Originally featured in Points West magazine in Summer 2019 Winchester Herald covers with baseball bat and mitt A Winchester bat? A Winchester mitt? With baseball season well underway, how curious to spot America’s national pastime sporting the name of a rifle? It’s true. “In 1919, attempting to recover from loans taken out to expand for […]
Originally featured in Points West magazine in Summer 2019 Winchester Calendar, 1894 In 1887, Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, introduced an advertising calendar to market its line of ammunition. Not to be outdone by its down-state rival, Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut, also introduced the first Winchester calendar the same […]
Originally featured in Points West magazine in Summer 2019 Wild Bill Hickok’s Revolver James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok’s (1837–1874) pair of ivory-handled revolvers were as legendary as he was. Three years after Jack McCall shot Hickok in the back as he was playing cards in Deadwood, South Dakota, an 1879 story in the Cheyenne, Wyoming, […]
Originally featured in Points West magazine in Summer 2019 Native Feather Bustle There’s no shortage of bustles at the Center of the West’s Plains Indian Museum Powwow, the longest-running annual program of the Center. The feather bustle is a traditional part of a Native American man’s regalia he wears to dance at powwow. In this […]
Originally featured in Points West magazine in Spring 2019 Photograph: Making a garden in North Platte, Nebraska, 1909 For these folks, spring undoubtedly meant consulting the Old Farmer’s Almanac and poring over seed catalogues. Today, however, gardeners—both experienced and wannabes—have a multitude of resources, especially on the Internet. Launching a search returns sites like the […]
Originally featured in Points West magazine in Spring 2019 Irma Hotel Chamber Pot In the days before indoor plumbing, that thirty-yard dash through the inky dark to the outhouse to relieve oneself in the middle of the night was reason enough to avoid any drinks after 6 p.m. And the cold, hard wooden seat with […]