. Yet when the…
In the fall of 1980, a 19-year-old named Bobby Shafran drove to Sullivan County Community College in Upstate New York to begin his first semester. He had never set foot on the campus before. He parked his car, walked toward the dormitory, and was immediately embraced by a young woman he had never met. She … Read more
In November 1846, Sheriff Nathaniel Kenny arrived at the Crenshaw homestead in Missouri’s Ozark hills to find the cabin door ajar, the hearth cold, and a half-eaten meal rotting on the table. No…
Sheriff Nathaniel Kenny stood at the door of the Crenshaw cabin and pushed it open. The November wind caught the hinges, and the door swung inward with a long creak that faded into the cold silence of the Ozark hillside. Behind him, frost covered the browning grass, and the bare oak trees stood like watching … Read more
In 1844 Georgia, Obadiah Kwash, an enslaved beekeeper on the Bellwether plantation, did not carry a gun or a torch. He carried knowledge. For years he had studied the plantation’s patrols—where…
The riders came back before midnight, fewer than they had left with. They did not speak of what had happened on the eastern road. They did not need to. The horses told the story well enough, their flanks still dark with sweat, their heads tossing at every shift of wind through the pines. One man … Read more
In July 1540, Henry VIII gave a sworn account to a commission investigating his own marriage, describing what he had felt of Anne of Cleves’s body in bed and concluding she was no virgin. Her…
The unfinished monument stands in Westminster Abbey, on the south side of the high altar. Her initials are carved into the stone, along with the lion and bull of Cleves, and a skull and bones in the Renaissance manner. The work was begun and then abandoned. Anne of Cleves is the only one of Henry … Read more
On May 11, 1864, a single .44 caliber bullet tore through the abdomen of Jeb Stuart, the Confederacy’s most famous cavalryman, fired from barely thirty yards by a retreating Union private named…
The . 44 caliber bullet struck James Ewell Brown Stuart in the left side of his abdomen. It was fired from barely thirty yards away, and it was fired by a man whose name almost nobody remembers. The year was 1864, the day was May 11th, and the most famous cavalryman in America was about … Read more
In 1834, deep in the mountains of Harlan County, Kentucky, three respected midwives delivered a baby boy with a dark birthmark on his cheek. Sarah McKenzie, exhausted from eighteen hours of labor,…
On a gray October morning in 1856, Sheriff William Hayes and several armed deputies stood behind the Morrison sisters’ cabin with Dr. James Whitmore, staring at ground that had been carefully disturbed in more than a hundred separate places. The wooden crosses had weathered and fallen years ago. The wildflowers Catherine had planted had long … Read more