History

On the afternoon of June 25, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry looked down from the bluffs across the Little Bighorn River at one of the largest Native American encampments ever assembled. Custer had driven his men nearly one hundred miles in pursuit of Sitting Bull, the camp’s leader, with orders … Read more

Leif Garrett was the biggest teen idol in America in the late 1970s, his face plastered across magazines and his records selling millions. Behind that carefully manufactured image was a teenager self-medicating with hard drugs to survive the pressure of his own fame. On the night of November 3rd, 1979, five days before his eighteenth … Read more

The sheriff’s horse refused the last stretch of the Notch Road, and Silas Redcliffe was not a man who argued with livestock. He dismounted, tied the rein to a laurel, and told Deputy Enoch Bledsoe to do the same. They went the rest of the way on foot, the smell of wet April earth thick … Read more

The hunters heard the woman’s voice before they saw anything. It drifted through the flooded timber along Swan Creek, clear as a church bell, singing a melody none of them recognized. The words sounded foreign, perhaps French or Spanish. Reverend John Samuelson, who had joined the rescue party searching for survivors stranded by the worst … Read more

The operator’s hand was already on the winch lever when the wind shifted. James Carlisle had spent the morning cutting line with his dozer against a grass fire in the hills above Groveland, California, a blade’s width of bare earth meant to stop the flames. Now the fire had outrun his machine. There was no … Read more

The cook woke at three in the morning on a deck that would not stay still. His galley was the size of a small kitchen, his stove refused to stay level in a North Atlantic swell, and before the day ended he would feed three or four hundred men three meals from that lurching iron … Read more

On the 20th of October 1968, on a tiny Greek island barely two miles long, the most famous widow on Earth married one of the richest men alive. Rain fell on Scorpios that afternoon, and roughly 250 reporters were kept at the water’s edge, straining for a glimpse of a ceremony that lasted only about … Read more

The demolition crews moved through the estate in stages from late 1941 into early 1942, and the destruction they carried out was total. They knocked down the 204-room mansion. They knocked down the carriage house, the seventeen greenhouses, the power plant, the barn, the chicken house, the pigeon house, the boathouse by the river, and … Read more

The Comanche earned their name from the Ute word kmania, meaning enemy, or more aptly, one who is always ready for battle. Among other Native peoples and European settlers alike, that name inspired genuine terror, and the tribe lived up to it so completely that they became known as the Lords of the Plains. But … Read more