Fresh from robbing the Deadwood Stagecoach, the Sioux performers of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West changed into loose-fitting Chinese garb and attached long single braids to the backs of their heads, mimicking the clothing and hairstyle of the Boxers then rebelling halfway around the world. Thus was the stage set for the “Western Easterners” to man a wall and defend their position against U.S. Army re-enactors in a scene played out in Cody’s “Rescue at Pekin.”

Pittsburgh was the host city this day in late May 1901, and the big-city crowd did not disappoint. As the action unfolded, spectators stomped their feet so hard as to send vibrations through the grandstand. During the climactic scene, as the Army re-enactors scaled the artificial wall, the jingoistic roar from audience members swelled to ear-throbbing intensity, and they surged over the railings to join performers on the arena floor.

The drama depicted actual events of the ongoing 1899–1901 Boxer Rebellion. Emerging as a violent response to increasing foreign incursion into China, the Boxers (nicknamed for their martial arts skills, though officially known as the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists) sought to eradicate all signs of modern progress (railroads, telegraph lines, etc.) and called for the liquidaton of foreigners, particularly Christian missionaries (and their Chinese converts).

On June 20, 1900, the Boxers besieged foreign embassies in the Legation Quarter of Peking (present-day Beijing), trapping within its walls nearly 500 foreign civilians, 400 military personnel and 3,000 Chinese Christians. Fifty-five days into the siege eight nations, including the United States, sent some 20,000 soldiers to relieve the siege. In battle that August 14 and 15 they defeated the Boxers and then divided the capital city into occupation zones, sending occasional punitive forays into the countryside. Not until Sept. 7, 1901, did representatives of the allied nations and China’s Qing empire sign the Boxer Protocol, officially ending the rebellion.

Ever the savvy showman, Cody was quick to draw a correlation between the Boxers and American Indians. As the rebels had resisted foreign incursion, he reasoned, so Plains Indians had resisted the westward tide of Anglo settlement, cutting telegraph lines, attacking railroad crews and battling U.S. soldiers. Fueled by superstitious ideology, the Boxers believed they could induce spirits to enter their bodies and render them invulnerable to bullets, much like Plains Indian adherents of the “Ghost Dance” movement believed their ceremonial shirts would protect them. The latter movement ended in tragedy on Dec. 29, 1890, with the battle turned massacre at Wounded Knee, S.D., all but ending the American Indian wars.

Buffalo Bill was a stickler for the authentic, wherever possible employing real soldiers, cowboys and Indians performing with real weapons. But as he had no access to real Boxers, the duty fell to those Sioux already in Cody’s employ. They were perfect for the role, one New York Sun reporter quipped, as they were “used to dying” in each show. “They die in the cowboy battles about the emigrant wagon, and they die again in the chase of the Deadwood coach,” he wrote. “They made no objection to…dying the death of Boxers this year.” A New York Evening Sun reporter noted, tongue in cheek, “Some of them seemed a little ill at ease in their Chinese makeup, but they kept themselves entirely in the landscape, positively refused to scalp a single member of the allied forces and never even indulged in so much as the ghost of a war whoop.”

American Indians had long featured in promotions for the Wild West, which urged potential ticket buyers to come see the “horde of warpainted Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux Indians” (though after convincing the infamous Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull to tour with him in 1885, Cody had hired only Sioux from the Pine Ridge Agency). Why did Plains Indians who had violently resisted “foreign incursion” agree to perform in the Wild West shows? For starters, those working for Buffalo Bill earned a decent wage, while employment prospects on and around the reservations were limited. In addition, room, board and travel were free. Finally, performers’ immediate families were welcome to join them on tour.

In the fall of 1900, drawn like so many Americans by the dramatic events in China, Cody proposed to his theatrical manager, Nate Salsbury, that they incorporate a reenactment of the allied victory over the Boxers in the forthcoming season of the Wild West. The pair put their heads together and came up with “The Rescue at Pekin.”

On April 2, 1901, opening night, they debuted the Chinese-themed spectacle at New York’s Madison Square Garden. After a fortnight’s run Cody took the show on the road, and by the time the season wrapped in late October the troupe had performed in arenas from upstate New York to the South and across much of the Midwest. In 1902, with few changes to the program, Cody and company performed for audiences in the Western half of the country.

The twice-daily shows were an enormous draw, attracting on average some 20,000 to 30,000 patrons, not counting those turned away at the gate. The audience often exceeded the population of the host cities, as people from surrounding areas packed the stands. The June 4 edition of Pennsylvania’s Reading Herald reported that crowds began to gather in the early morning, by showtime transforming into a “great huddled mass.”

As the battle between the Boxers and the soldiers marked the grand finale of each performance, Cody and Salsbury spared no expense. “It was indeed an enormous and costly undertaking,” author John R. Haddad writes, “requiring 100 horses, large amounts of gunpowder and explosives, the latest in cannons and firearms, and of course the massive wall of Peking that loomed majestically over one end of the arena.” The cast alone, including the braided Sioux “Boxers,” numbered 500.

The performance lacked for nothing. Whether it was authentically cast or accurate in every detail was beside the point. Cody and company were, above all else, entertainers, and whether clad in Western buckskins or Chinese silks, they seldom disappointed the huddled masses. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West magazine.

To the disbelief of gaping onlookers in the packed stands at El Toreo, Mexico City’s largest bullring, American rodeo performer Bill Pickett clung to the horns of a massive Mexican bull ironically named Frijoles Chiquitos (“Little Beans”). Watching from a safe distance in the saddle atop jittery horses were cowhand Vester Pegg and siblings Joe and Zack Miller, proprietors of the Miller Bros. 101 Ranch Real Wild West. Matadors, including the famed Manuel Mejíjas Luján (aka “Bienvenida”), also stood by as Bill grappled with the snorting, gyrating wild beast, which Mexican and Spanish bullfighters alike typically fought from a more dignified distance. Funny thing is, Pickett wasn’t even supposed to be there. Days earlier he’d been working one of the Miller family ranches back in Oklahoma.

It was early December 1908, and the Real Wild West had come off a grueling tour of the United States. Instead of heading home to lick their wounds, however, Joe and Zack Miller took the show south of the border. Though still two years from the onset of the Mexican Revolution, that southern neighbor was already in turmoil. The troupe endured several intrusive (and costly in bribes) searches by customs officials before arriving in Mexico City on December 11. The streets of the heavily populated capital were clogged with Roman Catholic pilgrims preparing for the next day’s Our Lady of Guadalupe observance, marking the 1531 visions of the Virgin Mary to believers in that Mexican city. The observance also marked the start of the show’s two-week run at the circus arena in Porfirio Díaz Park.

Low attendance and gouging fines for Pickett’s failure to appear, though “The Dusky Demon” was prominently featured in advertisements, led Joe to telegram brother George, back at the 101 Ranch, with instructions to have Pickett travel down by train immediately. Shortly after the bulldogger arrived and began performing, Joe and the show’s press agent, W.C. Thompson, stopped in at the Café Colón, a popular eatery among matadors and local reporters, where Joe hoped to gin up publicity for the show. When a table of matadors directed their laughter at the gringos, Joe asked what they found so humorous. They told him they had attended the show that afternoon and were unimpressed with Pickett’s antics in the ring, comparing him to a novice bullfighter. An indignant Miller challenged them on the spot to go toe to toe with Pickett in a bulldogging event. On behalf of the group, Bienvenida accepted and agreed to show up at the circus arena at 10 the next morning. But neither he nor any other matador took up the challenge, claiming the arena promoters forbade them from taking any such foolish risk.

After several days of verbal exchanges, challenges and braying newspaper ads, Miller bet the arena promoters Pickett could remain alone in the ring for 15 minutes with their fiercest fighting bull and spend at least five minutes of that time grappling barehanded with the beast, wrestling it to the ground if possible. If Pickett succeeded, the Millers would collect the gate receipts for the day. Joe also made a 5,000-peso side bet. The publicity from his wager and newspaper coverage led promoters to move the bulldogging spectacle, scheduled for December 23, to the far larger El Toreo. Within days Mexico City’s largest venue had sold out.

On the afternoon of the 23rd Pickett trotted into the arena atop his favorite horse, Spradley, to a cacophony of cheers, boos and hisses from an estimated 25,000 onlookers. As the blare of the opening trumpets faded, the gate to the corrals swung wide, and Frijoles Chiquitos stormed into the ring. When the bull saw Pickett and raced across the arena toward him, Bill saw right off that his terrified hazers would be of no use.

Steering Spradley in close to Frijoles Chiquitos, Bill sought to maneuver into position to leap on the bull’s bulging neck. Each time the rampaging beast gave them the slip. Suddenly, the bull swung around and charged rider and horse from behind. Spradley could not evade the rush, and one of Frijoles Chiquitos’ horns ripped open the horse’s rump, causing it to stumble. Taking advantage of the distraction, Pickett dove from the saddle. Locking on to the bull’s horns, he wrapped himself around its writhing neck and rode Frijoles Chiquitos as the crowd rose to its feet in anticipation. The bull tried everything it could to free itself of Pickett, to no avail. For several  agonizing minutes it wildly shook its great head, slashing with its horns, as the determined bulldogger clung tight, looking for an opportunity to take the animal to the ground.

Likely bemoaning their decision to bet against the do-or-die Yankee, the crowd turned on Bill and began pelting him with whatever was at hand. Fruit, cushions, rocks, bottles, even bricks rained down from the stands. After taking a rock to the side of his face and a beer bottle to the ribs, a bleeding and dazed Pickett released his iron grip on the raging Frijoles Chiquitos and lay on the arena floor grimacing in pain. Rushing in, his 101 Ranch hazers finally distracted the bull long enough to help Bill to his feet and out of the ring.

The crowd’s delight at Pickett’s failure turned to disappointment on learning he’d made it to the 5-minute mark, thus winning the wager. With his seven and a half minute ride the bulldogger had earned the show a whopping 48,000 pesos (north of $450,000 in today’s dollars), not to mention Joe’s side bet. The day after Christmas the show wrapped up its lucrative run in Mexico City and headed back north. Joe canceled a scheduled show in Gainesville, Texas, and as the train arrived in Bliss, Okla., weary troupe members clapped and cheered at being home. The big payday had helped buffer an otherwise tough financial year, and the show’s future seemed bright.

A Working Ranch

Most Western historians cite 1881 as the year 101 Ranch patriarch Colonel George Washington Miller first seared his brand on cattle. A notorious namesake San Antonio saloon is said to have inspired the brand. Whatever the truth, that first bitter wisp of burnt hide launched a story for the ages, as the 101 was destined to become one of the most recognizable names in both ranching and Western entertainment.

A Kentucky native, Miller fought for the Confederacy in his 20s and moved west after the Civil War, initially settling in southwest Missouri and driving cattle from Texas to the railheads in Kansas. Miller later moved his herds to land leased from the Quapaw tribe in Indian Territory (present-day northeast Oklahoma) while residing just across the border in Baxter Springs, Kan. He cultivated a relationship with the Ponca tribe when it was briefly displaced to the Quapaw Agency. Miller suggested the Poncas settle on land farther west in the Cherokee Outlet. After the federal government forced ranchers out of the outlet in 1893, the Poncas did just that, and Miller leased their land for his operations, setting up headquarters near the tribal hub at New Ponca (renamed Ponca City in 1913). The 101 Ranch ultimately comprised 110,000 acres.

After Miller succumbed to pneumonia in 1903, wife Molly had the ranch turned into a trust, with Joe, Zack and George as equal partners and shareholders. From then on the trio ran the whole shooting match. At the time of their father’s death Joseph Carson Miller was 35 years old, Zachary Taylor Miller 25, and the youngest, George Lee Miller, 21. Each brother developed unique interests and skills, enabling them to divide oversight of the 101 effectively and without rancor. Together they remained focused on realizing their father’s dream to build the nation’s largest and most influential ranch.

The rich soil already grew a range of crops, while livestock included cattle, bison, hogs, poultry and several breeds of horse. The brothers continued to experiment with crops and added an electric plant, a cannery, a dairy, a tannery, a store, a restaurant and several mills. Promoted as the “greatest diversified farm on earth,” the ranch prospered well into the early 20th century.

Of course, oil too played a role. Ernest W. Marland, of Marland Oil Co., spearheaded the search for crude deposits on the family spread and helped form the 101 Ranch Oil Co. That highly successful venture substantially increased the Millers’ profit margin.

All-important downtime served to seed the brothers’ entrance into show business.

What became the Real Wild West had its roots in late summer or early fall 1882 in Winfield, Kan., where Colonel Miller, Mollie and their children had recently moved. Miller and hands had just finished a cattle drive up the Chisolm Trail from Texas. Meanwhile, Winfield city leaders were planning an agricultural fair and wanted entertainment. Miller proposed his cowboys put on a roping and riding exhibition, and the event planners enthusiastically accepted his offer. Miller’s “roundup,” as he called it, proved a roaring success.

The business of running a sprawling ranch intervened, and it wasn’t until 1904, a year after Colonel Miller’s death, that the 101 hosted its next roundup. This time it was the Miller brothers’ brainchild.

That year Joe Miller visited the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Mo. While there he and leading Oklahoma newspapermen met with the board of directors of the National Editorial Association, hoping to convince the board to hold its 1905 convention in Guthrie. To sweeten the pot, Joe told the directors the 101 Ranch would host them and put on a big Wild West show in their honor. The board bit and approved the proposal.

The Millers thought it best to prepare for the 1905 event by holding a roundup in the fall of 1904. Pleased with the enthusiastic turnout, the brothers planned the 1905 roundup, which they grandly dubbed the Oklahoma Gala. Dozens of trains were needed to help transport the more than 65,000 people who attended the elaborate opening parade on June 11. It was the largest crowd yet assembled for an event in Oklahoma.

The June gala ended with a reenactment of a wagon train attack by 300 Indians. Gunfire and bloodcurdling screams rose from the arena floor as wagons caught fire and settlers closed with their assailants in mortal combat. More credulous onlookers feared they were witnessing a real massacre. Then, out of nowhere, a posse of cowboys rode to the rescue, guns blazing. As the act drew to a close, the performers gathered at the center of the arena to a standing ovation. The Miller brothers joined the troupe to bask in the crowd’s appreciation.

Over the next two decades the Millers hosted annual roundups at the 101, seating up to 10,000 spectators in an arena just across from ranch headquarters. The program always included roping, riding and bulldogging, as well as Indian dances and other Western cultural offerings. The brothers employed top cowboys from across the region, and Pickett and other well-known 101 Ranch hands went on to stardom in Hollywood Westerns.

The “Show Business Bug”

Planning for the June 1905 Oklahoma Gala had another unexpected offshoot, for Joe caught the “show business bug” in a big way. Looking ahead to the June gala, he and Zack arranged to have some of their performers join Colonel Zack Mulhall and his touring Western troupe in a series of shows that April at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Appearing before packed houses in one the biggest venues of the era gave the brothers an opportunity to learn the production aspects of a touring show. It also afforded their performers rehearsal time for the upcoming gala. Among the Miller hands appearing at the garden was Will Rogers, then a relative unknown. Indeed, Mulhall initially turned down Rogers, who had to enlist the help of the colonel’s wife, Mary, to secure a spot on the program.

It is ironic, then, that while the Madison Square Garden run proved successful for Mulhall, Rogers benefited all the more from his appearance. The turning point came amid the sixth show when a steer got loose and entered the stands. Thinking quickly, Will lassoed the wayward animal and guided it back to the arena floor, saving the day. The publicity generated by his courage, talent with a lariat and wit prompted a shrewd promoter to offer him a starring role, performing his rope acts solo on vaudeville stages in Manhattan.

Meanwhile, Joe, Zack and their well-rehearsed performers returned to Oklahoma to finish preparations for the gala. Taking a page from Mulhall, the Millers generated a marketing blitz, published in newspapers and spread through contacts nationwide, describing what attendees could expect on June 11. The lineup included bulldogger Pickett, trick rider Lucille Mulhall (the colonel’s daughter), expert horseman and crack shot Tom Mix and a supporting cast of almost a thousand performers, many from the local Ponca and Otoe tribes.

The 101 Real Wild West was one step from becoming one of the most popular traveling Western entertainment troupes of its era.

Taking the Show on the Road

Encouraged by their successful 1905 gala, and at the urging of Oklahoma neighbor Gordon W. “Pawnee Bill” Lillie—who’d already made a name for himself as the founder and proprietor of Pawnee Bill’s Wild West—the Millers took their show on the road full time in 1907. Favorable publicity from an early run in Kansas City, Mo., caught the notice of Theodore Roosevelt. The “Cowboy President” was already acquainted with the Millers from prior visits to their ranch. (On his invitation Mix had ridden in the president’s 1905 inaugural parade alongside Roosevelt’s Spanish-American War “Rough Riders,” sparking a rumor the 101 Ranch hand had been a Rough Rider himself.) Roosevelt persuaded the Millers to bring their show to Norfolk, Va., as part of the Jamestown Exposition. At the close of that 100-day run the exposition promoters helped land the Real Wild West a two-week run at the Chicago Coliseum. The publicity from 1907 led to the busy but grueling 1908 tour, starting at Brighton Beach, N.Y. Through 1916 the Millers and their performers were at the top of their game as crowds grew ever bigger, drawn by a spreading fascination with cowboys, Indians and all things Western.

In 1916 the Millers merged their production with Cody’s arena show and toured as Buffalo Bill (Himself) & the 101 Ranch Wild West Combined, though the nation’s growing involvement in World War I put the tour on hold later that year. Cody died soon after, on Jan. 10, 1917. Going back on the road in 1925, the Real Wild West toured throughout the United States and abroad, traveling to Mexico, Canada, Europe and South America.

Through the 1920s, however, the 101 Ranch Real Wild West, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West and other touring shows drew ever smaller crowds, leading to severe financial losses. By then such productions faced stiff competition from the film industry, as well as proliferating circuses and rodeos. Making matters worse for the Real Wild West, Joe Miller died in 1927, followed two years later by the death of brother George. Then came the Great Depression, which drastically cut into profits from the ranch and show. Zack alone could not pull the operation out of its tailspin, and in 1931 the 101 Ranch and its associated businesses went into receivership. A year later much of the land was divided and leased, and authorities auctioned everything of value to cover debts. On Jan. 3, 1952, a nearly destitute Zack Miller died.      

Today one may visit the site of the ranch headquarters, though all that’s left are a few weathered buildings, the foundation of the Miller home (known in its prime as the “White House”) and a few historical markers describing what once was. An excellent nonprofit named the 101 Ranch Old Timers Association continues its work to keep the ranch and show legacy alive. Its members support a wonderful museum housed within oilman E.W. Marland’s Grand Home in Ponca City and host annual events and tours for the public. And so the show goes on.

New Mexico–based E. Joe Brown is an award-winning author of novels, short stories and memoirs. For further reading he recommends The Real Wild West: The 101 Ranch and the Creation of the American West, by Michael Wallis, and The 101 Ranch, by Ellsworth Collings and Alma Miller England.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

The Curtiss-Wright Corporation came into being in 1929 through the merger of companies started by pioneering aviators Glenn Curtiss and the Wright brothers. Within the new company, the Curtiss-Wright airplane division made airplanes while the Wright Aeronautical Corporation focused on engines. By the time of World War II, Curtiss-Wright held more defense contracts than any organization other than vastly larger General Motors and had become something of a bully. It used lobbyists, legislators, friends in high places and its own overzealous salesmen to get what it wanted. It made some adequate but unspectacular airplanes and some big radial engines, but why Curtiss-Wright could punch so far above its weight remains something of a mystery. 

Trouble arrived for Curtiss-Wright in 1943 when its engines became the focus of a congressional investigation led by a senator named Harry S. Truman. The inquiry, launched back in March 1941, was formally known as the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program and it helped propel the obscure politician from Missouri into the vice presidency and eventually the White House. Strangely enough, it also impacted the life of actress Marilyn Monroe—but more about that later.

At the time, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk was the company’s go-to product. The design was essentially a 1933 radial-engine Curtiss P-36 Hawk fitted with an inline Allison V-12 engine. While not a bad airplane, the P-40 was obsolete by the time the United States entered World War II. Still, it was the best America had at the time. Messerschmitt Me-109s and Mitsubishi A6M Zeros ran rings around it at altitude—the P-40 had just a single-stage supercharger—but it remained an effective ground-attack machine.         

Yet the obsolete P-40 stayed in full production until the end of 1944. Why not ramp up manufacture of the North American P-51 Mustang and Republic P-47 Thunderbolt instead, Truman’s investigative committee asked? But Curtiss liked the easy profit it derived from the simple, proven, utilitarian design, and its attempts to create a successor—the XP-46, XP-60 and XP-62—were uninspired. All were canceled. Curtiss had no aeronautical geniuses like Lockheed’s Kelly Johnson, North American’s Ed Schmued or Republic’s Alexander Kartveli to push it to the forefront. Its best talent was an engineer named Don Berlin, who was held in high regard but never really rose beyond his singular success with the P-40. It is notable that when the British asked North American Aviation to license-build P-40s for the Royal Air Force, the California company said, “Hell, give us three months and the back of an envelope and we’ll design a real fighter for you.” That fighter became the Mustang. 

One new airplane the company had to offer was the SB2C Curtiss Helldiver, but it was an ill-handling, poorly manufactured, aerodynamically misshapen beast loathed by pilots, back seaters and maintainers. It was not a Don Berlin design but was credited to Curtiss engineer Raymond C. Blaylock, who seemed to have stepped out of obscurity long enough to head the Helldiver program and then disappear. (In fact, he ultimately became the vice-president of engineering of Chance Vought. He specialized in missiles and was not involved in the design of the remarkable F8 Crusader.) 

To be fair, it wasn’t all Curtiss’s fault. The Navy ordered the SB2C to succeed the Douglas SBD and demanded that a pair of the Curtiss dive bombers had to fit on a fleet carrier’s elevators while at the same time requiring that the SB2C be faster and longer-ranged than the SBD and carry a heavier load of ordnance. This led to the Helldiver receiving an awkwardly short aft fuselage, a huge vertical tail that nonetheless failed to keep the short-coupled airplane longitudinally stable, and a monster wing to lift all that weight at carrier-approach speeds. When Curtiss put a prototype SB2C model into the MIT wind tunnel in 1939, aerodynamicist Otto Koppen said, “If they built more than one of these, they are crazy.” 

The Helldiver’s poor handling characteristics, structural weaknesses—it tended to shed the aft fuselage and empennage under the stress of arrested carrier landings—and lousy stall characteristics at final-approach speeds caught the Truman Committee’s attention. It didn’t help that Helldiver production had been delayed by nine months while the Navy demanded more than 800 modifications. For many months thereafter, Curtiss failed to produce a single SB2C that the Navy considered usable as a combat aircraft. What particularly griped the Truman Committee was that Curtiss had been spending tens of thousands of government dollars advertising the SB2C to the public as “the world’s deadliest dive bomber,” despite the fact that it had not produced a single usable Helldiver.

There was even a song about the SB2C. It went, “Oh mother, dear mother/Take down the blue star/Replace it with one that is gold/Your son is a Helldiver driver/He’ll never be 30 years old.” The Australians and the British were smart enough to cancel their large orders for the SB2C before more than a few were built.

Initially, Curtiss was to construct the SB2C at a huge new government-funded factory in Buffalo, New York. Then production was shifted to Columbus, Ohio. For months, nothing happened, and rumors began circulating among the sidelined workers in Columbus that their efforts were being literally sabotaged. Nobody realized that the problem was the fact that Curtiss hadn’t been able to produce a single successful airplane in Buffalo. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) ordered thousands of Helldivers as a variant called the A-25 Shrike dive bomber. Big mistake. The Germans had already learned, with the Junkers Ju-87 Stuka, that terrestrial dive bombing worked only if the bombers had total air superiority and were attacking targets undefended by anti-aircraft guns. That kind of situation was rare enough that Allied air forces had abandoned the concept of dedicated dive bombers by the time the A-25 was ready for delivery.   

Things were bad enough with Curtiss airplanes. They were even worse for the engines being produced by the Wright Aeronautical Corporation. Several Army inspectors stationed at Wright’s engine factory at Lockland, Ohio, told Truman that they were being encouraged to ignore proper inspection procedures and to approve faulty materials and even entire engines being delivered to the government for use in the Helldiver and various other aircraft. That engine was the 1,600-hp Wright R-2600 Twin Cyclone. 

The R-2600 was the engine that goaded Pratt & Whitney into designing and producing the R-2800, the best radial of World War II, but the big Wright was an excellent engine itself—when it was built right. It powered thousands of North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, including those that flew America’s first offensive strike against Japan—the April 1942 Doolittle Raid. 

A preliminary investigation by Truman’s staff revealed that there were ample grounds for the whistleblowers’ claims, and that the inspection failings were obvious enough that company execs and Army inspectors should have been aware of the problems.

Well, let’s not be hasty here, the Army said. We’ll look into this and report back. Brig. Gen. Bennett Meyers and his staff did so, and Meyers announced that the Army could find nothing amiss. Meyers either lied or had been duped by his own inspectors, whom the Truman Committee later found to be actively obstructing the investigation. 

The engine division blamed the snitching on “petty bickering over privileges, authority and rights.” The Truman Committee, however, soon uncovered evidence of false tests of R-2600s and the materials that went into them, destruction of records, improper reporting of test results, forged inspection reports, off-the-cuff oral alteration of the tolerances allowed for parts, outright skipping of inspections and, in general, letting Wright’s engine-production needs override the recommendations of both company and Army inspectors. 

There almost certainly had been crashes and deaths caused by the failure of faulty Wright R-2600s, but nobody could identify any specific examples outside the mass of wartime catastrophes attributable to everything from thunderstorms to pilot error. Truman himself said, “The facts are that [Wright was] turning out phony engines, and I have no doubt that a lot of kids in training planes were killed as a result.” The fact that no 1,600-hp Wright Twin Cyclone had ever powered a trainer escaped his attention, but never mind.

As is often the case in such relationships, a culture had grown that encouraged Army inspectors to believe their primary duty was toward Wright rather than the AAF, and that keeping their jobs depended on keeping the company happy. If an Army inspector refused to accept material that he knew was faulty, he got a reputation as a knucklehead who failed to “get along.” Failing to get along meant you risked anything from an inconvenient job transfer to outright losing that job. When one Army inspector produced an honest report on conditions at the Lockland factory, he was immediately prohibited from entering any Wright plant. 

Testimony to the Truman Committee revealed that whenever an Army inspector tried to reject suspect engine material, a Wright exec would insist that the material was “important to the company.” If Wright appealed an inspector’s decision—to the inspector’s supervisor, to an AAF technical advisor, to the Army’s Wright Field itself—the appeal was invariably allowed. Inevitably, Army inspectors came to realize that objections were futile if Wright Aero disagreed.

Wright denied Army inspectors access to the company’s own precision instruments for their inspections, meaning they were limited to purely visual examinations. If they couldn’t see a crack, it didn’t exist. Wright’s excuse was that the Army inspectors weren’t properly trained in the use of the equipment. This was particularly true, the company said, for a device used to test the hardness of the gears in the R-2600’s drivetrain. It became an open secret that Wright was faking the hardness testing of these gears. The military inspectors were also denied the use of rejection stamps or embossing warnings to identify failed parts or engines, since Wright wanted to sell those wares to unsuspecting commercial and export operators. 

More than a quarter of the R-2600s built at Lockland failed a basic three-hour test run. Randomly selected engines were also put through a 150-hour quality test, but the Truman Committee found that since 1941 not a single engine had completed the test. One of them failed at 28 hours. 

Truman claimed to have personally rejected 400 ready-to-ship Lockland engines. “They were putting defective motors in planes, and the generals couldn’t seem to find anything wrong [with them],” he said. “So we went down, myself and a couple of senators, and we condemned 400 or 500 of those engines. And I sent a couple of generals who had been approving those engines to Leavenworth.” (Fort Leavenworth was the Army stockade in Kansas.)

Wright company inspectors often weren’t the problem. The AAF’s own people too often wanted to go along to get along. Chief Inspector Lt. Col. Frank Greulich tried to intimidate and discredit witnesses who gave negative testimony to the Truman Committee, and Greulich himself lied to the committee a number of times. As one observer put it, “The Committee witnessed the unpleasant spectacle of a lieutenant colonel, a major and several high civilian officials all telling entirely contradictory stories.”     

Once the Truman people had finished their investigation, the AAF insisted on repeating their work, inevitably making the same negative findings. But those faults led the AAF to a different conclusion: that the record of engines built at Lockland compared favorably with the record of other types of engines built elsewhere. The best they could say of Curtiss-Wright’s products was that “they were not always the best [but] have been usable.” 

One thing became readily apparent. The Lockland scandal was a prime example of what happened when a huge government-built, spare-no-expense factory tried to turn out an enormous quantity of material with inexperienced management and impossible production schedules while maintaining quality in the face of constant changes in tolerances and specifications.

Middle management was so overextended by the sudden wartime demands that a lot of the execs were simply incompetent, the workers inadequately trained and experienced engineers and supervisors too few. The more plants the government built for Curtiss-Wright, the more diluted the cadre of qualified and talented managerial personnel became. Only two percent of the first batch of applicants for jobs at Curtiss-Wright’s new plant in Columbus, Ohio, had any experience in aircraft production, yet they would soon be building Curtiss SB2C Helldivers, which had been described as the most complex single-engine design of its time. The Lockland plant was the biggest single-story industrial facility in the world, but its inept management soon turned the sleek new factory into a cluttered, crowded, ill-lit dump. One AAF report called it “a disgrace to the company and to the Air Forces.” 

It was thought at the time, at least by some, that Curtiss-Wright was untouchable because its president, Guy Vaughn, was a big-time player on Capitol Hill. Vaughn was a former automobile racer and speed-record holder who had come up through the ranks at Wright Aero. He was responsible, at least in part, for the development of one of the most important aircraft engines ever built, the Wright J-series Whirlwind. Particularly in its nine-cylinder J-5 form, the Whirlwind was the first reliable, bulletproof aircraft engine available. It was so reliable, in fact, that Charles Lindbergh chose it for his 1927 transatlantic flight, and it never missed a beat. (In truth, though, engineer Charles Lawrance did the heavy lifting and designing for the Whirlwind.)

Vaughn griped that the problems the Truman Committee claimed to be finding were simply “standard and recognized manufacturing and inspection procedures.” During his cross-examination by the committee, Vaughn demanded to know exactly what was wrong with three specific R-2600s that had been crated and ready to ship before being rejected by inspectors. It turned out that one of them lacked a lockwire on a gear, another had corroded cylinders, and the third had a driveshaft gear with a broken tooth and an inoperative magneto—defects that could have led to crashes. Vaughn huffed that he didn’t consider these engines to be defective. 

In the end, the Truman Committee toned down its report and Curtiss-Wright ended up suffering no penalty. This despite the fact that the Lockland plant had plainly turned out defective engines with the cooperation of dishonest AAF and company inspectors, and that some of those engines almost certainly went on to kill pilots and crewmen. The Justice Department did sue Wright and eight of its executives for selling the government known defective aircraft and engines, but the suit was never pursued. Three Army Air Force officers, including Greulich, did end up at Leavenworth, however, after being court-martialed for neglect of duty. (Despite Truman’s claim, none of them were generals.)         

The Truman Committee also concluded that Curtiss-Wright had received “far more contracts from the Army and Navy than warranted by the quality of its products or its ability to produce them.” The committee recommended that all Curtiss-Wright contracts be renegotiated, but this never happened either. 

However, the committee’s investigation marked the beginning of the end for Curtiss-Wright, a company that had once manufactured and sold more different aircraft, engines, propellers, accessories and parts than anybody else in the industry. Curtiss-Wright had become good at cranking out quantity, but less adept at creating quality. It continued to build second-best P-40s, concentrating on increasing the production rate, lowering costs and maximizing the profit. 

By 1947, with war profiteering a distant memory, Curtiss-Wright shut down 16 of its 19 plants. The company’s only possible moneymaking program was an attempt to turn the Curtiss C-46 Commando cargo plane into a pressurized airliner. But C-46s were so cheaply available as surplus that operators were buying and refitting the airplanes themselves. (And none saw the need for pressurization.)           

The CW-32 was to be a four-engine airliner with military airlift capability, but the project was canceled in 1948. The company was testing an all-weather jet interceptor, the XP-87, but when an expensive wing modification appeared necessary, the U.S. Air Force insisted that Curtiss pay a major part of the expense. CEO Guy Vaughn refused, and the Air Force retaliated by canceling the project. 

After 40 years, Curtiss was out of the airplane business.

Chaos took over the company’s front office as the focus shifted to profit-taking at the expense of R&D. As the excellent book Curtiss-Wright: Greatness and Decline puts it, “A vigorous and well-planned course of action was desperately needed. This, in turn, required a high degree of managerial skill and perhaps a bit of luck. Curtiss-Wright, it seemed, lacked both.” The leadership that took over Curtiss-Wright “came from the world of corporate finance and investment banking,” the book notes, “and had almost no direct connection with, or understanding of, the aviation industry.” By the mid-1950s, Curtiss-Wright “no longer had a distinct identity. The company had no viable product to develop and sell, and overdiversification was dissipating its resources.” 

Today the Curtiss-Wright Corporation has its headquarters in North Carolina and manufactures components for aircraft, but the days when the company dominated the U.S. aviation industry ended long ago. 

In 1944, Harry Truman became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s running mate and advanced to the vice presidency after FDR’s reelection to a fourth term. Some say he was chosen to shut him up, others that it was a reward for years of chasing down fraud, waste and abuse in the defense industry. (This part of Truman’s career is detailed in Steve Drummond’s excellent new book The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two.) Truman became president only months later, when Roosevelt died  suddenly  in April 1945. 

Marilyn Monroe is perhaps the most unlikely person to have had her life changed by the Curtiss-Wright catastrophe. That’s due to a young American playwright, Arthur Miller, who would later write Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and other classics. But in 1944 he had written a play that flopped after only three performances on Broadway. He decided that if that was the best he could do, he’d take up accounting, or selling insurance. Fortunately, he decided to give playwriting one more try. 

In January 1947, Miller’s play All My Sons opened on Broadway, became a huge success and launched his career. Based directly on the Curtiss-Wright scandal, the play told the story of a man who knowingly produced bogus aircraft parts. One batch of his parts—badly cast cylinder heads—resulted in the crashes of 21 P-40s, including one that killed his own son.

In an odd but fascinating mismatch, the now-celebrated Miller fell for actress and sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. Monroe herself sought escape from her dumb-blonde image, and marriage to a successful playwright and intellectual like Miller, she felt, was her ticket to legitimacy. They wed in 1956 but the marriage, like Curtiss-Wright’s dominance of the U.S. aviation industry, soon came to an end.

But for Curtiss-Wright’s fall from grace, it never would have happened.

To this day virtually everyone in the United States has heard of William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Even those not expert or passionate about the Western frontier era recognize him as one of the most iconic figures of American history. Buffalo Bill also remains fairly well known throughout Europe, for the Iowa-born scout turned showman extraordinaire brought his Wild West across the Atlantic Ocean eight times—four times between 1887 and ’92, and four more between 1902 and ’06. In arenas across the Old World honored guests and paying patrons alike filled the stands to thrill at buckskinned cowboys taming wild horses, warbonneted Indians attacking stagecoaches, soldiers on horseback waging mock battles, and eagle-eyed women and men showing off their shooting prowess. Among the countries to embrace Cody was Italy.

Judging by period newspapers, photographs and the surviving statements of spectators, quite a few cities on the Italian Peninsula were afflicted by “fever of the West.” Buffalo Bill’s Wild West came to Italy twice—during his second European tour, in 1890, and during his third European tour, in 1906. The first time his caravan of wagons bearing hundreds of employees and animals made just six stops. Popular demand swelled the second tour to 119 performances in 37 towns. The basic ticket cost 2 lire, or slightly less than $11 in today’s currency. For the best seats one paid 8 lire, or about $45, not a paltry amount. Most venues hosted two shows a day—one in the late morning, another in the evening. Seldom was there an empty seat in the house.

On its first Italian tour Buffalo Bill’s Wild West debuted in Naples on Jan. 26, 1890, for a 22-day run. Journalists were astounded at the appearance of Indians who until very recently had been at war. “That which may seem to the everyday Neapolitan to be a kind of game, an idle display of skill,” one Neapolitan newspaper wrote with a flourish, “is nothing less than a common necessity of everyday life in a country where acrobatic agility, boundless audacity and prowess are conditions for survival.”

The highlight of the tour was the 18-day run in Rome, the “Eternal City,” ancient capital of Italy. Its leading citizens welcomed Cody into the most elegant salons, where he impressed with his gentlemanly manners and “romantic grace.” He set up camp in the Roman meadows, near Vatican City, after reportedly declaring the crumbling Colosseum unfit for his show. Vatican authorities initially rejected Buffalo Bill’s request for an audience with Pope Leo XIII, as his entourage was too large. The showman offered concessions, and on March 3 he and a handful of select employees and performers were granted entrance to the Sistine Chapel and met the pope.

An article in the next morning’s New York Herald described the meeting as “one of the strangest spectacles ever seen within the venerable walls of the Vatican,” adding it took place “in the midst of the scene of supreme splendor, crowded with the old Roman aristocracy and surrounded with the walls immortalized by Michelangelo and Raphael.” American Indians with painted faces, clad in blankets and feathers and carrying tomahawks and knives, must have been an engaging if disconcerting sight as they knelt and made the sign of the cross while the pope blessed them. The newspapers presented Cody’s Indian performers, most of whom were Catholic, as “civilized,” though one Sioux woman reportedly fainted from the excitement as the “medicine man sent by the Great Spirit” passed by. Other accounts had one of the Sioux greeting the pope with a war whoop, kneeling to receive the blessing and then rising again with a whoop, enough to either “make the pope slightly pale” or “wrest an intrigued smile from him.” The parties then exchanged gifts. Buffalo Bill presented Leo a bouquet and a garland of flowers mirroring his coat of arms, while the pope gave Cody rosaries and medals bearing his pontificate. Leo’s gifts may have had the desired effect, as on Jan. 9, 1917, the day before his own death, Buffalo Bill converted to Catholicism.

“It has been a much greater success than we had hoped for,” Cody said of the stopover in the capital. “They said they had not had so great excitement in Rome since the days of Titus.”

On March 12 the Wild West began an eight-day run in Florence, where, despite poor weather, ticket holders from towns as widely scattered as Sienna, Empoli, Livorno, Pisa, Pontassieve, Prato and Pistoia packed the amphitheater. The show also hit Bologna, Milan and Verona. One day in mid-April Buffalo Bill and his top billing sharpshooter, Annie “Little Sure Shot” Oakley, hired a carriage and went to Venice, where an uncharacteristically nervous Oakley balked at riding a gondola. An Indian remained ashore with her as a bodyguard while Cody and others hopped aboard to take in such timeless sights as the 11th century St. Mark’s Basilica (a cathedral housing the remains of the namesake evangelist and gospel writer) and the 14th century Doge’s Palace (a onetime residence for the dukes who ruled Venice between 726 and 1797 and whom Cody compared anachronistically to U.S. presidents). Back ashore the reunited party ate fried fish.

After performing in Paris in 1905, Cody’s globe-trotting show, rebranded as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World, opened its second Italian tour in Genoa on March 14, 1906. Other tour stops included Rome, Florence, Milan, Naples, Bologna, Turin, Livorno, Pisa, Parma, Ravenna, Verona, Como and two dozen other towns. For one day only, April 27, the troupe performed in Asti, this author’s small hometown. The tour closed May 11 in Udine (some may argue for Trieste four days later, but that Italian town on the far northeastern border was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918).

Promoters in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of northern Italy, put up a massive poster to advertise the show’s April 11 tour stop. It worked like a charm, drawing a crowd of more than 10,000 to the two-hour performance. On April 21 the show stopped in the Piedmontese town of Alessandria, again bringing a flood of spectators eager to see the drama of the American frontier come to life. Though Alessandria’s population numbered just 7,000, the two Saturday shows packed the stands with 30,000 ticket holders.

Weeks in advance of the show’s arrival in Turin, capital of the northwestern Piedmont region, local newspapers ran daily dispatches about the Wild West. “Colonel Cody spared nothing to let the people of Turin know that the arrival of his crew and the staging operations constituted an interesting spectacle in themselves,” wrote La Gazzetta del Popolo on April 5. Two weeks later the paper shared another breathless tease:

“The celebrity of the plains, the king of all, will reproduce among us the deeds accomplished across the American continent, will show himself in the ability to kill the Sioux and will end the show with the apotheosis of peace and the dance of the nations.”

When the show finally rolled into Turin on April 22, the wagons, livestock and most performers encamped on a sprawling tract of 40,000 square acres, while Cody himself and other troupe members stayed in town on via dei Pellicciai (“Furriers Street”). The latter district’s delighted residents took to singing a rhyming refrain in Corsican dialect: “Alé, alé, anduma a balé, ch’a j’é l’America an via dij Plissè!” which roughly translated means, “Come on, come on, let’s go dance now that America is in Furriers Street!” Buffalo Bill reportedly liked the tune so much that he sang it during the final performance in Turin.

After wrapping up its tour of Italy in mid-May, the Wild West headed east to Austria, the Balkans, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine before returning through Poland to Bohemia (the present-day Czech Republic), Germany and Belgium. By the time Buffalo Bill gave his farewell performance of the 1906 season in Ghent on September 21, he’d become an international celebrity, and kids on street corners across Europe were playing cowboys and Indians.

Buffalo Bill’s tours of Italy certainly had a profound and lasting influence on the Italian vision of the American West (think “spaghetti Westerns” and replica firearms). Cody himself, however, had only tenuous connections to Italy. On March 6, 1866, the 20-year-old Union Army teamster had married Missouri native Louisa Frederici (1844–1921), but her family had its roots in the Lorraine region of northeastern France. Buffalo Bill did name his favorite Springfield Model 1866 trapdoor rifle “Lucretia Borgia,” but that is thought to have been a lark. The illegitimate daughter of a future pope, the namesake Italian noblewoman rose to prominence during the Renaissance. Rumored to have poisoned several lovers, Lucretia Borgia was both beautiful and deadly. Likely hearing her name in passing, and doubtless regarding his Springfield as beautiful and deadly (at least to elk and bison), Cody had Borgia’s name inscribed on the rifle’s lock plate. (What remains of the rifle is on display at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.)

When he set out in the entertainment world, Cody appeared onstage with Giuseppina Morlacchi (1836–86), a celebrated prima ballerina and popular dancer from Milan, who made her American debut in New York City in October 1867. By December 1872 she had joined the cast of dime novelist Ned Buntline’s touring Western melodrama Scouts of the Prairie, co-starring Buffalo Bill and fellow scout John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, whom Morlacchi would marry the following summer. Another Italian, Naples-born photographer Carlo Gentile, snapped and sold promotional cartes de visite of cast members, while his adopted Apache son appeared onstage. In 1873 Buntline left the troupe, and Cody enlisted friend James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok to join the aspiring showman, Morlacchi and Texas Jack in a new touring play called Scouts of the Plains. The productions served as a training ground for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and his later success across the ocean blue.

Wild West aficionado and artist Lorenzo Barruscotto hails from Asti, in the Piedmont region of northwest Italy. For further reading he recommends Four Years in Europe With Buffalo Bill, by Charles Eldridge Griffin, as well as the Italian language books Buffalo Bill in Italia, by Mario Bussoni, and Quando Buffalo Bill venne in Italia, by Nicola Tonelli.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Wild West.

Deep Sea Vision, a company based in Charleston, South Carolina, has obtained sonar images from almost 17,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean that might show the Lockheed Electra that Amelia Earhart was flying when she disappeared in 1937.

Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932). Those flights and others she made would have ensured her place in the history books, but much of the enduring interest in Earhart results from her disappearance. She and navigator Fred Noonan vanished over the Pacific during an attempted flight around the world in a Lockheed Electra 10-E, and people still speculate about what happened.

On January 27, 2024, Deep Sea Vision’s founder and chief executive officer, Tony Romeo, announced that he may have found the airplane. Romeo’s team had been using a $9 million Norwegian Hugin 6000, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), to search for the twin-engine airplane in the fall of 2023. When examining some data later, they noted an image taken some 100 miles from Howland Island on the sea floor 16,500 feet deep that could show the Electra. “I’m not saying we definitely found her,” Romeo told the Charleston Post and Courier, but the image was encouraging and appears to show an airplane. He plans to return to the area later this year with underwater cameras in an attempt to verify the object’s identity.

 There have been many theories about Earhart’s disappearance over the years. Romeo’s discovery, if substantiated, would indicate that Earhart and Noonan, unable to find their intended target of Howland Island (about 2,000 miles from Honolulu), were forced to ditch in the ocean and drowned. An organization called TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) speculates that they landed and perished on tiny Gardner (now Nikumaroro) Island. Others have theorized that they were captured by the Japanese and executed. In 2017 a History Channel documentary claimed to have uncovered a photo that showed Earhart and Noonan as prisoners on a dock in the Marshall Islands, but investigators quickly discovered that the photo was taken two years before they disappeared. A book from 1970 asserted that Earhart was still alive and living under an assumed name in New Jersey. (The woman in question sued the book’s author, and won.)

Time will tell if Romeo has truly solved the mystery or just added another intriguing chapter to it.

On August 30, 1813, a war party of 750 enraged American Indian warriors attacked a haphazard stockade known as Fort Mims in the southwestern corner of present-day Alabama, 50 miles from Mobile. After killing most of the 146 defending militiamen, the warriors turned on nearly twice that number of White, Black, and Métis (mixed indigenous and white) noncombatants, slaughtering scores of women and children with sickening ferocity.  

The victorious assailants called themselves the Red Sticks, after the traditional red war clubs they carried. Until 1812, they also had belonged to the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy, a loose alliance of largely autonomous villages, or talwas, that claimed a sprawling domain comprising modern Alabama and the western and southern portions of Georgia. Contact with British colonial traders in the late 17th century wrought the first significant change in the Creek domain. Those Creeks residing north and west of the trade route from the Carolinas became known as the Upper Creeks, those below it the Lower Creeks. The distinction was more than a matter of nomenclature. Living nearer to Whites, the Lower Creeks slowly shed much of traditional Creek culture in favor of accommodation. Upper Creeks tended to be traditionalists, profoundly distrustful of White encroachment, particularly once the American Revolution gave rise to an expansionist young Republic.  

At nearly 25,000 members, the Creeks were the most numerous Indian people in the American South. The other indigenous tribes in the region were the Cherokees in northern Georgia and western North Carolina, and the Choctaws and Chickasaws, who occupied the northern two-thirds of present-day Mississippi. All three would side with the United States in the pending conflict. Spanish Florida would prove sympathetic to the Red Sticks but remained effectively neutral.  

With the Fort Mims massacre, what had begun as a Creek civil war in 1812 metastasized into war with the United States. An outraged nation demanded vengeance against the Red Sticks. Total war was to be the price they paid, retaliation complete and unsparing. There was just one catch. The U.S. government, preoccupied with the War of 1812 against Great Britain, possessed neither the resources nor the will to confront the Red Sticks threat. Prospects consequently seemed good for the Red Sticks, who hoped not only to subdue the Lower Creeks, but also perhaps roll back the border with Georgia and expel White and Métis settlers from southwestern Alabama. Although the future of the Deep South hung in the balance, Tennessee, Georgia, and the Mississippi Territory would have to defeat the Red Sticks largely on their own. Georgia and the Mississippi Territory contributed invading columns to the conflict, but they made only brief and inconclusive gains. It fell to Tennessee to press home the fight.  

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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Enthusiasm for war ran high in the Volunteer State. “I hope to God,” said a Tennessee senator after Fort Mims, echoing the sentiments of his constituents “that as the rascals have begun, we shall now have it in our power to pay them for the old and new.” Tennesseans need look only to their own recent past, when Indian attacks were frequent and the state neglected by the federal government, to emphasize with the citizenry of the Tensaw. None reveled more in the prospect that victory offered to open vast new lands to Southern speculators and settlers than did the fiery, 46-year-old commander of the West Tennessee militia, Maj. Gen. Andrew Jackson.  

“Brave Tennesseans,” he proclaimed in a florid general order that exploited both frontier fears and avarice to spur recruitment, “your frontier is threatened with invasion by the savage foe. We must hasten to the frontier, or we will find it drenched in the blood of our citizens.” Jackson and Governor Willie Blount both were clear on the unique opportunity that the present crisis presented. Victory over the Red Sticks would be but the prelude to dispossessing all Creeks of their lands, dislodging the Spanish from West Florida, and preventing the pernicious hand of Great Britain from grasping the Gulf Coast.  

Volunteers flocked to the banner. From his home in the quaint settlement of Kentuck, Tenn., the 27-year-old farmer and expert marksman David Crockett saddled his horse and journeyed 10 miles to join a new regiment of mounted riflemen. Crockett enlisted over the earnest objections of his young wife, Polly. They had only just settled on their latest homestead—the peripatetic Crockett frequently uprooted his family—and had two young boys and an infant girl to raise. David wrestled with his emotions. (The future American icon—the “king of the wild frontier”—never cared for the nickname “Davy.”) Although a proficient game hunter, he doubted his fitness for combat; he had killed plenty of bear, but never a man. “There had been no war among us for so long, that but few who were not too old to bear arms knew anything about the business,” he recalled. “I, for one, had often thought about war and had often heard it described, and I did verily believe that I couldn’t fight in that way at all.”  

Then, too, there were Polly’s pleas to consider. “She said she was a stranger in the parts where we lived and that she and our little children would be left in a lonesome and unhappy situation if I went away.” Loyalty to a larger cause won out, however. “It was mighty hard to go against such arguments as these,” Crockett ruminated, “but my countrymen had been murdered, and I knew that the next thing would be that the Indians would be scalping the women and children all about there if we didn’t put a stop to it.” Besides, the term of service was merely three months, and the prospective pay hardly paltry. And so, on September 24, 1813, Crockett enlisted as private in the Second Regiment of Mounted Riflemen in General John Coffee’s cavalry brigade.  

Crockett’s baptism by fire came little more than a month later. Jackson had penetrated the wild, mountainous northern fringe of the Red Sticks country hopeful of striking deep into the heart of the enemy domain. First, however, he must clear his left flank of 2,000 Red Sticks warriors purportedly gathered at Tallushatchee, a talwa resting eight miles from his newly constructed Coosa River supply-depot. Jackson assigned the task to Coffee’s mounted brigade.  

Dawn on November 3, 1813, broke clear and chill over the clearing that cradled the clapboard cabins of Tallushatchee. As the darkness melted, General Coffee and 900 troopers glided undetected through the pine barrens. Two friendly Creek warriors guided them. Three miles short of Tallushatchee, Coffee divided his command into two parallel columns—the left element comprised of the cavalry, the right of the mounted riflemen clad in coarse linen trousers, long-tailed civilian shirts, and caped jackets called hunting shirts. Some men donned animal-skin caps, but not Crockett; he thought they made him look short. Suddenly, recalled Coffee, “the drums of the enemy began to beat, mingled with their savage yells, preparing for action.” Armed with bows and arrows, their sacred red war clubs, and a handful of muskets, the outgunned and outnumbered warriors (fewer than 200 actually were on hand) spilled from their cabins.  

Coffee opened the fray. As the Red Sticks formed a hollow square, he hurled a company of mounted rangers at them. The rangers galloped to within musket range, fired some scattered shots, and then dared the Red Sticks to pursue. With a series of yells, the warriors complied “like so many red devils,” said Crockett, who watched from his position in the militia column. Catching sight of Crockett and his comrades, the massed Red Sticks veered toward them, unaware of the long line of cavalrymen in the timber on the opposite side of Tallushatchee. “We gave them a fire,” Crockett recalled, “and they returned it, and then ran back to their town.” Coffee ordered the encircling files to advance dismounted.  

Pandemonium ensued. “Women and children darted from the cabins to surrender. Crockett saw seven women clutch at the hunting shirt of a stunned militiaman. He also counted 46 warriors running into a single cabin for a last-ditch defense. As Crockett’s company approached, a woman sitting in a doorway prepared to resist. “She placed her feet against the bow she had in her hand,” Crockett marveled, “and then took the arrow, and raising her feet, she drew with all her might and let it fly at us, and she killed a lieutenant.” The dead subaltern’s enraged men fired at least 20 musket balls into the woman. Her death elated the Tennesseans, who showed the Red Sticks in the cabin no mercy. “We now shot them like dogs,” Crockett confessed.  

Bullets penetrated the thin clapboard walls handily, shredding those inside with splinters, balls, and buckshot. To complete the carnage, Crockett’s detachment set the cabin ablaze, burning the wounded inside to death. The gore made an indelible impression on Crockett. “I recollect seeing a boy who was shot down near the house.” Crockett would wrote in his 1834 Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of Tennessee. “His arm and thigh was broken, and he was so near the burning house that the grease was stewing out of him. In this situation he was still trying to crawl along, but not a murmur escaped him, though he was only about twelve years old.”  

Scarcely a warrior escaped death, while Coffee counted just five of his men killed and 40 wounded, most slightly. Returning in triumph to Jackson’s supply depot, the victors, who had been on half-rations for days, discovered that the contractors engaged to feed the army had failed to deliver provisions. A ravenous Crockett and several of his companions returned to the battlefield in search of food. Combing the charred cabins and blood-soaked grounds, they found a potato cellar under the wreckage of the same cabin that had claimed the lives of the 46 doomed warriors. They hauled out a large cache of nauseating tubers. “Hunger compelled us to eat them,” remembered Crockett, “though I had a little rather not, if I could have helped it, for the oil of the Indians we had burned up on the day before had run down on them, and [the potatoes] looked like they had been stewed with fat meat.”  

Five days later, Crockett again saw combat. An allied Creek chief had called upon Jackson to save his people, whom he said a large Red Sticks war party had besieged at the fortified post of a trader named Lashley near Talladega, a talwa just six miles distant. Jackson’s scouts returned with a heartening report. The Red Sticks had not encircled the friendly Creeks. Rather, they were congregated in a shrub-choked valley below the hilltop fort.  

At sunrise on November 9, Jackson halted on the northern rim of the valley, his presence undetected by the Red Sticks. He quietly arranged his troops in battle order, telling Coffee to deploy his mounted men on the high ground to the east and west of the valley and join their flanks behind Lashley’s fort. To Crockett’s delight, the friendly Creeks streamed from the stockade, waving and crying, “How-dy-do, brother, how-dy-do.” After aligning his infantry on the northern rim of the valley, Jackson opened the action with an old Indian tactic. He sent three companies into the valley to roost the Red Sticks from their camp, and then wheel and dash back to the infantry lines. Painted scarlet and stripped to their breechclouts, the Red Sticks took the bait and chased the soldiers straight into Jackson’s ranks. Smoke rolled down the ridge, and the Red Sticks reeled in confusion. Repelled on one front, the Red Sticks rallied and then charged Coffee’s line.

“They came rushing forward like a cloud of Egyptian locusts and screaming like all the young devils had been turned loose, with the old devil of all at their head,” wrote Crockett. “The warriors came yelling on, meeting us, and continued until they were within shot of us, when we fired and killed a considerable number of them.” Crockett described the ensuing slaughter. “They broke like a gang of steers and ran across to our other line, where they were again fired on; and so we kept them running from one line to the other, constantly under a heavy fire.”  

After an hour of futile battering at Jackson’s lines, several hundred Red Sticks survivors slipped through a gap between two units and fled. Nearly 400 Red Sticks died in the one-sided struggle. Jackson had inflicted a shattering but by no means war-ending defeat on the Red Sticks; they were too numerous and dispersed to collapse under the twin losses at Tallushatchee and Talladega.  

David Crockett had no desire to stick around for the denouement. Together with most of Jackson’s volunteers, he quit the war at the expiration of his term of enlistment. In late January 1814, Crockett returned home to a joyous Polly, with $65.59 in pay and allowances in his pockets. Crockett would reenlist nine months later for a brief stint against the British in the Gulf Coast, but he saw no combat, his service ending before the Battle of New Orleans. “This closed out my career as a warrior, and I am glad of it,” he later wrote. Crockett had seen slaughter enough, and as his Narrative reveals, it clearly sickened him.  

The 21-year-old fellow Tennessean Sam Houston began his Creek War odyssey a few weeks after David Crockett headed home from his first enlistment. A non-conformist by nature, at age 15 Houston abandoned the Kingston general store in which he clerked to live with the Cherokees, whose country abutted his family’s East Tennessee farm. The Cherokees took to the strapping white adolescent. The chief of the band adopted him, naming Houston “the Raven” after the bird the Cherokees believed symbolized good luck and wanderlust. Houston had not bucked the family traces entirely, however. He regularly visited his widowed mother and siblings, wheedling money from her with which to purchase a generous quantity of gifts for his adopted Cherokee kin.  

In 1811, Houston returned to frontier society, fluent in Cherokee but intent on filling the gaps in his white education. He studied under a tutor and then opened a school for local children. Debt, however, soon drove him to resume clerking as well. Houston loathed the work no less than he had three years earlier. When in March 1813 the opportunity to enlist in the 39th U.S. Infantry regiment, then recruiting in East Tennessee, ostensibly for service against the British in the ongoing War of 1812, presented itself, Houston hastened to seize it. Being underage—the legal minimum age for service in the Regular Army was then 21—Houston first needed to obtain his mother’s permission, which she granted with an apparent admonition to never “turn his back to save his life.” That said, she slipped onto his finger a thin gold band with the word “Honor” etched in the inner curve.  

A friend remembered when Houston “took the silver dollar.” Following the custom of the day, a recruiting detail from the 39th paraded up the dirt thoroughfare of Kingston with fife and drum. Silver dollars glinted on the drumhead as tokens of enlistment. Houston stepped forward, snatched a coin, and “was then forthwith marched to the barracks, uniformed, and appoint the same day as a sergeant.” Shortly after Houston left Kingston, admiring friends secured for him an ensign’s commission. Promotion to third lieutenant came apace. Lieutenant Houston cut a fine figure in uniform. Powerfully built, at six feet, two inches tall, he towered over most of the men of his platoon. His deep, commanding voice and eyes, as brilliant a shade of blue and as transfixing as those of Andrew Jackson, enhanced Houston’s natural gift for leadership.   On the morning of March 27, 1814, staring intently at a gun-smoke-draped barricade, behind which thronged confidently jeering Red Sticks, the young lieutenant awaited his first test of combat.    

At last awakened to the danger a Red Sticks victory posed for the South, particularly if the British were to land on the Gulf Coasts, early in 1814 the War Department diverted the untried 39th U.S. Infantry to service under Andrew Jackson. With a command now numbering 3,200 men, Jackson advanced from his central Alabama supply depot on March 25, 1814, to challenge the strongest remaining Red Sticks contingent, nearly 1,000 warriors defending an enclave in a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River, 70 miles northeast of present-day Montgomery. Along the south bank of the river rested the Red Sticks village of Tohopeka. Across the land approach to the village, the warriors had fashioned the most formidable obstacle American Indians would ever construct in their century of conflicts against the United States. A 350-yard-long wall of massive pine logs held in place with upright pine posts and props zigzagged across the neck of the 100-acre peninsula. In places the breastworks rise to a height of eight feet; nowhere were they less than five feet high. Clay chinking filled gaps between the logs. Two rows of firing ports were cut in the logs at regular intervals.  

Jackson had devised a simple but ingenious plan—theoretically at least—to obliterate the Red Sticks and their refuge. At daybreak, General Coffee would ride down with his mounted brigade of Tennessee militia and 500 Cherokee warriors. They were to ford the river, come up on the Red Sticks from behind, and throw a cordon around the far bank of the horseshoe-shaped bend to prevent escape. Jackson, meanwhile, would march directly against Tohopeka with the infantry and an artillery company, batter openings in the breastworks with his two cannons, and then launch a grand bayonet charge against the weakened defenses. The 600 blue-coated soldiers of the 39th U. S. Infantry would lead the attack.  

The battle did not unfold according to plan. The small cannon blasted away for two hours without even denting the barricade. Aligned in close order within musket range of the Red Sticks, the Regulars took casualties from enemy sharpshooters. Sam Houston and his comrades grew restless. Not until the Cherokee warriors spontaneously surged across the Tallapoosa and seized the Red Sticks village, causing warriors to stream from the barricade to rescue their families, was Jackson able to launch his assault.  

The fight at the barricade was bitter but brief. Cheering Regulars rapidly punched gaps in the sagging Red Sticks ranks. On the extreme right of the regimental line, Lieutenant Houston climbed the wall with his platoon. He slashed at Red Sticks with his sword until a barbed arrow buried itself in his right groin. Hobbling about exhorting his men, Houston kept on his feet until the warriors opposing his platoon retreated to a log-roofed redoubt in a ravine beside the riverbank. Then he sank to the ground, bleeding and helpless.  

Houston begged a fellow officer to extract the arrow. The man tried, but the arrow refused to budge. He tugged at it again with the same result. Furious and perhaps delirious with pain, Houston lifted his sword and threatened to cleave the officer’s skull if he failed a third time. The man yanked, and the arrow came out, together with a mass of tissue and a torrent of blood. Houston righted himself, struggled back to the barricade, and delivered himself to the regimental surgeon, who staunched the flow of blood.  

After the collapse of the barricade, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend degenerated into a five-hour slaughter of Red Sticks that ended only with nightfall. Nearly 300 warriors died trying to flee across the Tallapoosa. Those who remained behind fought and died until only two clusters remained, one of which was the redoubt in the ravine near where Houston had been wounded. Jackson personally called for volunteers to storm the place. Houston, who lay near enough to hear the summons, labored to his feet, grabbed a musket, and summoned his men to follow him. Stumbling down the rocky ravine as twilight settled over the forest, Houston came within 15 feet of the redoubt before two musket balls struck him simultaneously, one in the right arm, the other in the shoulder. Drawing on his last reserve of strength, Houston turned to order his men to charge, only discover that he was alone. Houston staggered back up the ravine before collapsing. After dark, soldiers burnt the redoubt, immolating the occupants.  

Night fell. The occasional musket shots, which signified Red Sticks survivors rooted out and dispatched, at least ceased. Surgeons, meanwhile, attend to army wounded, which numbered 159 in addition to 47 killed. Jackson’s Cherokee and Lower Creek allies suffered 23 dead and 47 wounded. The Red Sticks force had been all but annihilated, with nearly 900 dead and fewer than three dozen escaping unhurt. The Battle of Horseshoe Bend effectively ended the Creek War. It also catapulted Andrew Jackson to national fame and earned him a major general’s commission in the Regular Army.  

On the battlefield that night, Sam Houston received only cursory care from the surgeons. A doctor bandaged his groin and extracted the bullet from his right arm. He was about to probe for the second musket ball when another surgeon suggested he desist. Houston, he said, had lost too much blood to survive the night, better not to torture him gratuitously. Laying Houston on the ground, the surgeons ministered to men whose odds of recovering they judged better.  

Houston, however, refused to die. Shivering with cold, tormented by thirst, and racked with spirit-shattering pain, he passed the night of March 27, alone and ignored. When daybreak confounded the surgeons’ prediction, Houston was placed on a litter and carried swinging and jolting between two horses 60 excruciating miles to Jackson’s forward supply depot, where me might expire in relative comfort. Instead, he lingered on. Placed on another litter and fortified with whiskey between blackouts, Houston made it home alive. It would take him three years to recover fully.  

David Crockett and Sam Houston had faced their respective baptisms by fire in the most consequential war between American Indians and the United States in the nation’s history. The Creek War opened the Deep South to the Cotton Kingdom, setting the stage for both the expulsion of all Indians from the South in the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and the Civil War three decades thereafter.  

Destiny would eventually lead Crockett and Houston to Texas, where Crockett would meet his end on a merciless March 1836 morning at a crumbling former Spanish mission called the Alamo, and Houston would chart the course of Texas independence from Mexico. For both, the road to glory had begun in battle against the Red Sticks.  

Peter Cozzens is the author of A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023)

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of American History magazine.

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There’s an element of truth to the maxim “the hat makes the man.” In the 19th century West, for example, certain headgear served to identify their wearers at a glance. Soldiers had the shako, firefighters the leatherhead, Indians the warbonnet and vaqueros the sombrero. But perhaps no other topper in history has symbolized a people and their region in such a defining way as the cowboy hat. See it stamped on a box, in neon outside a storefront or in a popular present-day email “emoji,” and one immediately thinks of the American West.

Yet, the cowboy hat wasn’t the most prolific lid of its time or place. In a 1957 editorial headlined The Hat That Won the West, in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, writer-historian Lucius Beebe disputed that the cowboy hat was ubiquitous out West, a notion he deemed an invention of artist Frederic Remington. “The authentic hat of the Old West,” Beebe wrote, “was the cast-iron derby, the bowler of Old Bond Street and the chapeau melon of French usage.” He then pointed to such derby wearers as lawman Bat Masterson, stagecoach robber Charles E. “Black Bart” Boles, Wells Fargo chief detective James B. Hume and, tellingly, “Remington and his imitators” as proof of his assertion.

Regardless, the cowboy hat remains the iconic symbol of the West. And the name that has become synonymous with it is Stetson. Ironically, John B. Stetson was an Easterner, and the factory that initially steamed, shaped and shipped tens of millions of hats bearing his name was in Philadelphia, though the company that produces them under license today is, fittingly, in Texas.

Stetson (1830–1906), the son of a New Jersey hatmaker, was diagnosed with tuberculosis as a young man and resolved to close up the family shop and venture West for the climate and to see its vaunted beauty before dying. In 1861 news of the Pikes Peak Gold Rush drew him and fellow hopefuls to the Colorado goldfields. Stetson arrived, so the story goes, amid heavy downpours and so crafted a beaver felt hat of his own design to keep dry. It featured the trademark wide brim, high crown and waterproof lining since associated with his name. The style proved so popular among the Western outdoorsmen Stetson encountered that the emboldened entrepreneur returned East in 1865 to resume hatmaking.

The first design off the line in his Philadelphia factory was the “Boss of the Plains” (see above). It proved instantly popular and dominated the market for the next couple of decades. As Stetson owners took to adding personalized touches—a dent here or a curved brim there—the company took note and rolled out additional styles.

Stetson got a big boost in the 1880s with the advent of international celebrity in the person of William Frederick Cody. Cody was already a fan of Stetsons, custom versions of which he wore onstage in the early 1870s in touring productions organized by dime novelist Ned Buntline. Within a few years of launching his own Wild West arena shows in 1883, Buffalo Bill was plastering his Stetson-capped image on signboards from San Francisco to Saxony. The hatmaker couldn’t buy better advertising.

The birth of the silver screen and its Western stars further amplified the popularity of the Stetson, one of which the company named for the actor who made it popular—the Tom Mix.

Today the cowboy hat endures, and scores of hatmakers big and small continue to craft styles that symbolize the Old and New West. We trace its history below.

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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In 1942, British authorities in Cairo arrested an Egyptian dance superstar for espionage. Her name was Hekmet Fahmi. Allegedly a nationalist with connections to Anwar el-Sadat, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and members of the Egyptian revolutionary Free Officers Movement, Fahmi had gained access to top secret intelligence from a well-informed British lover who worked at GCHQ and had passed this information to a pair of German spies who had managed to infiltrate Cairo.

At least, that was what Fahmi stood accused of. The espionage threat was credible enough for British authorities to put Egypt’s most famous dancer behind bars for more than two years. Her career would never recover. Yet Fahmi’s story remains a captivating part of World War II history, not only because of her alleged espionage but because of the talent that likely worked to her advantage as a spy: Egyptian cabaret belly dancing. 

An Elusive Art

Egyptian belly dance, known as raqs sharqi, has a history stretching back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian temple reliefs from the days of the pharaohs contain strikingly similar imagery to modern Egyptian belly dancing, such as women dancing wearing hip scarves to the accompaniment of clarinets and drums. While belly dancing expressed itself in different forms over time, including group dancing and male dancing, female belly dancing proved the most enduring and popular incarnation of raqs sharqi. Historically seen as a desirable trait for wives, brides-to-be were taught the art of belly dancing so that they could dance for their husbands. Some women became professional dancers to entertain primarily male audiences. 

Belly dance is a highly disciplined dance style comparative to a sport. It is a full body exercise that requires dancers to move different muscle groups independently. Essential to Egyptian-style belly dance, a scarf worn around the hips accentuates isolated hip and waist movements and adds flair to performances. Aside from complex hip, waist and chest movements, the dance also incorporates fluid arm and finger movements. To gain the amount of flexibility, precision and rhythmic grace to belly dance successfully takes rigorous practice. Once the essential basic movements are mastered, a dancer may weave together endless combinations and improvisations to form complex choreography. The dance can be performed to any type of music and also be highly dramatized if desired. Special types of belly dance performances can include candle dances, sword dances, floor dancing (performed on one’s knees and sometimes bending backwards), and the ever-popular veil dances, all of which require finesse.

Appeal to Foreigners

Foreigners who visited Egypt were captivated by belly dance performances they witnessed. Although Western paintings and illustrations from the 19th century often portrayed “oriental dancers” with colorful garb and bare stomachs, religious convictions saw female belly dancers in Egypt cover up more over time. The essential hip scarves were still worn but bare waists became less common and dance movements became more restricted as time passed. 

Belly dance experienced a Renaissance in the 1920s thanks to the creative genius of Badia Masabni, popularly known as Madame Badia. Originally from Syria, Badia spoke five languages and traveled in many countries throughout the world. Drawing inspiration from French cabaret performances, Badia realized how to create an elegant and exciting new dance style fusing the best of Egyptian belly dance traditions with Western flair.

Cairo’s Favorite Casino

With innovation and entrepreneurial skills, Badia set up a nightclub in Cairo called the Casino Opera, also known as the Casino Badia: an exclusive venue that also functioned as a training school to teach her new style of dance to adventurous young local women. Egyptian cabaret style belly dance was born.

Badia revolutionized belly dance. She introduced sweeping changes to dance costume, modeling her dancers’ costumes on two-piece French cabaret outfits with decorative brassieres, short hip scarves, and plenty of sequins. The dancers performed in high heels and sometimes barefoot. Badia developed new signature moves in the dance; she also allowed the dancers a wider field of movement and mixed signature Egyptian techniques with Latin dance styles and ballet. Badia also upended music, blending Western orchestral instruments like violins, cello and accordion with Egyptian traditional instruments such as clarinets and tabla drums to create powerful and enchanting background music for performances. The results were fantastic. Badia’s new cabaret dance style became all the rage in Cairo and influenced other schools of dance. 

Cabarets offering belly dance performances became magnets for British troops garrisoned in Cairo both before and during World War II. Badia’s Casino Opera was one of the most popular hotspots. Egypt’s King Farouk was a patron as was Randolph Churchill and many other famous personages. Many British soldiers in Cairo were eager to enjoy the company of attractive Egyptian females in nightclubs as well as to drink and socialize. Cabarets like Badia’s Casino Opera in Cairo were great places to mix—and to spy.

During World War II, many Egyptians were sympathetic to the Germans due to a general dislike at living under a de facto British occupation. We will probably never know how many Egyptian women who gained access to influential military and government officials through nightclub entertainment passed information they learned to German intelligence operatives, spurred by a desire to further the cause of Egyptian independence.

Accused spy Hekmet Fahmi herself was trained at the Casino Opera and was one of Madame Badia’s star pupils. Badia herself was rumored to have engaged in espionage, although for whom she may have been spying remains a mystery.

What is clear is that the special dance style that Badia and her proteges wielded to enchant their audiences has had staying power. The Casino Opera debuted many famous Egyptian belly dancers and movie stars, such as Samia Gamal and Taheyya Kariokka,  icons of 1950s Egyptian cinema. These talented and graceful women remain an inspiration for practitioners of Egyptian cabaret belly dance, a style which spread from Cairo all over the world and remains popular today.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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Award-winning actress and singer Ann-Margret is known for her commitment to entertaining U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. In 1966, she responded to a request signed by over 3,000 troops to perform for them and traveled to Vietnam with three bandmates on a USO tour, traveling to Saigon, the USS Yorktown, and the dangerous “Iron Triangle.”

Despite the danger, she said she was determined to do the best job she could and was not worried for her safety because she felt protected by American servicemen. She focused on bringing them joy from home. She returned to the war zone two years later with Bob Hope’s Christmas USO show.

She continues to support military service members and was honored by the USO in 2003 with the Spirit of Hope award, named after her friend Bob Hope. “I am very proud to be an American. Always will be,” she told Vietnam magazine Editor Zita Ballinger Fletcher in an exclusive interview.

Ann-Margret shared insights into her wartime experiences and new limited-edition perfume, with all profits benefiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, available at www.ann-margretperfume.com.  

You received a petition from troops in Vietnam in 1966 asking you to come perform. The war was unpopular and Vietnam was dangerous. What motivated you to go there despite those obstacles?

Honestly, I didn’t think about my safety at all at the time. I was very flattered by those signatures. Nothing would have stopped me from going.  

What did your family members think about you going to Vietnam?

Well, they knew how much I wanted to go, and they of course were worried but I said to them, “There’s no way anyone can get to me because…my guys are there!”  

What songs did you most enjoy performing there?

I loved doing “Dancing in the Streets.”  

You toured with Bob Hope on the USO Christmas Show in 1968. What was it like to work with him?

I loved working with Bob and did many times over the years. He was a gentlemen and always, always funny on stage and off. He was devoted to the soldiers. He shared many stories with us about traveling during World War II and all the marvelous and touching letters he received from them and their families. He was great at writing back, too.

When Bob and I were rehearsing our dancing for a duet for the tour he came out in a minidress and asked, “Who looks better, me or Ann-Margret?” I won, but he did get a couple of votes from the crew.

We knew that we would be safe. When I did Vietnam with Johnny Rivers there were just four of us, and when we went with Bob Hope there were 80 of us. We weren’t afraid at all, never. We all just wanted to bring a piece of home to those men.

What do you think young people should know about the Vietnam War today?

Our guys went through so much—and when they came back, some people were not very nice to them. They had to go through a lot, and to come back and have people be bad to you…We need to show respect and admiration for all the men and women who served, always. Never forget.  

You are donating 100% of the proceeds from your new limited-edition perfume to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. Can you tell us more about this?

Yes, thank you for asking. My dear friend Justin Chambers of Grey’s Anatomy has wanted to make a fragrance for me for a long while since we worked together. So it’s a project that’s been on the drawing board. When he suggested it benefit the veterans, that was a slam dunk for me. I absolutely adore the fragrance.

We worked on the actual fragrance for a year before we selected this special scent. It has notes of gardenia and jasmine and ylang ylang. You can visit my website for all the details at ann-margretperfume.com and I’ll be wearing it. You can count on that!  

You are a strong supporter of Vietnam veterans. Is there anything in particular you would like to say to Vietnam veterans reading this?

I love you all and I am proud to have been there with you.

This story appeared in the 2024 Winter issue of Vietnam magazine.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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The year 1873 saw the introduction of two game-changing firearms—the Winchester Model 1873 lever-action rifle and the Colt M1873 Single Action Army (aka “Peacemaker”) revolver. What set them apart from the array of available arms was that they were among the first chambered for center-fire metallic cartridges to be used in tandem.

Each firearm initially used its own proprietary round. The Model 1873 was chambered for the .44-40 Winchester cartridge, which went on to become one of the most popular rounds in firearms history. Purpose-built for the U.S. Cavalry, the Peacemaker was initially designed with a 7½-inch barrel, for accuracy at longer ranges, and chambered for use with the hard-hitting .45 Colt round. Not to rest on its own laurels, Colt then offered civilian versions of its revolver chambered for Winchester’s increasingly popular .44-40 cartridge, as well as the latter’s .38-40 and .32-20 rounds, thus sparing anyone who owned both firearms from having to carry two different calibers of ammunition. As attested by the images on the following pages, everyone from lawmen and outlaws to everyday cowhands and shepherds to headline entertainers were soon snapping up both manufacturers’ Model 1873s.

Another aspect that set apart the 1873s was shrewd marketing, including testimonials from famed Westerners of the era. Winchester and Colt each advertised its guns through such motivated Western dealers as E.C. Meacham, of St. Louis, and Carlos Gove, of Denver. Winchester’s 1875 catalog featured praise from Wild West showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who wrote the company on behalf of prospective buyers, “For hunting, I pronounce your improved Winchester the boss.” Writer Ned Buntline, whose florid dime novels birthed many of the legends associated with Buffalo Bill, tirelessly hyped both the Winchester ’73 and the Colt Single Action Army. For much of his career Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, the man who in 1934 brought outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow to ground, carried a Colt Peacemaker he dubbed “Old Lucky.” Bill Tilghman, the famed U.S. marshal out of Oklahoma, was known to carry both a Winchester ’73 and a Peacemaker, as did notorious outlaws Billy the Kid and Pearl Hart, though clearly not to either manufacturer’s detriment. 

Winchester produced a whopping 720,000 Model 1873 rifles through 1923, while Colt rolled out more than 357,000 first-generation Single Action Army revolvers through 1940. By then both companies had claimed the title “The Gun That Won the West” for their respective Models 1873. The Peacemaker is still in production, and modern-day replicas of both firearms remain popular among present-day cowboy action shooters. They’ve certainly earned their reputation. 

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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Director John Ford went on inactive status from the navy in 1944 to film an adaptation of They Were Expendable, William Lindsay White’s book about PT boats during the opening months of the war in the Philippines. The movie starred Robert Montgomery, who had joined the navy after Pearl Harbor and, like the character he plays, commanded a PT boat. John Wayne, who had not served in the war, was billed second. Back on a film set, Ford remained the same cantankerous needler he had been before the war and he zeroed in on “Duke” Wayne, one of his favorite targets. In Print the Legend, his Ford biography, author Scott Eyman relates how Montgomery watched the director rake Wayne over the coals. “Can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?” Ford asked in front of the cast and crew. Eyman related what happened next. “Finally, Robert Montgomery walked over, placed his hands on both sides of the director’s chair and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to Duke like that. You ought to be ashamed.’ The set fell silent. A break was ordered, and Ford ended up in tears.”

Despite the turmoil on set, They Were Expendable ended up being one of Ford’s finest films, a melancholic love letter to PT boats and to the navy in general. 

When the film opens in Manila on the eve of war in 1941, Lieutenant John “Brick” Brickley (Montgomery) wants to demonstrate the potential of the PT boats he commands. His admiral is dismissive (“In wartime, I prefer something more substantial,” he says). So is his second in command, Lt. (j.g.) Rusty Ryan (Wayne). Rusty wants a transfer to destroyers. 

Then the war comes. 

In one early scene, Rusty receives a finger wound that becomes infected and Brick orders him to the hospital on Corregidor. There he strikes up a brief romance with nurse Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed). Like everything else in the movie, the romance is realistic and understated. Rusty invites Sandy for dinner at the hut serving as the officers’ club, where sailors hidden in the crawl space beneath the building serenade them. It’s a touching scene, but Ford understands that romance is impossible under these conditions. The last time the two speak is over a field telephone as Rusty prepares to depart on a mission and Sandy remains on Corregidor as the Japanese move closer. The conversation gets cut off abruptly when higher-ups commandeer the line. Rusty—and the audience—never learn Sandy’s fate. 

Ford uses his own naval experience to create a sense of authenticity. There’s no place for cinematic heroics. Earlier in the film, as Brick chafes at the limited role his boats have been given, the admiral compares the situation to a baseball game. If the manager tells you to hit a sacrifice bunt, that’s what you do. “You and I are professionals,” he says. At the end, when Rusty decides to give up his seat on the last plane out to Australia so he can join the guerrilla fight against the Japanese, Brick calmly reminds him that they have their orders. Rusty sits back down. 

Brick’s PT boats do see combat and those who like watching these speedy plywood craft in action will enjoy those sequences. They also get one vital mission when they spirit “the General” out of the war zone so he can continue the fight from Australia. Although the General remains nameless, audiences certainly recognized him as Douglas MacArthur. In real life, John D. Bulkeley, the Medal of Honor recipient on whom Montgomery’s character is based, did transport MacArthur and his family south to safety on Mindanao, where B-17s then flew them to Australia. 

One of the movie’s greatest strengths is its eye for detail—when Brickley grabs a pair of scissors to estimate the distance on map; the terrified faces of wounded soldiers on Corregidor as Japanese bombs fall; the cook’s instructions to use a pinch of salt in the pancake batter; the way Sandy brushes her hair and puts on a string of pearls before sitting down to dinner with the officers; the fact that Rusty demands aviation fuel (PT boats used Packard engines adapted from airplanes). It is also beautifully filmed, with haunting shots of the shadowy and wet tunnels of Corregidor and some pulse-pounding sequences of PT boats dodging shell bursts. 

They Were Expendable turned out to be one of John Ford’s best films, but it was not a huge box office success when it was released at the end of 1945. It is a war movie in a minor key—subdued and somewhat melancholy. It matches the film’s subject matter: the American experience in the Philippines at the start of the war did not go well, either. No doubt, audiences who had just seen the terrible war come to an end were not eager to relive its grim early days, no matter how beautifully photographed.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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These are ten of the most interesting Westerners who spent time in the Centennial State.

Bent Brothers 

William and Charles Bent partnered with Ceran St. Vrain in the best known trading post west of the Mississippi. Established in 1833 on the Santa Fe Trail in what today is southeastern Colorado, Bent’s Fort was a gathering spot for travelers, trappers and traders. The Bent brothers forged lasting relationships with the Cheyennes and Arapahos. 

Kit Carson 

Christopher “Kit” Carson began his career trapping beaver in the Colorado Rockies and hiring on as a hunter at Bent’s Fort. In the 1850s he served as an Indian agent, working for peace on behalf of his friend Ute Chief Ouray. Late in his career he commanded Fort Garland before taking up ranching in the San Luis Valley. Carson died at Fort Lyon on May 23, 1868, and was initially buried beside wife Josefa at their home in Boggsville. 

Chief Ouray 

Born in 1833, the year of the shooting stars in tribal lore, the Ute chief sought peace with the U.S. government and preservation of his tribe’s hereditary lands at the height of the Indian wars. By life’s end he and wife Chipeta lived in a six-room house on a 300-acre farm along the Uncompahgre River near Montrose. Following his death on Aug. 24, 1880, despite Ouray’s best efforts, the government relocated the Utes to reservations in Utah.

Buffalo Bill Cody 

William Frederick Cody earned his reputation as an Army scout, his nickname as a buffalo hunter for the railroads and fame for touring worldwide with the best known Wild West show in American history. At age 13, however, he’d reportedly earned little during the 1859 gold rush to what would become Colorado. In later life he repeatedly visited his sister in Denver, where he died on Jan. 10, 1917. Cody is buried atop Lookout Mountain near Golden. 

Doc Holliday 

Tubercular dentist turned professional gambler and gunman John Henry Holliday came West for his health. After risking his life in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, backing the Earp brothers in the O.K. Corral fight and aftermath, Holliday made his way to Colorado, where he gambled in Trinidad, Pueblo and Leadville. The reputedly curative waters of Glenwood Springs failed to remedy his tuberculosis, and he died there on Nov. 8, 1887.

Baby Doe Tabor 

The beautiful Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt divorced her worthless first husband in 1880, moved to Leadville and met silver magnate Horace Austin Warner “Haw” Tabor, who left his wife of 25 years to marry Baby Doe. Alas, Horace died destitute in 1899, leaving the widowed Baby Doe penniless once again. Her body was found frozen to her cabin floor in 1935.

Alferd Packer 

Self-proclaimed wilderness guide Packer and five fellow travelers suffered in the San Juan Mountains during the harsh winter of 1874. The only one to emerge alive, Packer later confessed to cannibalism. Though he denied having killed the others, evidence suggested otherwise. Convicted of manslaughter, he served 18 years before being paroled in 1901. Packer died on April 23, 1907, in Deer Creek and is buried in Littleton Cemetery, a stone’s throw from this writer’s house. 

Margaret Brown 

A celebrated survivor of the 1912 sinking of RMS Titanic, this Colorado socialite, activist and philanthropist is best remembered as the “Unsinkable Molly Brown.” Known to family and friends as “Maggie,” she married mining engineer James Joseph Brown in Leadville in 1886, and in 1894 the successful couple bought a Victorian mansion in Denver preserved today as the Molly Brown House Museum. Maggie died in her sleep on Oct. 26, 1932.

Tom Horn 

He served at times as a scout, soldier, range detective and Pinkerton agent, but Horn became notorious as a paid-for-hire killer. In 1900, while working for the Swan Land & Cattle Co. in northwest Colorado, he gunned down suspected rustlers Mat Rash and Isom Dart. In 1902 Horn was convicted of having murdered 14-year-old rancher’s son Willie Nickell near Iron Mountain, Wyo., and on Nov. 20, 1903, he was hanged in Cheyenne. His brother brought Tom’s body to Boulder for burial.

Ann Bassett 

The first white child born in Browns Park, an isolated northwest Colorado valley notorious for rustling and illegal land grabs, Ann Marie Bassett was in the thick of the action for much of her life. After Tom Horn’s 1900 killing of Mat Rash, her fiancé, Bassett sought vengeance against Horn’s employer, cattle baron Ora Haley. Tried twice for cattle rustling, she was found not guilty both times. In an interview given just before her death on May 8, 1956, Bassett said, “I did everything they said I did and a helluva lot more.”

this article first appeared in wild west magazine

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On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, director John Ford and his wife were attending a luncheon at the home of Rear Admiral Andrew C. Pickens in Alexandria, Virginia. The host excused himself to take a call from the War Department. When he returned, he told his guests that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. “We are at war,” he said.

Ford was ready.

He had been born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on February 1, 1894, the son of Irish immigrants who had settled in nearby Portland, where the elder Feeney operated a bar. Young John played on the Portland High School football team and graduated in 1914. His high school nickname, probably because of his football prowess, was “Bull.”

When Feeney’s older brother Francis headed west and found work as an actor and director in California, young John followed—and assumed his brother’s stage name of Ford as well. Eventually John Ford began directing his own films. By the time of Pearl Harbor he was one of Hollywood’s most respected directors, with a resume that included The Iron Horse (1924), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and even a Shirley Temple film, Wee Willie Winkie (1937). In his 1939 Western Stagecoach, Ford turned a relatively obscure actor named John Wayne into a star. That was also the first movie Ford shot in the Southwest’s Monument Valley, a setting he made iconic in his postwar Westerns.

Yet for all his talent, John Ford was a flawed human being with a strong streak of pure New England cussedness. “Actors were terrified of him because he liked to terrify them,” said John Carradine, who acted for Ford in several films. “He was a sadist.” Ford became known for the way he needled his actors, especially Wayne, during filming and for his tendency to go on drunken benders between projects. According to one acquaintance, “It was as though God had touched John Ford at the beginning of his life and said, ‘How would you like to be a very unique man—like no one else. However, you may scare some people.’”

Ford had always nursed a love for the sea, perhaps inspired by his youth on Maine’s Casco Bay. In the 1930s he enlisted in the Navy Reserve with a commission as a lieutenant commander, and as tensions with Japan increased, he sometimes used his yacht Araner to shadow any Japanese vessels he encountered off the California coast. He started the Eleventh Naval District Motion Picture and Still Photographic Group in 1939 as a means of documenting the navy’s activities in the impending war and began recruiting friends from all aspects of the film industry to help. As he later said, “They are writers, directors, some actors, but mostly technicians, electricians, cutters, sound cutters, negative cutters, positive cutters, carpenters, and that sort of thing.” The navy called the 47-year-old Ford to active duty in September 1941 as a lieutenant commander and he went to Washington, where his photographic unit was assigned to work under William J. Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

In his new role Ford visited Iceland and Panama to survey the military situations there. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he received orders to head to Hawaii to film the aftermath. He and a crew embarked on the trip west on January 4, 1942. Twelve days later he was at Pearl Harbor, which he found “in a state of readiness. The Army and the Navy, all in good shape, everything taken care of, patrols going out regularly, everybody in high spirit[s]…”

On April 18, 1942, Lt. Col. James Doolittle and his raiders took off in twin-engine B-25 Mitchells from the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo. Although the Doolittle Raid did little physical damage to Japan, it dealt a psychological blow. Shocked by the American attack on its mainland, the Japanese military decided to move aggressively across the Pacific to prevent any more raids. One of its targets was a tiny atoll with an airstrip 1,110 miles northwest of Hawaii called Midway. It was little more than a speck in the vast Pacific, populated mostly by a species of albatross that people called gooney birds, but Midway was also the U.S. Navy’s westernmost base and home to a Marine detachment. Pan American World Airways had used Midway as a base for its Clippers, and navy submarines fueled there, too. A pair of Japanese destroyers had shelled Midway on the night of December 7, 1941, and the Japanese speculated that perhaps Doolittle’s men had taken off from the atoll for their attack. Furthermore, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack, believed that if he threatened Midway, he could draw the U.S. Pacific Fleet under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz out from Hawaii and into battle.

The U.S. Navy had cracked Japanese codes and knew that Midway was in the crosshairs, and Nimitz wanted Ford to photograph the fighting once it erupted. Sometime in late May 1942 he summoned Ford to his office at Pearl Harbor, said he had a dangerous assignment for him, and told him to report to Admiral David W. Bagley. Ford and cameraman Jack Mackenzie Jr. were soon zipping across the harbor in a speedboat for a rendezvous with a destroyer that was already underway. “Hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing, where I was going,” Ford said. “I found out when I got on board the destination was Midway.”

All was quiet on Midway when Ford and Mackenzie arrived. “All the year around it’s the same out there on that little Pacific island,” Mackenzie told American Cinematographer magazine. “The grandest place in the whole ocean to find absolute quiet and peace—if that’s what you want.” Ford spent time photographing the island’s gooney birds and the PT boats that had accompanied the task force. He remained doubtful that the Japanese would really attack but, forewarned by the codebreakers, the navy had been scrambling to bolster the atoll’s defenses by flying in more aircraft and reinforcing the ground forces. “By June 4 there were 121 combat planes, 141 officers and 2,886 enlisted men on the atoll,” noted Samuel Eliot Morison in his history of naval operations during the war. 

On June 3, Ford said, Commander Massie Hughes invited him aboard a PBY Catalina flying boats for a patrol. At first they saw nothing, Ford claimed, but then they got a glimpse of enemy vessels through a break in the clouds. When a couple of Japanese airplanes appeared to spot the PBY, Hughes headed into the clouds, and then descended for a wave-hugging return to Midway. 

Something, Ford realized, “was about to pop.” Another Catalina spotted what appeared to be the Japanese invasion fleet and the commander of Naval Air Station Midway, Captain Cyril T. Simard, sent out B-17s and Catalinas to attack the vessels, with little result. Simard expected the Japanese to attack the next morning and suggested that Ford place himself on top of the powerhouse, where he would have a good view of the impending action as well as a telephone link to headquarters. Ford and Mackenzie set up and went to bed.

Simard was right about the attack, although the morning of June 4 started off calmly enough. “Everything was very quiet and serene,” Ford said. He and Mackenzie shared the powerhouse with some Marines who had also stationed themselves on the roof. The filmmakers had a pair of 16mm cameras loaded with color film. Sometime around 6:30 that morning Ford was scanning the sky with binoculars when he spotted the first black dots that meant incoming Japanese aircraft. There were 108 airplanes in all, including 36 Nakajima B5N “Kate” bombers, 36 Aichi D3A “Val” dive bombers, and 36 Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighters, and they had been launched from four carriers about 200 miles out to sea. Midway’s radar had already picked them up and the defenders were braced for the onslaught. “Everybody was very calm. I was amazed, sort of, at the lackadaisical air everybody took,” Ford said. It was  as though this kind of thing happened all the time.

The Japanese planes roared in to attack. According to Ford, the lead pilot shocked everybody by flipping his Zero on its back and flying upside down about 100 feet off the ground in a show of bravado. “Everybody was amazed, nobody fired at him, until suddenly some Marine said, ‘What the Hell,’ let go at him and then shot him down,” said Ford. “He slid off into the sea.”

Then the attack started “in earnest.” Bombs exploded nearby, shaking the cameras. A plane dropped a bomb on the garrison’s hangar, which exploded. A piece of concrete struck Ford in the head and briefly knocked him out. “Just knocked me goofy for a bit, and I pulled myself out of it.” Recovering, Ford continued to film despite also receiving an ugly, three-inch shrapnel wound in his arm. 

Mackenzie, who kept a lucky rabbit’s foot in his pocket, had also been knocked down by the blast, and he regretted missing a shot of the explosion because he had been reloading film when it happened. He recovered and scrambled down a ladder to the ground and resumed shooting. “By this time [the Japanese] had riddled the hangars and set them on fire,” he recalled. “The hospital too was smashed and on fire, and the commissary was all busted up and burning fierce and one of our oil tanks was on fire sending a plume of heavy black smoke up into the atmosphere. It was a merry little hell all around.”

It appeared to Ford that the Japanese avoided bombing the runway, perhaps, he thought, because they hoped to capture the island and use it later. They did bomb alongside it, and they focused a lot of attention on an airplane the Americans had left out in the open as a decoy. From what Ford saw, the enemy wasted a lot of effort to destroy it. “[T]hey lost about three planes trying to get to that fake plane, as it came into a cone of fire that was pretty dangerous,” he said.

One incident that angered Ford happened as he peered through his binoculars and saw a Zero attack and kill a Marine who had bailed out of his airplane. “This kid jumped and this Zero went after him and shot him out of his harness,” he said, and then the Japanese pilot returned to strafe the water where the Marine had come down. 

Ford told his debriefers how impressed he had been by the Marines around him. “They were kids, oh, I would say from 18 to 22, none of them were older. They were the calmest people I have ever seen. They were up there popping away with rifles, having a swell time and none of them were alarmed.” He added, “I was really amazed. I thought that some kids, one or two would get scared, but no, they were having the time of their lives.”

But not all of them had escaped with their lives. Forty-nine of the atoll’s Marine defenders had been killed. Their aircraft—F4F Wildcats and obsolete F2A Brewster Buffaloes—were outmatched by the Japanese Zeros, and attacks flown from Midway against the Japanese vessels proved inconsequential at best and resulted in the loss of more aircraft. 

The attack on the atoll lasted only about 20 minutes. The Japanese did not return to follow it up with an invasion because they ran into difficulties out to sea. Yamamoto had accomplished his goal of drawing the Pacific Fleet into battle, but the results were not what the Japanese had desired. American carrier-based dive bombers pounced on the Japanese ships and sank four of its aircraft carriers—and one reason the American airplanes found the enemy ships at a disadvantage is because the carriers had to recover, refuel, and rearm the aircraft that had returned from the attack on the island. Although the U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown, the Battle of Midway at sea proved to be a disaster for Japan and a turning point in the Pacific war.

Ford returned to the United States with the raw footage from his small portion of the fight as well as footage shot by another of his cameramen, Lieutenant Kenneth M. Pier, who had been aboard the carrier Hornet at sea. He began shaping the footage into a short film with the assistance of some Hollywood friends—Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell from The Grapes of Wrath provided voices, Donald Crisp from How Green Was My Valley added narration, and Alfred Newman, who oversaw music for Twentieth Century-Fox, wrote the score. Ford insisted that his editors include a brief shot of Major James Roosevelt, the president’s son, in the final cut. If he did that to curry favor with Roosevelt, it worked. After screening the 18-minute short at the White House, the president told his chief of staff, “I want every mother in American to see this film.” The Battle of Midway began appearing in theaters, as a short before the main feature, in September. Critic James Agee called it “a brave attempt to make a record—quick, jerky, vivid, fragmentary, luminous—of a moment of desperate peril to the nation.” 

“Even now, far removed from Midway and the war, The Battle of Midway resonates,” wrote Ford biographer Scott Eyman. “It remains one of Ford’s great achievements.”

Ford had a bumpier experience with another film from his unit. Cinematographer Gregg Toland had taken the lead in putting together a documentary about the Pearl Harbor attack, but the military men who previewed the work gave it scathing notices. They objected to the way the filmmakers had recreated events for their cameras, the film’s virulent portrayal of the Japanese, and the way it left the “distinct impression that the Navy was not on the job,” in the words of Admiral Harold Stark. Ford had it recut from 85 minutes to 34, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted December 7th best short documentary at the 1944 Oscars. 

Ford continued his work for the navy. He ventured into harm’s way again in late 1942 when he oversaw shooting in North Africa. One person he encountered there was Darryl F. Zanuck, the production chief of Twentieth Century-Fox, for whom Ford had made The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. Zanuck had received a commission in the Signal Corps and was working on his own documentary. “Can’t I ever get away from you?” Ford grumbled to him. “I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that if I ever go to Heaven, you’ll be waiting at the door for me under a sign reading, ‘Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck.’”

Ford later went to Asia to film activity in Burma and China, and in June 1944 he supervised filming of the D-Day landings, activity marred when he went on an epic three-day bender in mid-June. Once he sobered up, Ford spent time aboard a PT boat commanded by John D. Bulkeley, who had rescued Douglas MacArthur from Corregidor in March 1942 and was the centerpiece of William Lindsay White’s book They Were Expendable, an account of PT boat crews in the Philippines. (See “Battle Films,” page 76.) When Ford returned to the United States to start work on the film version of White’s book, his time in the war zones were over. 

After the war, Ford continued his film career, directing a series of classic Westerns with John Wayne. (Ford enjoyed needling Wayne over his lack of service in the military.) Those films included Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Searchers (1956). The director is now considered one of the great artists of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When filmmaker Orson Welles, no slouch behind the camera himself, was asked who his three favorite directors were, he answered “John Ford, John Ford, John Ford.” 

For the rest of his days, until he died in 1973, Ford remained proud of his navy service and was “shameless” in his pursuit of official medals and ribbons. Befitting a man who had a character in one of his movies say, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” Ford often burnished the legend of his experiences at Midway and elsewhere. In truth, he had no need to embellish.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Canyon de Chelly, in the Four Corners region of northeastern Arizona, is among the most spectacular natural wonders of the American Southwest. It is also one of the longest continuously inhabited places in North America. Archaeologists estimate humans have lived in the canyon for more than four millennia. By the late 17th century Navajos had made their home there, and in the 19th century they waged two battles in Canyon de Chelly central to tribal history.

The canyon floor is anywhere from 100 to 300 yards wide and flanked by sheer red rock walls up to 1,000 feet high. About 3 miles from its east entrance the canyon splits into two main branches, with Canyon del Muerto running off to the northeast. Five miles up Canyon del Muerto is another junction at a prominence called Fortress Rock. Black Rock Canyon splits off due east, while Canyon del Muerto courses another 15 miles northeast.

In January 1805 a force of 500 Spanish soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Antonio Narbona entered Canyon de Chelly in response to a Navajo raid against the Spanish military post at Cebolletta. In the resulting battle near the northeast end of Canyon del Muerto the Spanish claimed to have killed 115 Navajos, including 90 warriors, while taking 33 women and children as slaves. Navajo tradition relates a different story—that most of the warriors were away hunting that day, and almost all of those killed were women and children. As the Spanish troops approached, the Navajos sheltered in a cliff dwelling high on the canyon wall, where they were trapped and picked off by Narbona’s marksmen. The only Spanish casualty was a soldier tackled by a Navajo woman while he was scaling the cliff. Both fell to their deaths. Narbona ended his career as the fifth Mexican governor of New Mexico.

Fifty-nine years later the Navajo fought another battle in Canyon de Chelly, this time against the United States. While the Civil War was raging east of the Mississippi, the U.S. government sent troops to the Southwest to put an end to persistent raids by emboldened Navajos. In 1864 Brig. Gen. James H. Carleton, commander of the military Department of New Mexico (which spanned what today comprises New Mexico and Arizona), ordered Lt. Col. Kit Carson of the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry to clear the canyon of Navajos and relocate them to a reservation at Bosque Redondo, nearly 400 miles southeast at Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory.

That January 12, in the face of a blinding snowstorm, Carson led 389 troopers into Canyon de Chelly. The Navajos, under the leadership of Chiefs Barboncito and Manuelito, skillfully used skirmishing parties to fight delaying actions while their main body withdrew into Canyon del Muerto. On reaching the junction with Black Rock Canyon, they scaled Fortress Rock with the help of ladders prepared ahead of time. By the time Carson’s force reached the far end of Canyon del Muerto, it had destroyed the tribe’s camps, crops and supplies and taken more than 200 captives. But more than 1,000 Navajos had evaded to the top of Fortress Rock, where they had stockpiled food. It wouldn’t be enough.

Biding his time, Carson withdrew from the canyon to wait out the Navajos, who were bereft of the necessities to survive winter. The strategy worked. By that summer Carson had accepted the surrender of some 8,000 Navajos, the largest such capitulation in American Indian history. In its wake the Navajos were forced to make what they recall as the “Long Walk” to Bosque Redondo. But the tactical success for the U.S. government turned out to be a strategic failure in the end. Some 3,000 Navajos died at the meagerly supplied reservation before they were finally allowed in 1868 to return to their homeland in the Four Corners region.

Present-day Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “de SHAY”) National Monument lies entirely within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation, thus all visitors to the canyon floor must be accompanied by a licensed Navajo guide. Its sheer walls are pocked with the ruins of centuries-old cliff dwellings and etched with pictographs. A particularly striking 200-year-old pictograph on the wall below Massacre Cave depicts the invading Spanish cavalry force, replete with lances and cross-bearing tunics. The North Rim Drive provides a number of spectacular overlooks, including Antelope House Overlook (directly across from Fortress Rock) and Massacre Cave Overlook, while the South Rim Drive ends at an overlook of the 750-foot sandstone spire known as Spider Rock. There is just no substitute, however, for exploring the canyon floor with a knowledgeable guide, one for whom it is especially personal hallowed ground.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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On April 14, 2023, a new museum about Amelia Earhart opened in Atchison, Kansas, the town where the aviator was born in 1897. The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum features interactive exhibits intended to celebrate the legacy of the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932) and inspire young people to perhaps follow in her footsteps. “We want people to take away the fact that she truly is relevant today,” says Karen Seaberg, the museum director and the founder and president of the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation.

The museum’s centerpiece is the last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E, the same type of aircraft Earhart was flying on an attempted round-the-world flight when she disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937. In other exhibits, visitors can get a sense of what it was like to rivet an airplane, experience how aviators from Earhart’s time navigated by the stars and explore the Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines that powered the Electra. They can also hear recordings of Earhart’s voice and climb into a life-size reproduction of the Lockheed’s cockpit.

Listen to Seaberg talk about the museum and take a look at the facility in this video.

More than a decade before sharpshooter Annie Oakley joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West, dancer Giuseppina Morlacchi garnered headlines performing with Cody in the traveling Western stage drama Scouts of the Prairie. Dime novelist and entrepreneur Ned Buntline, who hastily wrote the three-act Western script in December 1872, had the Italian-born prima ballerina play an Indian princess named Dove Eye. The male stars of Buntline’s theatrical company were Cody and John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, notable Army scouts who played themselves onstage. Landing Morlacchi was quite a coup for Buntline. Since making her U.S. debut in New York City in 1867, she had become the most sought-after dancer in the country, introduced the can-can to American audiences and earned the nickname “The Peerless.”

Photo collector Tony Sapienza said that when graceful Giuseppina performed the “grand gallop can-can” on Jan. 6, 1868, in Boston, where this photograph was taken, her interpretation of the high-stepping dance left the audience breathless. In Scouts of the Prairie she not only remembered her lines better than her co-stars, but also found romance with one of them. On Aug. 31, 1873, she married Omohundro at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rochester, N.Y. Morlacchi continued to perform with her dance troupe and star with her husband in Western dramas. But tragedy was to strike the young couple when 33-year-old Texas Jack died of pneumonia in Leadville, Colo., on June 28, 1880. With that Morlacchi stopped touring. A scant six years later, on July 23, 1886, she died of cancer at age 49 in Billerica, Mass.

(For more on both Omohundro and Morlacchi, see Matthew Kerns’ Wild West feature article.)

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Photographer Robert Hanley “Bob” Willoughby parlayed his beloved boyhood hobby into a kaleidoscopic career as a maker of indelible images. He was born in 1927 in Los Angeles, Calif., shortly after his parents, Cyril and Antoinette, divorced. Nettie Willoughby raised her son in West Hollywood. Cyril, a doctor, was not much present, but for the boy’s 12th birthday he gave his son a 35mm Argus C-3 rangefinder camera that quickly became a prominent fixture in Bob’s life. A neighbor taught the youth darkroom basics in exchange for babysitting. The sole class at school to hold his interest was art. When he was in junior high, a stroke disabled his mother, who never relented in her support for her son’s photographic ambitions. He converted the home garage on Marvin Avenue into a darkroom functional only at night owing to light leaks. He processed film and made prints to the tune of jazz broadcast by a San Francisco radio station whose AM signal reached southern California after sunset. Upon graduating from Louis Pasteur High in 1946 he apprenticed with a series of Hollywood photographers, earning $5 a week sharpening and expanding his skills. In night classes at USC, he studied under film designers and artists Saul Bass, Slavko Vorkapich, and William Cameron Menzies. He dove into LA’s vibrant music scene, photographing jazz and R&B performers. Dance magazine ran his pictures. He was 22 when his portrait of model Ann Baker graced the cover of the January 1950 US Camera; later that year eclectic label Fantasy Records recruited him to provide LP cover art. In 1951 he signed with Globe Photo, which wrangled assignments from feature and fashion periodicals. To analyze and absorb clients’ unique styles, he haunted used periodicals stores, assembling an archive in which to steep himself in technical and aesthetic nuance. Mixing faith and commerce, he shot for Catholic magazine Jubilee; it would be easier to list the mainstream publications he did not work for than those he did. Under the spell of master magazine photojournalists Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith, and Irving Penn, he took on ever more fashion and feature work, at the same time establishing a toehold in and eventually a remarkably strong and creative grip on the arcane and demanding specialty of photographing Hollywood productions as they were being made, recording candid moments and scenes as shot. He first worked on contract with magazines seeking to illustrate stories about actors and coming attractions and eventually came to be relied on by studios for his unobtrusive expertise. To facilitate these efforts, he developed innovative camera brackets and electronically controlled flash systems. His facility at documenting decisive moment upon decisive moment led a commentator to label him “the man who virtually invented the photojournalistic motion-picture still.” In 1957 he visited Ireland for the first time, forging a connection that lasted all his life. Through work he and Audrey Hepburn became long-time friends. At Elizabeth Taylor’s request, he photographed her and Eddie Fisher’s wedding in 1959. Soon after, he met Scottish flight attendant Dorothy Quigley aboard a transcontinental flight she was working. They fell for one another, wed, and raised three sons and a daughter, sometimes traveling and living abroad en famille thanks to Bob’s movie work. Over the decades, he photographed 100-some feature films on sets and at locations around the world. In 1973, he retired. Seeking a pastoral routine away from the high life, the Willoughbys relocated to County Cork, Ireland, where they bought a castle and began a 17-year stay during which Willoughby produced books of verse and photos, including a 2001 memoir. Bob Willoughby was 82 when he died in 2009 in Vence, France. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, among many others. Now, with an introduction by son Christopher, Chronicle Books has published a rich and varied survey of his oeuvre titled Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life. —Michael Dolan

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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This portfolio is excerpted from the new, comprehensive monograph of Bob Willoughby’s work, Bob Willoughby: A Cinematic Life published by Chronicle Books in November 2022.

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In January, Mecum Auctions put rocker Elvis Presley’s 1962 Lockheed 1329 JetStar on the block. The winning bid was $260,000, but when the bidder backed out, businessman/entrepreneur James “Jimmy” Webb stepped in and made the purchase for $234,000. Webb, who operates the YouTube channel Jimmy’s World, had the airplane disassembled and trucked to Florida, where he has plans for the jet’s next incarnation.

“The short version is I’m going to convert the fuselage into an RV so it can travel around the country for the rest of the world to enjoy,” he says. Webb’s analysis indicated it could cost nearly $6 million to get the JetStar airworthy again. 

The King of Rock and Roll had purchased the four-engine craft in December 1976 for $840,000 and sold it shortly before this death on August 16, 1977. Its last owner was a Saudi Arabian company. The plane had suffered from weathering during the nearly four decades it spent parked outside at the Roswell International Air Center in Roswell, New Mexico, and its engines and some of its cockpit instrumentation had been removed. It still boasted some unique features, including a red velvet interior and a working cassette deck and VCR player. Also included in the sale was a copy of the airplane’s aircraft security agreement, signed by Presley and his father, Vernon.

The swept-wing JetStar made its first flight in 1957 and entered service in 1961, establishing itself as one of the world’s premier business jets. The earlier versions were powered by four Pratt & Whitney JT-12 engines, with two each in pods mounted at the rear of the fuselage. (Later versions acquired quieter Garrett TFE731 turbofans.) Presley actually owned two of the airplanes. He purchased the first, a 1960 version, in 1975, the same year he bought a Convair 880 that he named Lisa Marie after his daughter. Both those airplanes are on display at Graceland, Presley’s home in Memphis, Tennessee.

Webb estimates it will take about a year to convert the fuselage into an RV. In the meantime, he plans to take metal from the wings and other parts of the airplane and fashion it into memorabilia that he will sell to fund the project, and he will donate any surplus revenue to two of Elvis’s favorite charities, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital and the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. “We’re trying to do everything we can to keep his legacy alive and to do what he would have wanted done,” Webb says. In the meantime, he will post about his progress on the Jimmy’s World YouTube channel.

The Wild West. It is the fundamental mythology of the United States of America, the iconography and imagery we have chosen to tell the story of who we are as a people and as a country. It is a mythology so enduring that depictions of it stretch from the yellowed pages of dime novels written while the West was still being won to the controllers and keyboards of gamers playing Red Dead Redemption 2. On film, from Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery in 1903 through Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall in 2021, the splendor and danger of the American West has captivated the imagination of generations.

The iconic figures of the American West are just as familiar. There are such stalwart lawmen as Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp and the outlaws they faced, like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. There are gamblers like Doc Holliday, scouts like Buffalo Bill Cody, and warriors like Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) and Geronimo (Goyahkla). Such names—such men—have become more than historical figures, as fiction trumped fact and their legends were superimposed over their lives. Each was a real man, but in the telling and retelling of their tales they have taken on the status of folk heroes, as much Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill as William Frederick Cody or James Butler Hickok.

Yet when we take a step back from the individuals and the individual stories woven into the tapestry of the American West, a curious theme emerges. Picture a meeting of these great Western men. Standing there are the scout Buffalo Bill, the lawman Wild Bill, the gambler Doc Holliday and the outlaw Jesse James. How are they dressed? Is Wild Bill wearing a marshal’s hat? Does Jesse James have on outlaw boots? Of course not. The wide-brimmed Stetson shading their eyes from the sun is a cowboy hat, and on their feet are tall leather cowboy boots. If the great men of the American West weren’t cowboys, how did the cowboy become the single most iconic figure of the American Western?

The truth is there was a famous cowboy who stood beside these men in real life and whose legacy is just as enduring, though his name has been all but forgotten by the casual student of American history. In 1873, when Buffalo Bill convinced Wild Bill to join a traveling stage show called Scouts of the Plains, their co-star was a real-life cowboy named John Baker Omohundro. Friends called him “Texas Jack.” Born on July 27, 1846 in Fluvanna County, Va., Jack served as a Confederate courier and scout during the Civil War, for a time under vaunted cavalryman Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, before drifting west to Texas and the life of an open-range cowboy.

Onstage Cody and Hickok impressed crowds with tales of buffalo hunting on horseback and gunslinging in frontier towns, while in his baritone Virginia drawl Texas Jack thrilled with stories of wild stampedes and cattle rustlers. He entertained packed halls, auditoriums and theaters as he whirled his lasso overhead, the first to turn that tool of the cowboy trade into an object of entertainment for fascinated audiences. Texas Jack was the first cowboy to rise to prominence in the American popular imagination, and his stage persona provided the foundation on which the cowboy trope in literature and film would be built. To understand the impact of Texas Jack, and just how unlikely it was the open-range cowboy should achieve such status and permanence in American pop culture, we should reflect on the history of the cowboy, both the word and the profession.

For much of American history it was an insult to call a man a “cowboy.” During the American Revolution the term referred to British Loyalists who stole livestock from local farmers and delivered them to British troops. On Jan. 22, 1779, New Yorkers hanged Claudius Smith, alias “Cowboy of the Ramapos,” for his guerrilla raids after Governor George Clinton posted a $1,200 reward for his capture. The word cowboy remained unflattering as late as 1881, when San Francisco’s Daily Exchange deemed cowboys “the most reckless class of outlaws in that wild country…infinitely worse than the ordinary robber.” The editors were referring to the infamous Cowboys of Cochise County, an especially ruthless band of rustlers and outlaws then operating near Tombstone, Arizona Territory, whose criminal activities were curtailed by the Oct. 26, 1881, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and subsequent Earp Vendetta Ride.

The passage of time and other factors have shaped our present-day view of the cowboy. The mid-1880s saw the expansion of the cattle industry from Texas across the entire West. American businessmen and wealthy European investors built vast ranches, bought cattle and hired cowboys, leading to one of the biggest economic booms in history. Their investments provided a foundation for U.S. dominance of the world economy while simultaneously funding the development of cities and infrastructure across the West. Books like Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian began to mythologize the cowboy, and literary giants from Zane Grey to Louis L’Amour followed suit. 

Hollywood gravitated to the cowboy and Western locations from its earliest films well into the late 20th century. Westerns dominated movie house screens following World War II, and cowboy stories dominated Westerns. Leading actors across multiple generations starred in Westerns, from William S. Hart and Tom Mix to John Wayne and James Stewart, Burt Lancaster and Clint Eastwood to Idris Elba and Benedict Cumberbatch.

After the devastating loss of both his mother and wife to illness on Valentine’s Day 1884, Theodore Roosevelt escaped west to start a cattle ranch north of Medora in what would soon become North Dakota. He was indelibly shaped by Western ranch life and the cowboys he befriended. Returning to Medora by train in 1900 on a campaign swing for incumbent President William McKinley, the vice presidential candidate told locals, “I had studied a lot about men and things before I saw you fellows, but it was only when I came here that I began to know anything or to measure men right.” It was Roosevelt’s time out West that would shape and refine the New York City boy into the “Cowboy President.” He wouldn’t be the last politician to exploit the cowboy image of rugged independence to improve his standing with American voters.

Film stars, authors and politicians aside, nobody has had more of an influence on the popular perception of the cowboy than one man—Buffalo Bill Cody. From its May 1883 inception as Cody & Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition (a short-lived partnership with sharpshooter William Frank “Doc” Carver) until Cody’s 1917 death, no entertainment was as prevalent or as successful as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. The imagery and iconography of Buffalo Bill are indelibly tied to the profession of the cowboy, the rare occupation Cody—messenger, scout, soldier, teamster, buffalo hunter, showman, town planner and hotel proprietor—never held. “Cody plowed his theatrical profits into ranching,” author Louis Warren explains in Buffalo Bill’s America, “but like most ranch owners, he was an absentee owner who was never a cowboy.”

Yet central to Cody’s vision of the Wild West, indeed the defining icon of the Western man, was the cowboy. For more than two decades the culminating act of the show was listed in the program as “Attack on a Settler’s Cabin by Hostile Indians. Repulse by Cow-boys, Under the Leadership of Buffalo Bill,” or similar wording. With civilization at stake and the fate of the emblematic family of white settlers on the line, the group of heroes riding to the rescue did not comprise professional soldiers but cowboys, of course led by Buffalo Bill. When Cody, who scouted for the military well before taking to the stage, rode into actual engagements with hostile Sioux or Cheyennes on the Great Plains and Dakota Territory hills, he did so in the company of trained soldiers, never cowboys. Why then did Cody present the cowboy as the savior of the settler—of civilization itself—from the threat of savagery?

The answer is the man Buffalo Bill would eulogize as “one of my dearest and most intimate friends”—Texas Jack Omohundro.

Texas Jack rode into Buffalo Bill’s life as a cowboy in 1869. Cody had been placed in charge of the government’s livestock at Fort McPherson, Neb., kept on the payroll between scouting assignments, when Omohundro rode into nearby North Platte trailing a few thousand head of Longhorns. The men were soon inseparable. They hunted together. They drank together. They scouted together. They even hung wallpaper in Cody’s North Platte home together. When Buffalo Bill spent long weeks away scouting for the 3rd U.S. Cavalry, Texas Jack stayed in a spare room at the Cody house to ensure the safety of Bill’s wife, Louisa, and their children. “Pards of the Plains for life” is how Cody defined their relationship.

On April 25, 1872, Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack set out from Fort McPherson in pursuit of Minneconjou raiders who the night before had stolen seven horses from nearby McPherson Station, on the Union Pacific Railroad. Guiding 46 troopers and an Army surgeon under the command of 3rd Cavalry Captain Charles Meinhold, they tracked the horse thieves. The next afternoon, after a brief skirmish on the Loupe Fork of the Platte River in which Buffalo Bill was injured and three warriors were killed, the party recovered two horses, while the surviving raiders escaped. In his after-action report Meinhold singled out four men for mention. The first were Sergeant John H. Foley, who “charged into the Indian camp without knowing how many enemies he might encounter,” and 1st Sgt. Leroy H. Vokes, “who bravely closed in upon an Indian while he was fired at several times and wounded him.” Next was Cody, whose “reputation for bravery and skill as a guide is so well established that I need not say anything else than but he acted in his usual manner.” The last was Omohundro, “a very good trailer and a brave man who knows the country well, and I respectfully recommend his employment as a guide should the service of one in addition to Mr. Cody be needed.” Cody, Foley and Vokes each received the Medal of Honor for “gallantry in action.” It is uncertain why Texas Jack did not, though his past service to the Confederacy might have given Meinhold pause.

Clippings from local papers expand on the day’s events. A reporter for the North Platte Democrat wrote that after Cody began firing at the Minneconjou raiders, “the remainder of the command, hearing the fire, came up at full jump—‘Texas Jack’ at the head.…[He] immediately let drive and brought his Indian down.…Beside enjoying the reputation of a ‘dead shot,’ he is well skilled in the ways of the red man, and we are glad to know that his services have been retained by the government.”

Cody also described the fight in his autobiography. “Two mounted warriors closed in on me and were shooting at short range,” he wrote. “I returned their fire and had the satisfaction of seeing one of them fall from his horse. At this moment I felt blood trickling down my forehead, and hastily running my hand through my hair I discovered that I had received a scalp wound.” Another paper picked up the action with rhetorical flourish. “[To Texas Jack] was Buffalo Bill indebted for his life,” it noted. “The red thieves were pursued and overtaken by Bill and Jack, who each killed an Indian. A third redskin had just drawn a bead on Bill, when Jack’s quick eye caught the gleam of the shining barrel, and the next instant ‘the noble red’ was on his way to the happy hunting ground, his passage from this sublunary sphere being expedited by a bullet from Jack’s rifle at a distance of 125 yards.”

If the latter account is to be believed, Texas Jack quite literally saved Buffalo Bill’s life that April afternoon. What is certain is that Omohundro was his best friend, the first man Cody telegrammed when the latter’s 5-year-old son, Kit Carson, died on April 20, 1876. For three years on the Nebraska prairie Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack rode, hunted, scouted and camped together. For four years on theatrical stages from Maine to Texas they appeared together in more than 550 performances, not counting matinees.

Onstage Texas Jack was the picture of the cowboy. His costume included the ever-present Stetson, tall black cavalry boots and a fringed buckskin jacket worn open to reveal the Lone Star of Texas emblazoned on his shirt. He carried a lasso, rifle, revolver and bowie knife, prepared for any danger that might come his way. More often than not that danger took the form of hostile Indian warriors. These captivating stage encounters—Texas Jack locked in deadly combat against a tomahawk-wielding brave—were the genesis of “cowboys and Indians” backyard games for generations to come.

The concept of cowboys fighting Indians on the outskirts of civilization is so firmly ingrained in the collective consciousness as to seem clichéd, but the reality of the cowboy stands in stark contrast with such romantic depictions in print and on-screen. By the time of the big Texas cattle drives of the late 1860s herders meticulously avoided conflict with Indians. After all, ranch owners entrusted them with the care of their valuable stock. Ensuring the safe conduct of their charges during transportation made cowboys more akin to present-day truck drivers than buckskin-clad knights. The era of cattle drives along the Chisholm Trail, Goodnight-Loving Trail and countless others lasted from 1866 until the 1890s when the expansion of rail lines and laying of hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence rendered the job of open-range cowboy obsolete.

During those scant 30 years of cowboy primacy, swift streams swollen by rain, lightning strikes, falls from horseback and disease accounted for the majority of cowboy deaths. A cowboy was more likely to draw his gun on a farmer than a card sharp across a town square at high noon, and more likely to fire his rifle at a coyote than a Comanche raider. Dust and tedium were the rule of a cowboy’s work, as was enduring the worst of conditions to ensure top dollar for beef. Unlike the fiction, the real cowboy’s life was far from romantic. “By all rights,” Lonn Taylor wrote in The American Cowboy, “he should have joined the hunters of Kentucky, the whalers, the flatboatmen, the plainsmen and all of the other American types who briefly caught the popular imagination, were popularized on the stage and in song, and were then forgotten. But the open-range cowboy was never forgotten.”

The reason the cowboy endured while all those other professions were forgotten is that after the death of his cowboy friend Texas Jack, Buffalo Bill Cody refused to let the public forget. Once, a lone cowboy rode with Buffalo Bill across the prairies of Nebraska. Now, hundreds of cowboys followed his lead in the spectacle of the Wild West. Where once a single cowboy stood onstage and twirled his lasso, now a legion of men demonstrated cowboy skills for audiences worldwide. Buffalo Bill enshrined Texas Jack’s experience as a cowboy in show programs handed out to millions of men, women, and children visiting the Wild West at stops in cities across the United States and throughout Europe. From the inaugural performance in 1883 and in long stands at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1886–87, Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden Jubilee in London and the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Wild West programs contained a section titled simply “The Cow-Boy,” written by Texas Jack in the spring of 1877.

“The cow-boy!” began the piece that introduced the profession to so many eager spectators. “How often spoken of, how falsely imagined, how greatly despised (where not known), how little understood? I’ve been there considerable.” With descriptions of stampedes and storms, cowboys singing to restless steers at night and “cow sense,” Omohundro outlines a profession requiring the patience of Job and peopled by ambitious, adventurous and rebellious young men, “taught at school to admire the deceased little Georgie [Washington] in his exploring adventures, though not equaling him in the ‘cherry-tree goodness.’” Signing with a flourish as both J.B. Omohundro and Texas Jack, the author concludes on a wistful note:

How many, though, never finish, but mark the trail with their silent graves, no one can tell. But when Gabriel toots his horn, the “Chisholm Trail” will swarm with cow-boys. “Howsomever, we’ll all be thar,” let’s hope, for a happy trip when we say to this planet, adios!

In searching for an archetype of the kind of man Buffalo Bill—soldier, scout and buffalo hunter—would elevate above all other professions in his simulacrum of the real West, presented as absolute historical truth to huge audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, one need look no further than John Baker “Texas Jack” Omohundro, cowboy. 

Perhaps the breadth of cowboy adventures in literature and on film can also be attributed to the well-publicized exploits of Texas Jack. Years before Lakota warriors traveled with the Wild West, Omohundro led the Pawnees on their 1872 penultimate summer buffalo hunt in Nebraska. Before Cody defiantly erected his tents opposite the exclusive 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Texas Jack set up a Western-themed hotel, saloon and shooting gallery opposite the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. Before Cody and Doc Carver launched the Wild West extravaganza in 1883, Omohundro and Carver displayed their skills with rifle, pistol, and bow and arrow at a series of exhibitions in 1878.

If the life of the average cowboy was trail dust and tedium, Texas Jack’s was never short on excitement, adventure and romance. In 1873 he married his beautiful co-star “The Peerless” Giuseppina Morlacchi, an Italian-born prima ballerina who was among the most famous dancers of the era, having introduced the can-can to the American stage in 1868. In 1874 Texas Jack guided Anglo-Irish noble and adventurer the Earl of Dunraven through newly established Yellowstone National Park. Three years later he blazed a new trail into the park from the southeast and rescued tourists from marauding Nez Perces as the latter fled Army troops through the park. Jack led Western hunts for such aristocrats as Dunraven, Sir John Reid and Count Otto Franc, all significant figures in the coming boom of the American cattle industry. He scouted for Brig. Gen. Alfred Terry in pursuit of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake) in the aftermath of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s June 25, 1876, defeat at the Little Bighorn (Greasy Grass). One night in 1878 Texas Jack surprised Thomas Edison in a Wyoming hotel, shooting a weather vane atop a freight depot from the window of Edison’s room to prove he was “the boss pistol-shot of the West.” It is little wonder it took scores of cowboys to replace this one man in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. 

“William Cody seldom spoke of death or of people who had died,” biographer Warren notes. “In all his correspondence there is barely a mention of any deceased friends or acquaintances. He wrote no poignant words about Wild Bill Hickok, Sitting Bull or [Wild West manager] Nate Salsbury. No matter how tragic their deaths, he seldom spoke of the loss.” But Buffalo Bill did write multiple dime novels about his late cowboy friend Texas Jack. Omohundro, stricken with pneumonia, died in the high Rocky Mountain town of Leadville, Colo., on June 28, 1880, a month shy of his 34th birthday. On Sept. 5, 1908, almost three decades after Texas Jack’s death, Cody gathered the cast and crew of the Wild West around Omohundro’s grave in Leadville’s Evergreen Cemetery. There he delivered an impassioned eulogy for the man he called “one of my dearest and most intimate friends…one of the original Texas cowboys, when life on the plains was a hardship and a trying duty.” Buffalo Bill purchased the permanent gravestone that marks the Texas Jack’s final resting place.

Nearly a decade later, on Jan. 6, 1917, an ailing Cody rode through Leadville for the final time on a return visit from Glenwood Springs to Denver. Too weak to leave his train car, he sat up in bed when told he was in Leadville, telling his daughter about the grave of Texas Jack, his friend and partner. Four days later Buffalo Bill was dead.

Few men are truly remembered in the way the world remembers Buffalo Bill. Yet Americans largely forgot about Texas Jack Omohundro, the cowboy who first popularized the profession and introduced the lasso to the stage, and whose description of his life on the open range spoke to millions of spectators from programs handed out at each stop of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Americans recall the names of the legendary lawmen and outlaws, of the braves and bandits, the soldiers and the scouts, but we forgot the name of our most important open-range cowboy. Americans forgot, but Buffalo Bill remembered. And because Buffalo Bill remembered Texas Jack, the world remembers the American cowboy. WW

This article, published in the April 2022 Wild West, received the 2023 Western Heritage Award for best magazine article from the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Matthew Kerns, who writes from Chattanooga, Tenn., is a historian, web developer and digital archivist who manages the Texas Jack Omohundro Facebook page and has written many articles about Texas Jack. His 2021 book Texas Jack: America’s First Cowboy Star is recommended for further reading, along with Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, by Louis S. Warren, and The Notorious Life of Ned Buntline: A Tale of Murder, Betrayal and the Creation of Buffalo Bill, by Julia Bricklin.

It was just after 7 p.m. local time on August 15, 1935, a frigid day of patchy fog on the far northwest coast of Alaska. Famed flier Wiley Post and his good friend and fellow Oklahoman, the celebrated humorist Will Rogers, were sloshing around the shallow waters of Walakpa Lagoon on the Chukchi Sea coast some 15 miles southwest of Point Barrow. Tiny, remote Barrow, on the most northwesterly point of the North American continent, was to be the jumping off place for their planned flight to Siberia and beyond.

They were behind schedule and anxious to get started. Because of poor visibility, Post had gotten lost on the six-hour jump from Fairbanks to Barrow and had been forced to put the floatplane down in the lagoon to get his bearings. The pair had landed near an Inuit family headed by Clare Okpeaha, who had closed his summer seal hunting camp and was waiting for a boat to Barrow. After Rogers explained they were lost, the Inuit, despite his broken English, pointed to the northeast and guessed the town was about “twenty or thirty miles” away—his concept of “English miles” was limited at best.

Post was loathe to lose another day waiting for better visibility, the marginal takeoff minimums be damned. He had come to think of himself as a master of any situation and his assuredness must have swept Rogers into the moment. After a half-hearted attempt by Okpeaha to dissuade the men from attempting to take off in such poor weather, Post and Rogers climbed back into their single-engine Lockheed Orion. Post started the engine and taxied the awkward, nose-heavy machine across the lagoon and positioned it nose-to-wind. Following a hurried engine run-up check, Post throttled up the 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine and lifted off in such an abrupt, steep manner that even Rogers must have been startled. With that last bit of recklessness, Wiley Post condemned them both to a trip into eternity.

Wiley Post is arguably the most unlikely of all the great aviation pioneers. He was a poverty-stricken, one-eyed ex-convict from Oklahoma who never finished junior high school but nevertheless went on to become a parachute jumper in a flying circus, a test pilot, discoverer of the jet stream, inventor of the pressurized flight suit, pioneer of the first autopilot and the first man to fly solo around the world. How did a man with such a checkered past and almost nonexistent formal education make his astounding engineering accomplishments? 

Post was born November 22, 1898, in a modest farmhouse near Grand Saline, Texas, though Oklahoma, where he moved as a child, later claimed him as a “favorite son,” as it did Will Rogers. He quit school at 11, having decided he was “old enough to decide matters for himself.” He saw his first airplane at a county fair at age 14, when a Curtiss Pusher was the hit of an airshow. To top off the day, on the trip home Wiley rode in an automobile for the first time. Armed with his new-found love for machines, he took a seven-month auto mechanic’s course, graduating as a chauffeur and mechanic.

Post attended the U.S. Army’s radio school during World War I and went to France but saw no action. After his discharge, he drifted, winding up as an Oklahoma oil field roughneck, leading to his own unsuccessful attempt at becoming an “oil baron.” Unemployed, discouraged, but still fiercely ambitious, Post succumbed to desperate financial temptation and began hijacking automobiles in Grady County, Oklahoma. On April 2, 1921, the weekly Chickasha Star newspaper’s headline read, “Bandit Captured and Lodged in Jail.” Wiley was convicted of robbery and sentenced to ten years in the state reformatory. For reasons unclear, however, a sympathetic prison physician came to Wiley’s defense, and Post received parole on June 3, 1922. 

Relieved, Post decided it was time he finally made good. He joined the Texas Topnotch Fliers, a flying circus, and became their star parachute jumper for $200 a jump. During this period, he gained a reputation as an utterly fearless aviator. But the work was intermittent; by 1926 he was back on an oil rig. Fate intervened when a roughneck’s sledgehammer sent an iron bolt into his left eye, which had to be removed. He used the settlement money he received to buy an airplane, but struggled mightily to gain his pilot license, no small feat with such a disability. Finally, after accumulating 700 hard-earned probationary flying hours, Wiley Post was awarded air transportation license number 3259 on September 16, 1928. When Texas oilman Florence C. Hall met Post, he was im-
pressed enough by his ability to hire him as his pilot. After that, flush with a new confidence coming from the association with Hall, Post began seeking the main chance.

Now began his incredible breakthrough into the national consciousness. Part of his motivation no doubt had to do with a desire to impress his new bride, 17-year-old Mae Laine, with whom he eloped in 1927, but most had to do with his own burning ambition. The opportunity he had been seeking presented itself in late 1928 when Hall sent Post to the Lockheed factory in Los Angeles to exchange his company’s Travel Air for a new Lockheed Vega. Hall named the sleek ship Winnie Mae after his daughter. Post was overjoyed, as it was an airplane designed to “go places and see things.” The coincidence of the name echoing his new wife’s must have been equally gratifying.

Unfortunately, that joy was short-lived. A downturn in the oil business forced Hall to give up the luxury of a private airplane and pilot and he sold the Winnie Mae back to Lockheed. Post received a break when Lockheed unexpectedly hired him as a test pilot. In June 1930, Hall re-hired Post and asked him to order a new Winnie Mae Vega, a seven-passenger monoplane with a 420-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine. Hall also approved Post’s entry into a 1,760-mile National Air Races Derby between Los Angeles and Chicago. Flying with famed navigator Harold Gatty, Post won the race—his first brush with national fame.

That was all it took for the always ambitious Wiley Post to up his game. Boldly, he announced plans to fly around the world in record time. Hall was in favor of the plan; the Depression had slowed his business, Post had plenty of time on his hands and the publicity couldn’t hurt. During the spring and summer of 1931, Gatty mapped out the journey while Post got his machine in tip-top shape. He made many modifications, especially the addition of extra fuel tanks and a special folding hatch atop the fuselage to enable Gatty to make critical celestial observations. The two men departed Roosevelt Field, New York, on June 23, 1931. After a series of incredible adventures, any one of which could have stopped them dead in their tracks, the duo arrived safely back at Roosevelt Field after eight days, 15 hours and 51 minutes—a new world record.

In less than three years, Wiley Post had been transformed from an unknown barnstormer into the world’s most famous pilot. And writing the foreword to Post and Gatty’s book about their flight was the world’s most famous humorist, Will Rogers, a “cowboy philosopher” who had become a beloved star of stage, screen and radio as well as a widely read newspaper columnist. Post and Rogers had met in 1925 and they had bonded almost instantly.

In 1932, subject to bouts of melancholia and worried he was sinking from public view—his one real avenue to financial success—Post settled on the idea of flying solo around the world. Incredibly, he somehow pulled that effort together, telling the newspapers in February 1933 he would do it with help from a new “robot” or “automatic pilot.” Post had a Sperry autopilot installed in the Winnie Mae and dubbed the new contrivance “Mechanical Mike.” He received permission to use this “risky” device on condition he not carry passengers, which of course was the whole idea. After modifications that included increasing the Winnie Mae’s fuel capacity, beefing up the range on his two-way radio mast and installing a more reliable ignition harness, Post was ready.

Early in the morning of July 15, 1933, Post took off from New York’s Floyd Bennett Field. He was wearing a white eye patch after having suffered severe headaches when his glass eye froze over Siberia two years earlier. His last words to his wife were a rather grim, “See you in six days or else.” Fortunately, the “or else” never materialized, though he didn’t make the six-day goal. Once again, Post’s combination of skill andluck held. Other highly capable aerial competitors were hot on his heels, but the “one-eyed superman” arrived triumphant back in New York on the evening of July 22, 1933. He had broken his own speed record by more than 21 hours—a total of seven days, 18 hours and 49.5 minutes. 

The nation could not seem to do enough to express its delight in Wiley Post’s feat. The honors, awards and accolades continued for months; even President Franklin Roosevelt personally thanked him for his “courage and stamina.” New York mayor John P. O’Brien pinned a new gold medal on Post’s coat and compared him to globe-girdling explorers Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake. Still, Post’s dream of great wealth remained elusive and, while he did make decent money endorsing such products as Camel cigarettes, it was not enough; he hungered for new ways to win acclaim. In particular, his use of the Sperry autopilot on the solo world flight had whetted his appetite for state-of-the-art scientific investigations.

He turned his attention to testing the “thin air”—the unexplored stratosphere, beginning around 30,000 feet. An opportunity came with the announcement of the 1934 MacRobertson Race from England to Australia, with a first-place prize of £15,000. Post intuitively understood his only chance to win the 12,500-mile challenge was to take advantage of the high-altitude winds that had recently been discovered by stratospheric balloon flights. It was clear the plywood-built Winnie Mae could not be pressurized; Post would need something like a deep-sea diver’s suit to protect him. With the help of the B.F. Goodrich Co., he developed a pressurized flight ensemble, dubbed at the time, “a man from Mars” suit. It was constructed from a rubberized parachute material, including a plastic vision plate encased in an aluminum helmet. After getting mixed results from the tests of several suits, Post reached 40,000 feet on September 5, 1934. He was the first person to fly in a pressure suit, as well as the first to use liquid oxygen for breathing. Post had proved operating in the stratosphere was “a definite reality, with practical equipment.”

By this time, Post’s adventures and headlines about his proposed stratospheric dashes across the continent were galvanizing the public, subsuming his push to enter the MacRobertson Race. Additionally, to Post’s delight, Will Rogers had renewed their friendship, having become increasingly interested in his activities. As it happened, Rogers had been present when a pressure suit-equipped Post attempted a high-altitude, 375-mph flight from Burbank to New York on February 22, 1935. Post had to make a forced landing shortly after takeoff, with engine sabotage strongly suspected—Post was picking up jealous competitors along with his growing commercial endorsements. Rogers wrote: “[Saw] Wiley Post take off.… He soon had to land. He brought her down on her stomach [the gear had been dropped on takeoff for streamlining], that guy don’t need wheels.”

After a failed second attempt at the transcontinental speed record on April 14, Rogers suggested the aging Winnie Mae be retired and Post given tangible help in his scientific pursuits: “Wiley Post…cant break records getting to New York in a six-year-old plane, no matter if he takes it up so high that he coasts in.… So when Wiley gets ready to put her in the Smithsonian we all want to give him a hand.” The appeal worked, Congress appropriated $25,000 for the museum’s purchase, but the money went to Hall, the airplane’s owner. Meanwhile, the impulsive and always resourceful Post had somehow pulled together the necessary additional financing to purchase a new airplane. 

Post did not give his new airplane a name, but experienced pilots and mechanics had taken one look at this one-of-a-kind “unusual-looking” plane and dubbed it “Wiley’s Orphan,” or alluding to its rather illegitimate origin, “Wiley’s Bastard.” Painted “Waco Red” with silver trim, it had a second-hand Lockheed Orion 9-E Special fuselage married to an orphan Lockheed Explorer wing and a 550-hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp engine. Its retractable gear could fit into the low Lockheed wing, but the airplane could also be fitted with pontoons. The design’s chief advantages were greater speed and a high load capability. The chief disadvantage, by far, was a too-far-forward center of gravity, causing nose heaviness and a built-in tendency to assume a diving attitude. With pontoons attached, the problem was exacerbated. A Lockheed engineer had even warned Post, “you’ll be in trouble if there is just a slight power loss on takeoff.” Increasingly overconfident, even complacent, Post ignored him, keeping the plane’s imbalance a secret when applying for an air worthiness certificate on July 23, 1935.

A hint of what Post planned to do with his new machine emerged when a reporter apparently overheard a conversation and wrote a story that Will Rogers and Wiley Post were secretly planning a trip to Siberia via Alaska. It rang true to many; Rogers had long expressed a desire to visit the Far North. In addition, Post had obtained financing to survey potential air routes from Alaska to Russia. 

Meanwhile, Will Rogers was at his ranch in Pacific Palisades, California, dithering over whether to commit to this Alaskan “vacation,” as he called it. His wife, Betty, opposed the trip out of fear the men would get lost over the trackless Siberian wastes. Will calmed her with assurances that he was only committing to visiting Alaska. Probably, he said, he would say goodbye to Post there and return home. Betty could see how badly her husband wanted to go, so she acquiesced.

The two men kept a public silence about their proposed venture as Rogers put the finishing touches on his last movie, Steamboat Round the Bend. By August 4, the secret was out; national headlines announced that beloved humorist and movie star Will Rogers would fly to Alaska with Wiley Post. Their journey began with a takeoff from Seattle’s Lake Washington, adjacent to Boeing Field, on Wednesday morning, August 7, 1935. Post and Rogers landed on Juneau’s Gastineau Channel a thousand miles and eight-and-a-quarter hours later. There an old friend of Post’s, famed Alaska pilot Joe Crosson, greeted them. A Juneau newspaper noted the reaction of the local bush pilots, “[who shook] their heads in doubt…at the plane.” Rogers was the soul of hospitality when asked about their plans. “Wiley and I are like a couple of country boys in an old Ford—don’t know where we’re going and don’t care,” he said. Post, however, was irritable, snapping at reporters, “We’re going to stay [in Juneau] until we get ready to takeoff!”

When weather finally allowed the journey to continue, a local airline mechanic observed, “Post was not a good seaplane pilot…too abrupt on takeoff and pulled up too steep.” Following goodwill stops at Dawson, Aklavik and Anchorage, the two tourists departed Fairbanks on August 15, bound for Point Barrow. Post continued to exhibit erratic flying behavior, especially regarding fuel management and dangerous scud running—all of which Rogers understood nothing. Or cared; he was loving every minute of his time in Alaska.

On the takeoff from Fairbanks, Post had made another dangerously steep departure. One bush pilot noted that “if the engine [had] quit, he’s a goner.” The weather was forecast bad all the way, but Post forgot his pledge not to fly Rogers “in or above cloud or fog bank.” He was now “making his own weather.” In fact, it was only due to his great skill and continued good luck that he’d made it as far as Walakpa Lagoon.

After a hurried conversation with the Okpeahas, Post and Rogers got back into the red Orion and took off into the fog and mist, with Post once again, inexplicably, hanging by the propeller in a steep ascent. He banked sharply at two hundred feet and there was an explosion “like the sound of a shotgun,” as Okpeaha testified. The engine stopped, very possibly due to fuel stoppage induced by the twisting takeoff. In their book Will Rogers & Wiley Post: Death at Barrow, Bryan and Frances Sterling wrote that the airplane “continued to somersault, tumbling downward, [then hitting] the shallow water [and] shearing off the right wing, breaking the floats, and falling on its back.” Both men were instantly crushed to death, their bodies so mangled their wives were told white lies about their actual condition. Okpeaha set out running to Port Barrow and arrived there with news of the crash five hours later.

Tributes poured in from all over the disbelieving world. The newspapers concluded that the cause of the accident was carburetor icing resulting in “the engine stalling.” The truth was the airplane should never have been licensed to fly in the first place. The government investigation, the Sterlings wrote, became “a travesty” that covered up the regulatory negligence of the Bureau of Air Commerce. The government’s secret rationalization: If the famous Wiley Post was not flying safe, was anyone? Despite that contemporary, and successful, coverup, sufficient documents survived for later researchers to at last reveal the real cause: pilot error. Wiley Post’s luck had finally run out.