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.

O n the evening of June 5, 1944, Louis Leroux, his wife, and their six children scrambled atop an embankment near their farm to investigate the sounds of distant explosions. Three miles south, Allied fighter-bombers were attacking bridges over the Douve River on France’s Cotentin Peninsula. In the fading twilight the family watched silhouetted warplanes peel away from the glowing tracers of German anti-aircraft fire that stabbed skyward. When the excitement ended, the Lerouxs returned home to bed, unaware that their farm would play a vital role in the Allied liberation of France. 

Their slumber was disturbed a few hours later by the droning of low-flying aircraft. Gazing out their windows, they were startled to see descending parachutes. “They looked like big falling mushrooms,” recalled Madame Leroux. “We didn’t know what they were but could see that they were landing in the marshes.” When shrapnel from German flak shells pelted the roof, Madame Leroux and her husband gathered their children to take shelter in the stone stairwell. 

The farmstead sat on the east bank of the Merderet River, which bisected the Cotentin Peninsula north to south. The farm overlooked one of just two crossing points: the La Fière Bridge on the road to the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. While on the high ground, the family home was closer to the riverbank than originally intended thanks to the German occupiers who, recognizing the defensive potential of the landscape, had manipulated locks to flood the area with seawater. Rivers and streams had overflowed their banks to turn wide swaths of bucolic fields into swampland and a shallow lake.

At dawn on June 6, a platoon of Germans arrived at the Leroux’s farm. They searched the stables and occupied the house while the family retreated upstairs to the main bedroom. When gunfire erupted outside, the Lerouxs again scrambled for cover. Bullets cracked through windows, splintering shutters and ricocheting off interior stone walls. The staccato of German Mausers, MP40s, and MG42s echoed through the house as the occupiers fired back at the attackers.

During a pause in the shooting, the family rushed downstairs, past wounded Germans sprawled in the kitchen, and into the wine cellar. Wanting to flee, they nudged open the external cellar door. Spotting a soldier—who they thought was British—they yelled, “Français! Français!”

He replied in French: “Stay where you are and close the door!” 

Several hours later the door opened, and the same soldier commanded them, again in French, “Get out!” 

The Lerouxs now realized the soldiers were American paratroopers. They questioned the French family to learn how many Germans were inside, and then the shooting resumed as the French family sought cover. “The noise took our breath away,” admitted Madame Leroux. The Americans were peppering the house with rifles and machine guns. The skirmish ended after a bazooka round exploded into the house and paratroopers sprinted in to herd the surrendering Germans out. In the lull that followed, the Lerouxs celebrated their violent liberation by gifting a bottle of Calvados brandy to the Americans. “They asked us to drink some first,” recalled Madame Leroux, “which we did. Then they all drank some.”

The paratroopers, there to seize the bridge and expecting a German counterattack, told the Lerouxs it was too dangerous for them to stay. The family packed food and blankets before walking to a neighbor’s home. During their exodus, they passed more American troopers heading to the bridge.

The La Fière bridge was the D-Day objective of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Battalion of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. Capturing the bridge intact was critical to the Allies’ plans: first, they needed to prevent the Germans from using it to move reinforcements against the landings at Utah Beach and second, they wanted the bridge to serve later as an artery for armor and infantry to break out from the beachhead toward the ultimate objective: the port of Cherbourg.

A member of the 505th later described the nighttime parachute drop they had made into Normandy as “a model of precision flying and perfect execution.” Pilots of the 315th Troop Carrier Group—veterans of missions in Sicily and Italy—had dropped their passengers right on target. Under the command of Lieutenant John “Red Dog” Dolan, Able Company assembled 98 percent of its troopers within an hour. The 505th’s sister regiment, the 507th, was supposed to land on the opposite side of the Merderet, but it was not as fortunate. Weather, anti-aircraft fire, and hopelessly lost pilots scattered them across 60 square miles. 

With their drop zone just a half-mile from their objective, Dolan’s lead platoon pushed through the graying light of dawn and reached the Leroux’s farm in 30 minutes. The troopers immediately searched the bridge for demolition charges and put the German occupiers under siege. By mid-morning, with the help of paratroopers from the 508th PIR, the east side of the bridge was secure, but the scattered state of the 507th left the defense of the west side in a weakened state.

Major Frederick C.A. Kellam, the 1st Battalion commander, organized his men as well as troopers from other scattered units into a perimeter. The troopers of the 505th, most of whom had seen combat in Sicily and Italy, provided the backbone of his defense. As one of the veterans recalled, “We knew exactly what to expect on the upcoming mission: incoming mortar rounds, the terrifying German 88s, machine pistols, and one-on-one attacks against machinegun nests.” 

The road past the bridge cut across the swampy marshland via an elevated, tree-lined causeway almost 700 yards long. Kellam’s men dug in on a gentle slope facing the river. The position was less than ideal as it left them in the open and in view of any Germans on the far side, but defending from the protected reverse slope wasn’t an option. One positive, though, was that any attack from the opposite side could only come across the narrow causeway. 

“Red Dog” Dolan positioned Able Company closest to the bridge: a platoon on each side, plus another in reserve 400 yards to the rear. Dolan’s heavy firepower consisted of three .30-caliber belt-fed machine gun crews and two bazooka teams dug in to the left and right of the bridge. He also positioned a 57mm anti-tank gun 500 feet back, at a bend in the road where it had a direct line of fire down the causeway. A platoon of combat engineers stood by to blow the bridge in the event of an enemy breakthrough. To prevent that, troopers blocked the far side of the bridge with Hawkins mines. “We placed our anti-tank mines right on the top of the road where the Germans could see them,” recounted Sergeant William D. Owens, “but could not miss them with their tanks.” 

The troopers created an additional roadblock by pushing a German flatbed truck—disabled during the earlier firefight for the farmhouse—into the middle of the bridge. 

A reconnaissance of the far bank revealed it was occupied by only a handful of 507th troopers rather than the expected battalion. Without radio contact and the planned-for support, the men led by Kellam and Dolan were on their own.

The first sign of trouble came at 4:00 p.m. when scout Francis C. Buck came hightailing it back across the long causeway. He’d heard spurts of gunfire followed by the unmistakable clanking of tanks. Close behind him were a few men from the west bank who were fleeing the German advance. Buck paused briefly at the two bazooka positions to give them a heads-up before sprinting to Kellam’s command post. 

The enemy heralded their attack with an artillery barrage, which lifted as four tanks rolled across the causeway. Following them were an estimated 200 infantrymen. The Americans held their fire—the fleeting glimpses of field gray uniforms darting between the trees wasn’t yet worth wasting ammunition.

The first tank—a Panzer Mk III—paused 40 yards short of the bridge. The commander, apparently spotting the mines, opened his hatch and stood up for a better look. One of Dolan’s machine gun crews squeezed off a burst at the tempting target and killed him instantly. With that, the American line erupted with rifle and machine gun fire.

The two bazooka teams went to work. Gunners Lenold Peterson and Marcus Heim abandoned their foxhole so they could aim around a concrete telephone pole. To their right, Privates John D. Bolderson and Gordon C. Pryne did the same. Just a few hours earlier, Pryne had been a rifleman, “But on the jump, one of the guys on the bazooka team broke his ankle,” he said. “They gave that job to me. I didn’t want it, really, but they said, ‘You got it.’” 

The two teams pummeled the lead tank, which in turn fired a round at Peterson and Heim. It flew high, shattering the telephone pole. Dolan later admitted, “To this day, I’ll never be able to explain why all four of them were not killed. They fired and reloaded with the precision of well-oiled machinery.” 

The lead tank was hit by several 2.36-inch high-explosive rockets, one of which disabled a track while another briefly set it alight. Peterson and Heim advanced to get a better shot at the second tank—a captured French Renault R-35 painted Wehrmacht gray—which was some 20 yards behind the first. Heim later recalled, “We moved forward toward the second tank and fired at it as fast as I could load the rockets into the bazooka. We kept firing at the second tank, and we hit it in the turret where the body joins it, also in the tracks, and with another hit it also went up in flames.”

The 57mm gun fired as well and was subjected to heavy enemy retaliation. In the melee, two tank rounds punched through the glacis shield, and seven men were killed keeping it in operation.

A third tank now lumbered toward the bridge as German mortar shells pounded the American line. Although the first tank was disabled, the main gun and machine gun were still barking out shells. Rushing out from his foxhole, Private Joseph C. Fitt scrambled atop the first tank to toss a hand grenade into the open hatch and finish off the crew.

While the tank battle raged, the German infantry struggled to advance against the weight of American firepower. One paratrooper observed that the bunched-up enemy, seeking cover along the treelined causeway, “made a real nice target.”

With the German attack stalling, the two bazooka teams yelled for more ammo. Three men, including Major Kellam, scrambled forward with satchels of rockets. The trio was 15 yards from the bridge when another mortar and artillery barrage crashed in. Kellam was killed, and the other two men badly wounded, one mortally. Kellam’s death made Dolan the senior officer. His first action after taking command was to dispatch a runner to the regiment’s command post to advise them what happened.

Artillery continued to rain in. “They really clobbered us,” admitted Owens. “I don’t know how it was possible to live through it.”

Owens’ platoon was out front. When his radioman with the walkie-talkie took a direct shell hit, they lost contact with Dolan. “So, from then on, as far as we were concerned, we were a lost platoon,” said Owens. Anticipating another attack, Owens slithered from foxhole to foxhole collecting grenades and ammunition from the dead to redistribute to his men. “I knew we would need every round we could get our hands on.”

The enemy infantry rushed forward again, passing the knocked-out tanks and getting closer to Owens’ platoon, which poured fire into their ranks. “The machine gun I had was so hot it quit firing,” said Owens. He shouldered a dead man’s BAR, firing it until he ran out of ammo, then he switched to a second machine gun of a knocked-out crew. 

Owens could hear another machine gun stitching the German flank and the plonking belch of a 60mm mortar lobbing shells along the causeway. Riflemen squeezed off shot after shot. It was getting desperate. “We stopped them,” Owens recounted, “but they had gotten within twenty-five yards of us.” 

Just as the German attack failed, Colonel Mark J. Alexander, the regimental executive officer, arrived with 40-odd paratroopers he had managed to collect along the way. His inspection of the defenses confirmed they were set as well as could be expected. Shortly thereafter, the division’s second-in-command, Brigadier General James M. Gavin, arrived with men from the 507th. Gavin concurred with Alexander’s assessment, later recounting that Dolan’s troopers holding the bridge were “well organized and had the situation in hand.”

Alexander asked Gavin, “Do you want me on this side, the other side, or both sides of the river?” 

After glancing at the far bank, Gavin replied, “You better stay on this side because it looks like the Germans are getting pretty strong over there.” The two officers agreed that attacking across the bridge would divide their manpower and might cost them the bridge in the face of a strong counterattack.

German shells continued to pummel the American positions. One shell exploded on the edge of a foxhole, burying the two occupants. Alexander helped dig them out and then sent them back to the medics.

First Sergeant Robert M. Matterson, who was directing the wounded to the aid station, said they were coming back in such numbers that he “felt like a policeman directing traffic.” Indeed, as the day ended, dozens of men flowed past while dozens more of their comrades lay dead, strewn across the battlefield. 

Sunset gave way to darkness, with a bright moon that was occasionally obscured by scudding clouds. Throughout the night, the Germans periodically lobbed artillery shells at the Americans, while Alexander dispatched supply parties to scour the division’s drop zone for more ammunition.

At dawn, the rising sun released mist from the surrounding swamps and heralded the arrival of a squad of airborne engineers along with two more machine gun crews. Colonel Alexander warmly welcomed the men and directed them to dig in. 

The additional firepower was much needed, but Alexander was still concerned about his available arsenal: “We had no long-range firepower other than machine guns. Well, we had one 57mm gun with six rounds of ammunition and a limited supply of mortar rounds, but this all had to be held in reserve for any serious effort the Germans might make to cross the bridge.” 

Alexander’s mental inventory was interrupted when a group of paratroopers on the far side of the Merderet River attempted to wade across. He watched helplessly as German fire cut into the men sloshing through the water. A handful made it to safety, but most were killed and several of the wounded drowned.

The Germans preceded their next attack with intensified shelling, including tree bursts. Two more captured French Renault tanks were in the vanguard. Dolan’s 57mm crew held their fire—with only six rounds left they wanted a clear shot. But when the lead tank boldly geared onto the bridge, the 57mm crew cracked off a round. The shell struck the tank, sending it and its partner into retreat. Nestled in front of the anti-tank gun was Corporal Felix Ferrazzi, a radioman serving as a machine gunner. With a clear view down the causeway, he added to the mayhem with repeated bursts of fire into the advancing Germans. The gunners implored him to move due to the 57mm’s muzzle blast, but despite being wounded, Ferrazzi stayed put—until a mortar shell mangled his .30-caliber. The other Americans added to the wall of lead, especially Sergeant Oscar Queen, who estimated he fired 5,000 rounds from his belt-fed machine gun. 

Thirty minutes into their attack, the Germans floundered. They began their withdrawal as the paratroopers neared their breaking point. Dolan’s 1st Platoon was down to 15 men; one squad had just three troopers still standing. Owens sent a runner to report to Dolan: they were almost out of ammo and unable to repel the next attack; could they pull back? Dolan replied, “No, stay where you are.” He then scribbled a short message for the runner to relay to Owens: “We stay. There is no better place to die.” With his orders in hand, Owens organized what was left of his platoon.

But the Germans had had enough. They waved a Red Cross flag and requested a 30-minute truce to recover their wounded. Owens and his comrades used the time to bring up more ammo and determine who was still alive. Able Company had suffered 17 killed and 49 wounded; the battalion was down to 176 men. The exhausted Owens then sought a better view of the causeway. “I estimated I could see at least 200 dead or wounded Germans scattered about. I don’t know how many were in the river,” he said, “Then I sat down and cried.”

But the battle for La Fière Bridge wasn’t over. For the Allies to break out of the beachhead, the stalemate had to be broken. Later that evening, General Gavin relieved the battered 505th paratroopers with elements of the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment. In a charge rivaling the Light Brigade, the glider men made a daylight assault across the causeway on June 9. Pushing through the pall of friendly artillery and withering enemy fire, they successfully occupied the far bank, while another group of 100 paratroopers swarmed in behind them to help secure the foothold. The road to Cherbourg was now open for Major General J. Lawton Collins’ VII Corps, but it came at a heavy cost. The 82nd Airborne had suffered 254 men killed and more than 500 wounded to seize, hold, and secure the vital bridge at La Fière. 

The Leroux family returned to find their home in ruins and most of their livestock victims of the crossfire. They lived in the stable—as it had suffered the least damage—rebuilding their farm over the next five years. They moved back into their home in time for Christmas 1949. 

“Our family celebrated,” recalled Madame Leroux, “happy, in spite of our misery, to all be back together without having suffered any dead or wounded, thanks to the American soldiers who fought to liberate and save us.”

Frenchman Henri Farman was already a celebrated cycling champion, race car driver and entrepreneur when he ordered a biplane from the world’s first airplane factory, Les Frères Voisin. Five months later, in January 1908, he won Ernest Archdeacon’s prize for the first officially observed heavier-than-air flight over a one-kilometer circular course.

A week after making Europe’s first flight outside France (in Belgium), Farman lunched with Wilbur Wright in Paris in June. They got on famously; when Wilbur explained his plans to make demonstration flights in France, Farman replied that he had accepted an offer from a consortium of St. Louis businessmen. He would get $25,000 for touring the United States for 90 days, plus $200 per flight. The organizer was Tom MacMechan, editor of American Aeronaut. “These public demonstrations ought to bring about a great popular realization of the practicability of dynamic flight,” enthused Aeronautics, another aviation journal. 

After learning that aviator Glenn Curtiss had flown his June Bug on July 4 to win the $25,000 Scientific American Cup for the first public powered flight in America, Farman crated his Voisin for shipment across the Atlantic. He sailed with his assistant, Maurice Herbster, and his wife, arriving in New York on July 26 to an enthusiastic welcome. Headed by Curtiss, a welcoming committee from the Aero Club of America chartered a tug to escort the Farmans’ ship to the pier, where automobiles whisked them to the Hotel Astor on Times Square.

Farman had become front-page news, where he was hailed as “the world’s champion aeronaut” and “the man with the practical aeroplane.” The military was keen to witness his demonstrations, and with Orville Wright planning test flights for the government at Fort Myer, Virginia, an international contest seemed possible. Farman even challenged Orville to a contest for a $10,000 purse, but Wright declined. Farman was unfazed: “If they consider their machines superior, why don’t they accept my challenge? I could gain much valuable data from a contest, and surely my machine, with its long list of record flights, has at least some points of information for my brother aviators.” 

As the venue for his demonstrations, Farman chose the horseracing track in Brighton Beach, New York, which in 1907 had been converted to host 24-hour endurance motor races known as “Grinds.” Farman arranged to remove large sections of an infield fence while he had his crates hoisted onto theatrical scenery trucks and unloaded in the track’s old betting ring. When customs officers did not arrive as expected to examine the contents, Farman sent away his hired stevedores. Then the revenue men finally arrived and Herbster had to recruit a crew of unskilled locals. They dropped one of the crates, damaging the airplane’s tail cell and rudder. Despite the damage, the appraiser declared the Voisin’s new Antoinette V8 engine to be the finest piece of machinery he had ever seen, saying that “all who examined the machine were greatly impressed with its workmanship, which is exquisite.” Farman spend the next day on repairs, reassembling the airframe and installing the engine. 

At a banquet at the Astor on July 30 one news account noted that “the ballroom was full of balloonites, with here and there a submarine fiend, an auto crank or a common scientist wedged in among the number.” Charles Manly, the engineer and test pilot for aviation experimenter Samuel Langley, congratulated France on its aviation experimenters and described Farman as “a man destined to do great good for aeronautics and create enthusiasm among millions.” Farman’s riposte was equally gracious to those on this side of the Atlantic: “We foreigners owe credit to Octave Chanute for the basic principles of our apparatus, and to the Wright brothers, pioneers after Mr. Chanute.” 

After the guests had consumed a model of the Voisin confected from spun sugar, Farman made a less-than-sweet dig at the secretive and litigious Wrights. “I carry on my experiments in public because that seems advantageous,” he said. “The work is difficult enough, and it is better for others to see what you are doing and for you to see what they are doing, each improving by the mistakes of the other.”

Farman was not alone in resenting the Wrights’ secrecy, even on home turf. The American Magazine of Aeronautics opined, “Farman has perhaps done more, through publicity, to brush away the cobwebs of doubt than the Wrights. Even here, we doubt that the Wrights ever flew, while we read of the Farman’s flights with less astonishment than at the invention of a headacheless booze.” James Means, editor of Aeronautical Annuals agreed, saying, “Owing to the public exhibitions of flights with motor-aeroplanes in France, the Frenchmen are in a fair way to get years ahead of us in aviation, as they did with the automobile.”

“We are disgusted with some American inventors who have been chasing the almighty dollar instead of solving the problems of flight,” railed MacMechan in the American Aeronaut. For impeding the free exchange of ideas, he argued, the Wrights should forfeit their place in history for making the world’s first airplane flight. He added, “After Farman’s flight, there will be no difficulty raising capital to finance the cost of building aeroplanes and conducting experiments.” 

First, though, Farman had to get into the air, and that was looking problematic. At only 840 yards, the racetrack was short and it was traversed by ruts and ditches. Ominously, Farman’s promised down payment of $6,000 failed to materialize, so track owner William Engeman was induced to mollify him with cash so the show could go on. 

Apart from finances and the small track, keeping the water-cooled Antoinette from overheating was Farman’s main problem. Its “total-loss” cooling system meant the engine water evaporated as it carried heat away, and since the Voisin had a marginal power/weight ratio, the airplane could carry only so much coolant. “If we could carry sufficient water,” Farman said, “we could stay in the air 30 hours as easily as 30 minutes.” Wind was his second concern: “A steady, strong wind is what you want—but if it becomes too strong, great care is needed. Trees and other obstacles can divert the wind. I generally fly 15 feet above the ground—I can fly higher, but never as high as your skyscrapers, although I hope to some day.” 

Ever cautious, Farman confided to the Daily Tribune, “When I risk my neck, as every man who mounts an aeroplane is bound to, I am at least certain that I have left nothing undone to make my apparatus as perfect as possible. I take no unnecessary risks—I could soar into the air to any height if my motor would work long enough. But it would be folly to ascend a yard higher than necessary, for the aeroplane is at present a very delicate machine and something may snap at any moment.” He managed the public’s expectations accordingly. “I want to emphasize to the American people that an aeroplane does not fly over the rooftops like a balloon. I hope they will not be disappointed to find that they can view airships without craning their necks.” 

On July 31, before his first public show, Farman flew for Aero Club members. According to the New York Times, “Several hundred persons were near the curtained-off part of the betting ring in which the machine is kept when it was pushed out. Then those who watched got some idea of the driving power of the propeller. A mechanician turned the motor over by twisting the blades while five men held the aeroplane, Mr Farman advanced the spark and opened the throttle. The whirling blades shook the shrubbery 60′ away as in a windstorm, while dust clouds were blown up 75′ away.… [T]he airscrew of the Voisin began to revolve swiftly, and the machine moved across the turf for 200 yards. It left the ground, mounted ten or twelve feet in the air and moved along with an easy, bird-like glide. Two-thirds of the way to the eastern extremity of the oval, a group of men with a wagonload of boards were busy covering a ditch. A calf ran about and the crowd infringed. As he bore down on these obstructions, Farman stopped his propeller, while the guiding planes were inclined downward. As the aeroplane neared the turf, Mr Farman let his propeller shoot around for a moment. This made the landing as gentle as that of any creature of the air. It was a delicate piece of airmanship, and the crowd cheered.” 

The first public day, Saturday, August 1, was less propitious. Attendance was poor. At a venue regularly attracting 20,000, only 2,000 people turned up. Weather balloons zigzagging across the sky indicated wind gusts of 22 mph, which prevented any ascents. Instead, Farman had the Voisin paraded before the grandstands and explained its workings. After being warned to hold their hats, the crowd gasped as the Antoinette fired, generating “a terrific blast of air back towards the hundreds behind. Instantly a cloud of straw hats went hurtling into the air, high into the roof of the grandstand. The blast cleared a path like a cyclone. Fifty people were blown off their feet.” 

Entertaining perhaps, but not what the crowd had paid to see. They dispersed resentfully when Farman announced by megaphone in his thick French accent that flights would be postponed. Admitting “the spanking sea breezes that met the conservative foreigner,” the New York Times acidly described Farman as “walking through the clover to see if the wind was strong enough to justify his determination not to fly.”

Thereafter, things got worse. No demonstration had been planned for the next day, Sunday, August 2, so no officials were present. But despite the forecast of continuing gusts, conditions were sunny and calmer. While Farman tuned his Voisin in the makeshift hangar, 500 of Saturday’s disgruntled visitors huddled outside. MacMechan assured them that Saturday’s tickets would be valid for future flights, but the crowd responded with a chorus of threats and started forcing the gates. 

When news of the fracas reached Farman, he acted swiftly. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “They paid to see me fly—many of them working people who can’t get here any other day. Let them in. Hurry!” To objections that there was no one to police the crowd, he replied “I have seen enough of the American people to satisfy me they don’t need police if you give them a fair show.”

Minutes later, the crowd surged through the gates, raced across the infield and surrounded the hangar so closely that it became impossible to roll out the Voisin. According to The Herald, “Farman, with his new-found confidence in American fairness, ordered the canvas doors to be drawn back, climbed on the machine and shouted at the crowd to stand back as the aeroplane was rolled out.” 

An announcer asked people to be patient, and most obeyed. The wind died down to a westerly breeze. “There came a clattering sound from the aeroplane, and a cloud of dust could be seen leaping into the air,” reported the Herald. “The propeller flashed faster and faster, then the great machine darted forward, rolling rapidly over the ground. 200 feet from the start, it leaped into the air, rose 25 feet and came whirring over the field with the speed of an express train. At the end of the flight the motor was stopped, the slant downward begun, the motor started again for a few revolutions to lessen the shock of landing, the machine rolled along for about 100 feet. For a second or two the crowd was silent before the throng in the grandstand stood and cheered, but it was all over in less than a minute. Then the crowd dashed across the field to tell Farman that he was not a fake after all, but the real thing. Farman took it all coolly and begged the men not to hurt the machine: ‘Aeroplanes are babies yet—in the crawling stage—and you must be patient with them.’ Many of the men who were yelling themselves into a state of perspiration over Farman’s achievement were only five minutes before denouncing him as a fraud and exciting the more unruly elements to demand their money back or ‘have fun’ with his machine….” 

The Voisin had made a public flight, but it appeared that the tour was doomed by the combination of inadequate spectacle, misleading advertising, poor organization and increasingly critical press. Farman offered to sell his Voisin for $6,000, even suggesting that the government might buy it for the Fort Myer trials. The popular Vanderbilt Cup race driver Joe Tracy made an offer, which Farman turned down. 

Matters didn’t improve. On August 5 Curtiss wrote, “Farman’s attempts were very disappointing. The first day he flew 140 yards at an elevation of three feet in 11 seconds, at about 20 mph. He made two such flights and then wheeled the machine back to the tent. Next day there were about 3,000 attending and as it was too windy, he did not attempt to fly.” On August 6 and 7, storms precluded further flights, with only three hops over the weekend; attendance by then was down to a few hundred, who showed more interest in the amateur motorcycle races organized at the last minute as an added attraction. 

Ironically, in France Wilbur Wright was triumphantly demonstrating the superiority of his machine to incredulous audiences at another racetrack, near Le Mans. As far as transatlantic rivalry was concerned, it was game over. By contrast, Farman’s backers fled back to St. Louis and the contractor who erected the hangar attached the Voisin for a debt of $120. Farman sent him $50. Warned that other creditors would soon follow, he hired a fast car, some wagons and a local work crew. By the early hours of August 14, the Voisin had been hastily repacked and hustled off to the Manhattan Custom House and loaded aboard a Cherbourg-bound freighter. 

With his machine safe, Farman accepted Thomas Edison’s invitation for a quick visit to the “play shop” at the great man’s New Jersey laboratory. There, he saw the Voisin flicker jerkily onto a screen in a short film that was advertised for public screenings in that month’s Variety.

Stardom notwithstanding, Farman had only received a fraction of his promised fees. His wife was unimpressed by the visit to America. To the New York Sun, she compared audience expectations on both sides of the Atlantic. “The people here are not ready for such an advanced idea,” she said. “They would rather witness a race between two donkeys than see Farman fly. The machine is too technical for them to grasp and Farman flew so easily that they thought it didn’t mean much. He would have drawn more crowds if he had made several ineffectual attempts to sail and broken the machine a little—enough to give an idea that it was dangerous. In France it is different. Over there, where flights have been public and no one has to pay, I’ve seen 30,000 present at a flight.” The editor agreed: “Farman’s work seems almost too businesslike. At least he might make the machine wobble a little and dip dangerously to remind us that he really is flying and not running an automobile on some invisible aerial road.” 

For Aeronautics, the problem was the venue. “If the grounds had been large enough to allow long circular flights, people would have been anxious to see the flights, but with a straight flight of only a few hundred feet, people thought they had not seen enough for their money. Any flight is wonderful but the public wants a spectacle. Mr Farman fulfilled his side of the agreement as far as the ground permitted and must be of the opinion that interest in aeronautics on this side of the pond is really less than he anticipated.”

The New York Times riposted: “Mr. Farman is a bit ‘difficult’ and overconfident of his ability to steer his way among strangers.” The editorial concluded that it was a case of caveat aviator: “Mr. Farman did not exercise caution in the selection of his managers. Inventors are notoriously incompetent in business matters, and it is not only in the United States that their bright hopes of fortune fail to materialize.” 

Farman remained pragmatic. “I said to myself before I came to America that I was not sure that the people were ready for such an exhibition of mechanical flight in the restricted area that seems a necessary adjunct to charging admission. If for no other reason than that the newspapers here have treated me with such kindness, I am glad the trip was made.” 

Disillusioned, the Farmans headed back to France on August 15. Farman’s Brighton Beach flights were commemorated 30 years later by the painter Alois Fabry as part of a huge mural project inside Brooklyn Borough Hall done for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Entitled “Brooklyn Past and Present,” the work immediately attracted controversy—for its style and because some people thought it included a depiction of Vladimir Lenin. Dedicated in 1939, the murals were removed in 1946 and have since disappeared. 

Virtually every Old West aficionado is familiar with Buffalo Bill Cody’s popular Wild West shows, which traveled the United States and across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During Cody’s 1890 and 1906 European tours throngs of Italians in arenas from Rome to Bologna thrilled at the showmanship of Buffalo Bill and his revolving cast of characters. The 1906 tour was the last to Europe for Buffalo Bill, who a decade later teamed with the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Real Wild West but by then was too frail to travel overseas.

Within decades Americans huddled faithfully around TV sets in living rooms nationwide to indulge a seemingly insatiable fascination with Western lore and dramatized portrayals of real-life cowboys, Indians, cavalrymen and gunmen. Though few channels were on the air by the mid-1950s, dozens of Western series aired weekly, at least one or more nightly. Western junkies could also take in Saturday afternoon B reruns of black-and-white “oaters” on the small screen at home or the latest Technicolor weekend matinees on the big screens at local movie theaters.

Meanwhile, another American harboring a fascination with the Old West embarked on a tour of Europe, searching for a gunmaker who could replicate the Colt 1851 Navy per-cussion revolver, the weapon of choice of Wild Bill Hickok, among other Western gunfighters. Val J. Forgett Jr.—gun collector, Civil War re-enactor and owner of the New Jersey–based Service Armament Co.—ultimately found what he was looking for in Italy. In 1957 Forgett founded Navy Arms, a subsidiary cap-and-ball revolver line within Service Armament, and a year later rolled out his first Colt Navy replicas in unison with gunmakers Vittorio Gregorelli and a young, astute Aldo Uberti from the northern Italian firearms manufacturing center of Gardone Val Trompia. Forgett’s first imports didn’t bear the later obligatory Italian proof marks but were merely stamped GU, or G&U, for Gregorelli and Uberti. In 1959 Uberti began producing replica firearms under his own trade name. He and Forgett were the driving forces behind the enduring popularity of Italian-made replica Old West firearms. It took the American entrepreneur and the skilled Italian gunsmith to make many a would-be gunhand’s dream an affordable reality.

Around the same time, with the centennial of the American Civil War fast approaching, the North-South Skirmish Association (N-SSA) found its ranks expanding. N-SSA’s competitive shooters (Forgett among them) were in dire need of usable guns, as the supply of wartime arms had begun to dry up. Blame the collector market, which had snapped up most original firearms of the era, in turn driving up prices on those remaining in circulation. Particularly scarce and expensive were Confederate firearms, which had been produced in far fewer numbers. Thus, in 1960 Navy Arms introduced a pair of percussion revolvers based on the Colt Navy and dubbed the “Yank” and the “Reb.” The steel-framed Yank adhered to the styling of the Colt Model 1851, while the brass-framed Reb faithfully recreated the Griswold & Gunnison, a Southern copy of the Colt Model 1860. Fine examples of either can reap well into the five figures today.

Uberti’s and Forgett’s respective lines continued to expand, leading to a second generation of replicas of the “smoke wagons” of old. In 1973 Navy Arms introduced copies of the Winchester Models 1866 and 1873, the first of the company’s replica lever-action rifles. Over the decades at least a dozen different Italian gunmakers have entered the replica arms market, including Davide Pedersoli and Giuseppe Pietta, introducing everything from Colt Single Action Army “Peacemakers” to Spencer carbines. Uberti’s present-day line includes dozens of models.

Another Italian export that drove the popularity of Old West replica arms was the “spaghetti Western” film subgenre, a darker take on the traditional Western, whose productions were directed and scored by Italians, co-starred Italians and were filmed in both Italy and Spain. The heyday of these popular big-screen adventures (roughly 1964–78) brought to superstardom such American actors as Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef and featured full-screen closeups of the co-starring firearms.

Any sharp-eyed, gun-savvy viewer can quickly discern an Italian replica from an original. For example, many replica Colt Single Action Army revolvers are fitted with brass trigger guards—an option unavailable on original Peacemakers, though most percussion-era revolvers did have brass trigger guards. Colt 1851 Navy revolvers could be special-ordered with silver-plated guards, while the fluted 1861 Navy—another hard-to-find original Colt on the collector market—had blued-steel trigger guards. To their credit, Uberti and other Italian makers equipped later iterations of their replica Peacemakers with the correct steel trigger guards.

One thing is as sure as shooting, the Italian connection reverberates to this day in the ranks of such competitive shooting organizations as the N-SSA and the Single Action Shooting Society, not to mention on the big and small screen. Despite reports to the contrary, the decades-old transatlantic fascination with the Old West is alive and well. 

The motor launch tied up at the small-boat pier in Seeadler Harbor in New Guinea to disembark a dozen men from the ammunition carrier USS Mount Hood. The date was November 10, 1944. Led by the ship’s communications officer, Lieutenant Lester Hull Wallace, the group had several errands to run on shore before returning to the ship. Wallace planned to take a couple of men with him to the fleet post office to pick up mail. Others were headed to headquarters to obtain charts and manuals. Two had dental appointments and two were on their way to the brig. The sailors were just splitting up when a tremendous blast knocked them off their feet. When they looked out into the harbor, they were stunned to realize that their ship was being wracked by explosion after explosion.

Seeadler Harbor was off the northeast coast of Manus Island, 250 miles north of mainland New Guinea. It was one of the finest anchorages in the Southwest Pacific Theater, measuring 15 miles long and four wide, with ample depth for capital ships. The army had taken the island from the Japanese in early March 1944 and within days U.S. Navy Seabees had begun to build a major advanced operating base capable of supplying and repairing the ships of Admiral William F. Halsey’s Third Fleet as it supported General Douglas MacArthur’s leap-frogging drive along New Guinea’s north coast to retake the Philippines. That same month a survey ship marked out more than 600 moorage sites throughout the vast harbor. The Manus base grew over the summer and became dotted with hundreds of buildings—mostly Quonset huts used as barracks for thousands of sailors and as warehouses for the vast amounts of materiel necessary to carry on the war.

On the morning of Friday, November 10, Mount Hood was one of some 200-odd ships in the harbor. The vessels ran the gamut from patrol boats to escort carriers and also included landing ships, tanks (LSTs), destroyers, and civilian-crewed freighters. Mount Hood was anchored at berth 380, near the harbor’s center, four miles from the entrance and 2½ miles from land. It was the first of eight AE class ammunition ships that had been converted for the U.S. Navy, with a length of 460 feet, a displacement of 14,000 tons, and a cargo capacity of 7,800 tons. Mount Hood’s keel was laid down in September 1943 and it began service as a cargo vessel named the SS Marco Polo. Once the navy took over, it converted the ship into an ammunition carrier. Commissioned in July 1944, the vessel was renamed after the dormant volcano that provides Oregon with its highest point. Its captain was Commander Harold A. Turner. 

Turner struggled to find qualified seamen for his crew and many of those he received were raw recruits with no experience at sea. After an unusually short fitting out and a shakedown cruise in the Chesapeake Bay, Mount Hood stopped at Norfolk, Virginia, to load 5,000 tons of explosives and ammunition. On August 5, 1944, with its hold filled, Mount Hood departed Norfolk bound for the Admiralty Islands via the Panama Canal. The ship reached its final destination, Seeadler Harbor, on September 22. Its mission was two-fold: to dispense its cargo to other warships, and to take on any unused munitions from homeward-bound vessels.

On November 10 Mount Hood was ringed by nine landing ship, mechanized (LCM) boats and was the center of a humming hive of loading and unloading activity. The small-engine repair ship USS Mindanao was anchored off the ship’s port side just 350 yards away. USS Argonne, another repair ship that also served as the task force commander’s flagship, was 1,100 yards off.

Wallace and his going-ashore party piled aboard the captain’s 40-foot gig and at 8:25 a.m. they shoved off toward the beach. As he headed toward shore Wallace noted that aerial depth charges were being loaded aboard the Mount Hood from the landing craft moored alongside.

A lanky, bespectacled 29-year-old native of Georgia, Wallace had graduated from Atlanta Tech High School and earned his law degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1941. Afterward he married Mildred Virginia French and went straight into the service of the Bureau of Internal Revenue, working in the estate and gift tax branch—but not before registering as an officer in the Naval Reserve. In 1942 the navy called him up and assigned him a place in the Bureau of Naval Personnel. After a year there the navy sent Wallace to its communications school at Harvard University, and then to the Sub Chaser Training Center at Miami, Florida. In the summer of 1944 the lieutenant was transferred to USS Mount Hood—his first at-sea deployment. He put his Ivy League training to good use when setting up the ship’s communications department.

Wallace and his crew landed at the pier and disembarked to carry out their various chores. Just as they were separating, one of the sailors loudly exclaimed, “Look!” The boat crew turned to see an eruption of smoke and fire rising above Mount Hood. In seconds a powerful explosive concussion threw them to the ground. It took a full 12 seconds for the horrible sound of the exploding ship to reach them. Even from two miles away they could see dark shapes being ejected from the explosion and curving high into the sky. The lieutenant reacted immediately. “Back to the boat!” he yelled. He told the coxswain to make all speed to return to the scene. It took more than a quarter of an hour for the motor launch to reach berth 380. They found no ship, no bodies. “There was nothing but debris all around,” Wallace later wrote. Mount Hood and her crew of 350 had simply vanished.

Wallace directed the boat to the nearest vessel, the Mindanao. He was shocked by what he saw—the port side had been pummeled by flying steel that punched 33 irregularly shaped holes into the hull, some as large as three by four feet. He later learned that everyone on the port deck—26 sailors—had been killed instantly by the blast. In all, 82 men died on Mindanao. There seemed nothing more Wallace and his men could do, so the lieutenant had the launch head back to the pier to await further orders. There he was told to stick around and that he’d be required as a witness for an about-to-be-convened official board of inquiry. He did not know then that he was the only surviving officer from Mount Hood. 

Out in the harbor ships were assessing the damage from the explosion. After the sky ceased raining metal fragments, the crew of the Argonne counted 221 pieces of the Mount Hood strewn across the deck. Said the ship’s captain, Commander T.H. Escott, “By the time we had recovered from the force of the explosion, Mount Hood was completely shrouded in a pall of dense black smoke. It was not possible to see anything worth reporting.”

Ships as far as 2,200 yards distant sustained various degrees of damage, among them the escort carriers USS Petrof Bay and Saginaw Bay, the destroyer USS Young, four destroyer escorts, and several cargo and repair vessels. Small boats like landing craft took the brunt of the blast. Many were sunk and more were damaged beyond repair. Many crewmen died. Fortunately, there were no major combat ships in the harbor that morning. 

When divers entered the harbor waters to inspect Mount Hood’s wreckage, they found none to speak of—only a few stray pieces of the hull, nothing bigger than 16 by 10 feet. They were astonished to see a trench in the sand 50 feet wide and 300 feet long that the explosion had excavated to a depth of 40 feet. USS Mount Hood had literally ceased to exist.

Within days the navy organized a board of investigation to discover the cause of a catastrophe that killed 432 men and wounded an additional 371 from surrounding ships. The members, headed by a captain and two commanders, were to review all the facts, study images taken at the scene, and interview personnel who, in some way, witnessed the events of November 10, 1944. The hearings took place aboard the destroyer tender USS Sierra. 

The first order of business was to define the scene at Seeadler Harbor and the role Mount Hood had played in activities there. It was noted that the ship was “the primary source for the issue of all types of ammunition,” and was taking on munitions from homebound vessels. The board noted that the harbor had four delineated anchorages for ammunition ships in the harbor’s western portion. But they were not used. After shifting the ship’s allocated place twice, the harbormaster settled it into berth 380, in the generally placid waters at the harbor’s center. That central location was more convenient for the landing craft and lighters that had to carry the ammunition back and forth. The ship was anchored in about 120 feet. At the time of the explosion Mount Hood was carrying about 3,800 tons of high explosives, including “quite a bit of damaged ammunition,” Lieutenant Wallace told the board. “Some of it was corroded and I myself remember seeing some pyrotechnics with dates as far back as 1915.”

Seaman First Class Lawrence Gaschler told the board that he should have been aboard Mount Hood that morning unloading side-by-side with his fellow crewmates from the amphibious boat pool. But he had been chosen to pilot a boat that carried an officer from the escort carrier USS Ommaney Bay to another ship in the harbor. “In my mind, we’d just passed the Hood when it blew up,” he testified. “There was this bright flash and I could feel the heat, then just a second later the concussion hit us. It knocked the officer down and knocked me out. When I came to, debris was falling in the water around.”

Motor Machinist’s Mate Lew Cowden was aboard the destroyer escort USS Whitehurst. He recalled that “we were headed toward the open sea when it exploded. They tell me we were much closer when taking on supplies and went right past [Mount Hood] on our way out. I had just started up the ladder to the fantail when the blast pushed me back. I ran forward and came up on deck amidships. The air was full of smoke and fine dust. I was told that we were far enough away to avoid damage from the blast and yet near enough that major debris blew over us.” 

Not all eyewitness testimony was credible. Aviation ordnanceman Edward L. Ponichtera, who was working on the beach near the Mount Hood, asserted that he saw a twin-engine Japanese bomber drop two bombs—“each a direct hit”—on the ship. “I clearly observed the Rising Sun painted on the plane,” he said. Carl Hughes, a sailor on the Liberty ship SS William H. McGuffey, averred that he saw an enemy midget submarine broach the water near Mount Hood and fire two torpedoes.

With help from the Mount Hood survivors on Wallace’s boat, the board’s investigators pieced together an accounting of the types of cargo aboard at the time of the explosion. Munitions included .30-caliber machine gun rounds, 14-inch shells for battleships, and everything in-between. There were dozens of 100-pound bombs stored away in the holds, or in the case of the 1,000-pound blockbusters, kept in a small shack on the main deck. Hold #5 contained rocket bodies and rocket motors, most of them damaged. The total was nearly 4,000 tons of munitions. 

The investigators then moved over to assess Mount Hood’s crew and their role in the inferno. They felt the sailors had an overall “lack of experience” and, perhaps even more crucial, a “lack of leadership among the twenty-two officers,” which led to poor discipline onboard. “This was reflected in the rough and careless handling of ammunition,” the board noted. 

In all, 133 witnesses gave testimony, supported by dozens of exhibits. Wallace was twice called to give evidence. It took the board a month to gather all of its evidence. 

On December 14, 1944, the board issued its findings. “The following unsafe conditions and practices were revealed in the investigation: ammunition was being roughly handled in all parts of the ship; boosters, fuzes and detonators were stowed together in one hold in a manner contrary to regulations governing transportation of military explosives; safety regulations for handling ammunition were not posted in conspicuous places and there was a general lack of instruction to the crew in safety measures; there was a lack of enforcing the prohibitions of smoking; there was evidence that ammunition was accepted on board which was definitely defective and should have been destroyed by dumping in deep water.”

The board’s final conclusion was that “The explosion was caused by a force or agency within the USS Mount Hood itself.” Had Captain Turner survived he and his senior officers would have been held responsible. The board had to admit that they had no clear idea of the exact cause of the disaster—they could only guess—which was frustrating for the three members.

Regarding the statements about a Japanese bomber or midget submarine, the board firmly stated there was no evidence that either of these attacks took place, and so discounted the accounts. 

In his endorsement of the report, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander of Pacific Ocean Areas and Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, wrote, “The question of negligence is not involved but rather that the technical mistakes made by the above named officers [Turner and others] were errors in judgement resulting from a keen desire to meet necessary military commitments and move on with the progress of the war.” The admiral noted, “The exigencies of war will always require the acceptance of certain operational hazards.”

While working on its conclusions the board took note of two other incidents involving explosions on ammunition-carrying vessels, one in May 1944 and the other in July. 

On May 21 an LST tied up at Pearl Harbor’s West Loch was loading mortar rounds for the upcoming invasion of the Mariana Islands when it was blown up after an errant shell fell into a stack of munitions in the hold. The resulting conflagration quickly spread to other nearby LSTs. Six of the craft were sunk and 160 men killed.

And on July 17 a blast at the naval magazine ammunition loading facility in Port Chicago, California, flipped and sank the freighter SS Quinault Victory and vaporized the Liberty ship SS E.A. Bryan. Three-hundred-twenty men died, two-thirds of them African American stevedores. Both ships were tied up at a finger pier loading ammunition from a string of railway boxcars. The official finding of facts produced by the board of inquiry noted that “no intent, fault, negligence, or inefficiency of any person in the naval service caused the explosions.” Among shortcomings that led to the disaster, the board wrote, “The officers had little stevedoring experience, none with handling enlisted personnel, and none with explosives.” They went on to describe the situation with the enlisted men, and the racism in the conclusions was only thinly veiled: “They were unreliable, and lacked capacity to understand instructions.” (When loading was ordered to resume weeks later, many of the sailors involved refused, leading to a mass court-martial. Those convicted of mutiny and sentenced to hard labor became known as the Port Chicago 50 and gained their release after the war and only following a public outcry.) 

So, in the space of seven months three eerily similar accidents wreaked havoc on the navy’s explosives supply lines. Nine ships were lost and more than 900 men died.

In March 1945 the navy’s Bureau of Ordnance issued a “circular” letter to relevant commands that emphasized how easy it was to explode “bomb type” ammunition accidentally “by impacts not severe enough to cause even slight rupture to container walls. Any idea that hazards due to ‘mere denting’ of containers must be thoroughly dispelled.” The letter went on to outline a series of revised loading practices intended to cut down on the risks of explosions, in particular how dangerous materials should be handled. After tightening up the rules the navy suffered no further cataclysms. 

Following his testimony to the board of investigation, Lieutenant Wallace returned to Arlington, Virginia, to reunite with his wife and son. For his next tour the navy sent him for duty in the communications unit of a carrier—exactly what he had sought all along. He spent the next ten months on station in the Pacific Theater, where he was promoted to commander. Wallace was discharged in late 1945 and when he returned home, he reclaimed his old post at the Bureau of Revenue (later renamed the Internal Revenue Service). He retired in 1974 and died in 2012 at the age of 97.

Mount Hood was not forgotten. In July 1968 a second ship named for the Oregon volcano was launched at Sparrows Point, Maryland. Designated AE-29, it was the fourth Kilauea-class ammunition ship to enter navy service. The second Mount Hood served in Vietnam in 1972, earning a campaign star, and served in the Gulf War in 1991. The ship was decommissioned in August 1999 and was sold for scrap in September 2013.

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.

Rounding the bend past the guard gate, I catch my breath when I spy the Greenbrier resort’s main building. The Georgian-style structure, wedding-cake white and six stories high, looms above flower-speckled grounds that cover 7,000 acres and include cottages, five golf courses, tennis courts, and hiking and bridle trails. This posh estate was established in 1778 in White Sulphur Springs, Virginia (now West Virginia), around a natural hot spring (though the main building wasn’t built until 1858 and since has been expanded). Five presidents stayed here before the Civil War and famous guests since then have included President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, and a whole roster of industrial barons—including Vanderbilts, Fords, and du Ponts—who regularly spent their summers here.

But one chapter of this majestic hotel’s history is lesser known—during World War II, diplomats from enemy Axis countries were interned here. And after they left, the hotel became an active wartime military hospital. There aren’t tons of artifacts left behind from those years, but you can discover traces of this fascinating history and hear some interesting stories. I’m here to learn about it from Dr. Robert S. Conte, who served as the Greenbrier’s historian for nearly 40 years. 

“Remember, Pearl Harbor was a big surprise,” Conte says as we sit at a big wooden desk in the Victorian Writing Room off the dramatic main lobby. I study the room’s gleaming wood trim, ornate mantel, and red carpeting, wondering what’s original and what’s not (only the wood trim, I later learn). “So, on December 7, there were pretty much fully functioning embassies in Washington,” which included those of Japan, Germany, and Italy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that these now-hostile diplomats and their families leave Washington within 48 hours for security reasons. The Greenbrier soon became a leading candidate to house the new adversaries. 

“The Greenbrier had several things going for it,” Conte explains. “It was on the railroad line—so get on a train in [D.C.’s] Union Station and you’re there within a few hours. It was isolated, and so could easily be guarded. And it was first-class,” which was imperative to ensure the reciprocal treatment of American diplomats being held overseas.

The State Department approached the Greenbrier’s management—it was owned by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad—on December 17, 1941, to propose a leasing plan. Within two days the resort closed to the public and the first group of 159 German and Hungarian diplomats and their families arrived on a secretly scheduled Pullman train from Washington. “They pulled up in the same train station that still exists across the street,” Conte says. Eventually 1,697 people from five different countries were interned here.

The plan was to keep the diplomats at the Greenbrier for up to eight weeks while prisoner negotiations between Washington and the enemy countries ensued. From the start, all internees were treated as regular guests (other than the presence of 50 U.S. Border Control guards keeping an eye on them), with the staff  of several hundred and quality of the resort’s service remaining unchanged. General Manager Loren Johnston ensured this, even though some employees may have wrestled with the idea of serving the enemy. “You may rest assured,” Johnston wrote his staff, “that our Government has a very good reason for everything they request us to do.… It is our duty to serve these people for the duration of their stay in the best possible manner.”

While the golf course and riding trails were off-limits for security reasons, the internees could roam the building and grounds, use the indoor swimming pool, play ping-pong in the main lobby, and shop in the lower-level stores. The Germans bought so much they needed two extra railcars when they left.

For the most part, the imprisoned guests were well-mannered, though one night the Germans celebrated Hitler’s birthday in the main dining room. “It got a little boisterous,” Conte says. “One of the staff said, ‘It’s a hell of a hail of heils.’” 

The Germans and Italians notoriously didn’t get along. “Of course, the Germans thought everyone was inferior,” Conte says. “There was tension.” So around April 1942, the Italians were moved to the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina, and Japanese diplomats, who had been interned at the nearby Homestead in Hot Springs, Virginia, were transferred to the Greenbrier.

But the Germans and Japanese got along even worse, leading to conflicts that tested the staff’s patience. In another note, GM Johnston appealed to his employees once again: “It must be remembered that this country is in a grievous war…and in order that we may properly perform our service we must…do our full duty.”

At long last, behind-the-scenes negotiations in Washington paid off with a prisoner exchange involving neutral countries, including Mozambique, Portugal, and Sweden. The last diplomat left the Greenbrier on July 9, 1942, and the resort reopened to the public.

Even before the last internee left, however, management was in negotiations for the Greenbrier’s next wartime duty. The U.S. Army wanted to use the main building as a hospital, and soon purchased the property for $3.3 million, well below the market value at the time. And so, on August 31, 1942, after a short, six-week summer season, the resort closed its heavy glass doors once again and began the challenging task of transforming itself from a resort–cum–internment–camp into a military hospital, to the tune of $2.2 million in renovation costs.

“This hospital is a major story,” Conte says. Originally, army officials planned to knock down all the interior walls, but former Greenbrier managers hired by the army reminded them that someday it would be a hotel again. “They figured out a plan where they could use the existing 500 guest rooms, converting them to hold 2,000 beds,” Conte says, though some walls needed to be razed to make room for a surgical area. The elegant lobby level remained more or less the same, except for an elevator shaft added off the ballroom for wheelchairs and gurneys.

Conte leads me through the richly decorated lobby-level rooms (courtesy of New York designer Dorothy Draper after the war), pointing out pieces of centuries-old furniture and vintage lithographs. The North Parlor was converted into a chapel, he says; the enormous crystal chandelier is original—and, according to one story, one of the Japanese internees left behind the gigantic Chinese screens that grace one wall. We walk onto the balcony just outside, overlooking the back of the hotel. A guard tower once rose above the fields in the distance.

The hospital’s first soldiers arrived on November 14, 1942, and over the next three years, more casualties came from Europe, North Africa, the Aleutian Islands, the Philippines, and elsewhere in the Pacific Theater. “For a lot of G.I.s, it was like, ‘Holy mackerel,’” Conte says of the soldiers’ response to their first view of the refined setting. “Clearly, when you see the building, you know it’s no army hospital. When you walked in, there was carpeting and wallpaper and, at the beginning, white tablecloths on the dining tables.” 

The hospital wasn’t formally dedicated until October 16, 1943, when it was given the official name Ashford General Hospital—after U.S. Army doctor Colonel Bailey K. Ashford, known for his early 20th-century malaria research. The press, however, dubbed it the “Shangri-La for Wounded Soldiers,” given the fact that G.I.s could use the resort’s championship golf course and other facilities. 

Between 1942 and 1946, 24,148 soldiers were admitted, and 11,346 operations performed. “They did vascular and neurosurgery here,” Conte says, “as well as rehabilitation.” General Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed twice at Ashford mid-war for some R&R, and was admitted as a patient once in late 1945 (for pneumonia, Conte believes). 

One big issue the military confronted was how to run such an enormous operation during a national labor shortage. Their solution? Build a prisoner-of-war camp at a nearby former Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Seventy-two Quonset huts housed 1,000 POWs, first Italians and then Germans, who had been captured overseas. They cooked meals, took care of the grounds, did laundry, and ran errands, among other tasks.

The last patients left in 1946, and so did the POWs. With the free labor gone, the military sold the Greenbrier back to the C&O. That, however, wasn’t the end of the Greenbrier’s military duties. Ten years later, the government was looking for a site for an emergency relocation center for the U.S. Congress in case of nuclear war.  “Another interesting story!” Dr. Conte says—but not one for today. 

By the early 1850s gold fever had spread across the American West. Southwestern Oregon Territory was no exception, as placer miners had descended on Coyote Creek in what today is Josephine County. Camps sprang up, and the goldfields remained a beehive of activity until gold strikes in neighboring Idaho in the 1860s drew the miners away. But the Coyote Creek diggings would experience a resurgence, and a town would be born of it.

After a few short years the excitement in Idaho faded. Miners returned to Coyote Creek to find 500 Chinese laborers working the old claims for 10 cents a day plus rice. The miners demanded their claims be returned, and the Chinese contractor yielded. Again, small camps sprang up, including one named Goldville.

By the late 1870s placer mining had given way to more efficient hydraulic mining, bringing a whole new flood of gold seekers. Among them was the Rev. William Ruble, who arrived with his wife, sons Bill and Schuyler and their families. The Rubles were Campbellites, aka Disciples of Christ, committed to restoring an early form of Christianity that adhered to strict doctrine. Disenchanted with the evils of society, they had taken to the Oregon Trail in 1853 and landed first in Salem, where they took up farming and the nursery business.

Over the span of a dozen years the Rev. Ruble bought up the majority of mines and claims in the area. He also set up mining businesses for his sons. William and son Schuyler invented the Ruble hydraulic elevator, designed to separate coarse rock from finer material in a placer mine.

The Rev. Ruble and sons set about improving Goldville and founded it as the town of Golden in 1890, the post office opening in 1896. After building the family residence and a Campbellite church, the Rubles added a school, a general store and other homes. Theirs was a monumental effort at civilizing the area, though some miners, particularly single ones, were less enthusiastic about the mores of its founders. The Campbellites did not permit the busy saloons and brothels of other prosperous camps, nor is there a record of the town ever hosting a dance. Miners seeking such pleasures had to travel to the town of Placer, a few miles south on Graves Creek, which did a booming business in sin.

Golden itself remained relatively small, never home to more than 200 or so people, with another several hundred in the surrounding area. Despite its dearth of entertainment, the town held on for nearly 30 years, only to fade as the ore faded in value. Perhaps sensing its decline and his own, the Rev. Ruble left in 1901, his sons and their families soon following his example. The founder of Golden died in Salem in 1905.

A year later Golden school reported three dozen students in attendance. But the exodus continued, and the post office shuttered in 1920. Mining dribbled along into the mid-20th century, but the town faded into a ghost.

Today the Campbellites’ quaint and attractive 1892 Golden Church still stands. Nearby is the Rubles’ house, also built in 1892. Also surviving is a 1904 general store, an outhouse and the remains of other outbuildings, including the carriage house.

There are no extant businesses in Golden, but the church is always open. Nearby is a small cemetery, though oddly enough no residents of Golden reside in it. In fact, no one has found eternal rest there, for the little graveyard sprouted up as a small-screen stage set. In 1972 the producers of the popular Western series Gunsmoke filmed an episode in Golden, one scene requiring a cemetery, and the rest is TV history. Visitors unaware of its short history still leave coins and trinkets atop the fictitious grave markers. The town and its pretend cemetery have since served as a backdrop for other Western productions.

In the 1990s concerned residents formed the Golden Coyote Wetlands to preserve the town and adjacent creek. Owned today by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, Golden is a state heritage site and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Those interested in a longer visit can stay in a nearby campground off Coyote Creek Road, which runs through town.

Despite its lack of what many miners considered “essentials,” Golden survived more than 130 years to earn protected status for coming generations. Most ghost towns of southern Oregon weren’t as fortunate, having fallen into ruin or been stamped out of existence beneath the ever rolling wheels of progress. 

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

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.

Jean Boulet’s first helicopter flight was almost his last.

It was September 21, 1947, and the 26-year-old Boulet was at the Camden, New Jersey, headquarters of Helicopter Air Transport, the world’s first commercial helicopter operator. He had earned an engineering degree from the École Polytechnique in Paris and had been a member of the French air force during World War II. After the liberation of France, the air force sent Boulet to the United States for fighter pilot training. He returned to France in 1946, but the war had ended and “there were many pilots and not enough planes,” Boulet told the author in an interview in the 1980s. “I didn’t think there was too much of a future for someone who had not flown during the war, so I left the air force.” 

Despite the glut of former military pilots on the market and his relative lack of experience in the air, Boulet remained determined to make flying his career. “I started looking for civilian flying jobs and received a proposal from SNCASE [Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautique du Sud-Est] which was just beginning to develop helicopters,” he said. “I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do the job because I couldn’t fly helicopters, but they said nobody knew anything about flying them.”         

SNCASE sent Boulet to Helicopter Air Transport, which also ran a training program for pilots, and that’s how he ended up in New Jersey and in the copilot seat of a Sikorsky S-51. 

“The first day I saw a helicopter, I had my first ride and my first accident,” Boulet recalled. “The instructor did not have a lot of experience, and at the end of the flight the helicopter started to rock back and forth very quickly. I thought he was doing a nice demonstration of the helicopter’s agility, but he had really lost control. We crashed, rolled over, the blades were broken, the aircraft was a mess, but luckily, we were only shaken up a little. This experience gave me a mistrust of this very strange flying machine.” 

Despite this rather dramatic and nearly catastrophic introduction to the helicopter, Boulet would soon become the primary helicopter test pilot for SNCASE, which later became Sud Aviation and then the helicopter division of Aérospatiale. As these companies grew into one of the world’s leading helicopter manufacturers, Boulet was at the controls for test flights of the SE-3101, Alouette I, II and III, Frelon, Super Frelon, Lama and Puma helicopters. He helped define the role of helicopter test pilots in the development of new aircraft. “We suggest and request modifications and we decide the way a helicopter must be flown,” he said. “We request things such as an increase in power, which we did for the Alouette II.” 

Boulet also set the world’s record for helicopter altitude three times. His third record-setting altitude flight almost ended in disaster after the engine of his Lama flamed out during a descent through a thick layer of clouds. As he always did, Boulet managed to find a way to survive.

After the crash landing in New Jersey, Boulet was able to fly 10 hours in another Helicopter Air Transport helicopter before the company went bankrupt and ceased operations. He completed his helicopter pilot training in Scotland and returned to France and SNCASE, which was ready to test fly its first helicopter, the SE-3101, in June 1948. The SE-3101 was an experimental helicopter designed by German aviation pioneer Henrich Focke of Focke-Wulf fame. An updated version of the Focke-Achgelis Fa 223, it had twin tail rotors, an uncovered fuselage and was powered by an 85-horsepower Mathis engine. After months of tie-down tests, the helicopter was ready for its first flight.

Another pilot, who had experience with autogiros, was going to make the first test flight. He was a bit heavier than Boulet and the underpowered aircraft was unable to lift off the ground. “So, the manager told me to try because I was lighter,” Boulet said. “I was young and thin and was able to take off and hold it off the ground.” This was “the first helicopter to be flown in France after the end of the war,” said Charles Marchetti in Vertical Flight: The Age of the Helicopter, a book published by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1984. Marchetti was a chief engineer and the Aérospatiale helicopter division general manager. 

The SE-3101 flew a total of about 20 hours over the next two years but did not go into production due to several stability and control problems. It was able to achieve “satisfactory” forward flight without too much instability or vibration, according to Marchetti, but “during hovering and approach or forward flight near the ground the instability of the aircraft became obvious.”

The company’s first production helicopter was the SE-3130 Alouette II, which was also the first production helicopter with a gas-turbine engine instead of the more conventional piston-driven engine. The first flight took place on March 12, 1955, with Boulet at the controls. “[W]e had a few problems to solve, but we were able to solve them by working very hard because we knew we had to catch up with the American industry which had started production in 1944,” he said. Eventually the company manufactured more than 1,300 SE-3130s. 

Boulet was SNCASE’s only test pilot in 1955, which was problematic. “The company said you cannot be the only one because if you are ill, we cannot fly,” Boulet said. “So, we engaged more pilots, three or four in 1956 and 1957.” The number of test pilots grew over the next few decades. “When I was chief test pilot, I always had control and would not do things I did not think were safe,” Boulet said. “And when the other pilots flew, I always signed the flight order. I only lost one pilot. He was doing a demo flight in Germany and ran into a cable. It was the only bad accident we had. We had some crashes, but not any other bad crashes.” 

Boulet first attempted to break the helicopter altitude record on June 6, 1955, in the Alouette II, just three months after the aircraft’s first flight. The existing record was 24,524 feet, set by U.S. Army warrant officer Billy Wester in a Sikorsky S-59. 

The higher a helicopter ascends into the thin air at high altitudes, the more difficult it becomes for the engine to maintain power and the rotor blades to maintain lift. Yet Boulet said the flight, during which he reached a record 26,932 feet, “was not very difficult.” This is an example of his modesty, as the flight was, in fact, quite difficult indeed. 

He took off from the Buc airfield, about 10 miles southwest of Paris. “I just had to apply the pitch and climb,” he said. “But there was a problem with cockpit icing and I couldn’t see too well. Then, when I started to descend, I had a flame-out and couldn’t restart the engine.” Boulet was forced to autorotate, a technique where the pilot disengages the main rotor from the engine so the blades can be rotated by aerodynamic forces only, without any mechanical assistance. Autorotation will slow a descent but won’t stop it. “There was a strong wind that took me very far from the field I took off from, but I was able to land.” Boulet’s record was broken in December 1957 when U.S. Army captain James Bowman reached 30,335 feet in a Cessna YH-41 Seneca helicopter.

On June 13, 1958, Boulet began heading skyward in another Alouette II, determined to regain the helicopter altitude record for Sud Aviation and France. He climbed quickly when “suddenly I heard a loud bang and the engine stopped,” he said. Once again, he had to autorotate. “When I landed, we discovered that the casing of the engine had broken completely in two.” Despite the broken engine, Boulet had reached 36,027 feet and reclaimed the altitude record.

In the meantime, SNCASE merged with SNCASO (Société Nationale des Constructions Aéronautique du Sud-Ouest) to form Sud Aviation, and Marchetti began designing the larger, seven-seat Alouette III. The helicopter made its first flight on February 28, 1959. Boulet was at the controls and flight engineer Robert Malus was also aboard. Marchetti reported that the new helicopter flew beautifully and that Boulet managed to land a fully loaded Alouette III on top of France’s Mont Blanc, an altitude of 15,777 feet. “In November 1960, on the occasion of a presentation in India, he landed with a passenger and 250 kilograms (551 pounds) of cargo in the Himalayas at an altitude of 6,004 meters (19,698 feet). At that time, this was an unprecedented feat.”

Sud Aviation’s next aircraft was the Frelon, which was the forerunner of the more successful SE321 Super Frelon. A long list of problems was discovered in the early test flights of the Frelon, Boulet reported. “This helicopter had three engines which was something very new for us and we had a lot of problems, with incidents on almost every test flight. Once we had a severe instability with the helicopter. I was just about to tell the crew to jump out, but then I was able to gain control at the very last minute.” 

On another test flight, problems with faulty servocontrols almost caused a crash. “It was not possible to hold the stick because it was moving completely to the left, and I could not pull it back, no matter how hard I tried,” Boulet said. “Finally, with the help of my copilot, I was able to pull the stick back and gain control. This was not a very fun test program, and the crew was always tense during test flights.” 

Test flights for the Super Frelon began in December 1962 and were a lot more successful than those for the Frelon. With Boulet at the controls, the Super Frelon set a new speed record for helicopters of 350 kilometers an hour (217.5 miles per hour).

To meet the French army’s new requirement for a medium-sized, all-weather helicopter, Sud Aviation began developing what would become the SA 330 Puma. The prototype made its first flight on April 15, 1965. As usual, Boulet was flying and, of course, there were problems, as there are in the initial test flights of almost every prototype aircraft. There were a lot of vibrations “that made it very unpleasant for the pilot and crew,” Boulet said. It didn’t really make it harder to fly, but it was difficult to see the instruments because of all the shaking.” 

Marchetti and his team solved the shaking problem by developing a suspension system that isolated the gearbox from the rest of the aircraft. It was called the “barbeque system” because the structure resembled a barbeque grill. Sud Aviation ended up manufacturing about 685 Puma helicopters.           

In 1970 Sud-Aviation became Aérospatiale and in quick succession designed three new, single-turbine helicopters: the Gazelle, Écureuil and Dauphin. The Gazelle had two unique features: fiberglass rotor blades and the Fenestron design in which the anti-torque tail rotor was surrounded by a circle of material instead of being completely exposed. Boulet especially appreciated the Fenestron, which he referred to as “the fan-in-fin tail rotor.” “I had a bad experience at the beginning of the Alouette II test program,” he said. “I was at the controls with the aircraft on the ground, and a man who was not noticed by the mechanics walked head-first into the tail rotor. It was horrible and there was blood everywhere and pieces everywhere. I was traumatized by this and lived in fear that it could happen again. Because of this, I loved the Fenestron and worked very hard to make it successful.” 

Boulet was not as taken with the fiberglass rotor blades that had replaced the traditional metal blades, at least initially. “At high speed we had a lot of flutter, and this, of course, meant a lot of vibration,” he said of the early test flights with the composite blades. “This [vibration] was so bad that I thought the helicopter was going to break into pieces. The stick was moving all over the cockpit, but happily, after a few seconds, I was able to recover with the help of the copilot.” 

Aérospatiale’s SA 315B Lama was a redesigned and more powerful version of the Alouette II that was intended to fly at high altitudes and in hot temperatures for the Indian army. It was first manufactured in 1971 and Boulet decided this was the perfect helicopter in which to set a new altitude record. To make that possible, it was necessary to lighten the aircraft by removing all possible instruments, taking out the passenger seats and replacing the standard fuel tank with a smaller one. Engineers modified the turbine Turbomeca engine to increase power by about 6 percent. After Boulet started the engine, mechanics removed the battery and starter motor to further lighten the aircraft.  

Boulet and the Lama leaped into the air on June 21, 1972, from an airfield near Marseille. Trouble started almost immediately. “During the climb, there were some clouds, but I was able to climb through a hole in them,” he said. “But all the time I was worried about my descent.” 

Boulet was able to reach the stunning altitude of 40,820 feet and smash the previous record of 36,027 feet he had set in 1958. However, his worries on the way up proved prescient on the way down when Boulet couldn’t find the hole in the clouds for his descent. “My cockpit was completely frozen, and visibility was very bad. And also, there was some mist on the ground, which made it very hard to see the ground and tell how high up I was.” 

As if these weren’t enough problems, as he began to descend through the clouds, his engine failed. Without the generator and battery, which had been removed, he had no way to restart the engine. This meant Boulet would have to perform the world’s highest and most dangerous autorotation, without the help of the horizon indicator and compass, which had also been removed. “So, I had to go through 13,000 feet of clouds without instruments,” Boulet said. “The only way for me not to go upside down was to watch for the brightness of the sun. I could barely see where the sun was by looking for the bright spot in the clouds, and I tried to keep this spot above me.” 

Using every bit of the experience he had gained over the years, Boulet managed to keep his helicopter upright. After he broke through the clouds, the warmer air below melted the ice from his cockpit and windshield so Boulet was finally able to see where he and the Lama were going. He landed safely after a descent of about 25 minutes. 

This was Boulet’s third and final helicopter altitude record, and it has yet to be broken. 

Boulet remained Aérospatiale’s chief test pilot until he retired in 1975, ending one of the most illustrious careers of any helicopter or fixed-wing test pilot. “The rest of us were like members of the orchestra, which Boulet was the star soloist who could take your breath away,” said Claude Picard, a helicopter pilot and a member of Aérospatiale’s public relations department.

“I loved my job; it was the only thing I wanted to be doing, and I did everything possible to reduce the risks,” Boulet said, adding that there were times when he was frightened. “I remember a few times when I was scared, especially in the days of the Frelon. I put on some warm clothes because when you are scared, you are shivering.” There were also a few perks available to the chief test pilot that helped compensate for the occasional terror. Boulet said that he often flew a helicopter he was testing to his nearby home to have lunch with his wife. And, from time to time, he was able to “borrow” a helicopter for a weekend of skiing. “This was because in France at that time we had very liberal civil aviation regulations and you could go anywhere provided you had permission of the owner,” he said. 

In the years after he retired, Boulet kept busy skiing, lecturing and writing. He also wrote History of the Helicopter as Told by Its Pioneers 1907-1956, which he published in 1984. Boulet died on February 13, 2011. He was 90. 

Once Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, the Germans moved into the vacuum. Rome was declared an “open city” by the Italian government, meaning it was unoccupied and off limits to attack, but Germany rushed in troops for an occupation that lasted for nine months and subjected the citizens to the brutality of Nazi rule for the first time in the war. The Nazis rounded up Jews and sent them to their deaths in concentration camps, violently enforced curfews, and attempted to crush any opposition.

A story about Italian resistance to German occupation, Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) is recognized as the first classic film of what has become known as the neorealist movement. Shot in the city after the Germans had left but before the war was over, the stark black-and-white film remains powerful even as it nears  its 80th anniversary. Wrote novelist Virginia Baily for The Guardian newspaper in 2015, “It was one of the most visceral, gut-wrenching cinematic experiences of my life and I have carried images and sounds from it—the old ladies stalling the Gestapo while the resistance hero escapes across the roofs, the martial music playing as the German regiment marches down a deserted street, the tortured hero slumped in a chair, the priest in his black robes—with me ever since.” 

The film opens as those German soldiers march through Rome to make a nighttime raid on a downtrodden apartment building. They seek Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), a communist and a central figure in the resistance. The apartment dwellers do what they can to divert the soldiers, and Manfredi escapes across the rooftops. While the Germans search, they intercept a call on the communal telephone from Manfredi’s sometime mistress, Marina (Maria Michi), an actress who quickly hangs up when she realizes something is amiss.

One of the building’s residents is Pina (Anna Magnani), a plain-speaking widow with a son, Marcello. She is pregnant, and on the night the Germans arrive she is planning to get married the next day to Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), a soft-spoken printer. Her spiritual adviser is the priest Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), who also serves as a central figure in the resistance.

In the meantime, the German Major Bergmann (Harry Feist) plots with the manipulative Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti) to stamp out the resistance and capture Manfredi. On Bergmann’s orders the Germans conduct another raid on the apartment building. This time they herd all the residents outside. When Don Pietro hears that one of the children from the building has a hidden stash of bombs and guns, he bluffs his way inside under the guise of giving last rites to a bedridden old man. He manages to hide the weapons before the Germans find them. 

Outside, Pina sees the Germans taking away Francesco. Frantic, she breaks free, and dashes down the street in pursuit of the truck carrying away her fiancé. The merciless Germans gun her down as her son watches. She dies in the street, cradled by Don Pietro. Partisans attack the truck convoy with the prisoners and Francesco manages to escape.

Bergmann and Ingrid have another tool they can use to find Manfredi: Marina. The cynical actress, angry with Manfredi and addicted to her creature comforts—which include drugs that Ingrid provides her—tells the Germans where they can find the resistance leader. The Germans descend as Manfredi and Don Pietro are bringing an Austrian deserter to safety and arrest the three men on the street. Bergmann forces the priest to watch as he has Manfredi brutally tortured, but neither the communist nor the Catholic priest divulge any information. Manfredi dies during his ordeal and Bergmann has the priest executed. Tied to a chair and praying for God to forgive his executioners, Don Pietro is murdered while the children from the apartment look on, horrified, before they trudge back into town, damaged in ways we can only imagine.

Rome, Open City was something of a change of direction for director Rossellini, who earlier in the war had made films for producer Vittorio Mussolini, the son of Il Duce. Even before the Germans had been forced out of Rome, Rossellini had begun thinking about making a movie about the resistance. He wanted “to show things exactly as they were,” he said. One of his collaborators on the story was another up-and-coming Italian filmmaker named Federico Fellini. Rossellini shot the film with little money, on location, and with film stock he scrounged—or even stole—from whatever sources were at hand, including cast-off snippets from other photographers. (The director said he stole stock from the offices of the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes news organization.) Most of the actors he used (with the notable exceptions of Magnani and Fabrizi) were nonprofessionals. He even used German prisoners-of-war as extras, including the soldier Pina slaps before making her ill-fated break. The result was a fiction film that looked and felt more like a documentary—in fact, the distributor Rossellini had obtained reneged on the deal, saying Rome, Open City wasn’t a “real movie.” But the film found a distributor in the United States and became a success, launching Rossellini’s international career and putting Italian neorealism—a genre embraced by other directors like Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica—on the cinematic map. 

Center stage in a northern Colorado museum is an unmistakable symbol of the West. Faint lettering on the driver’s box of the historic stagecoach reads U.S. Mail, attesting to its original purpose, while covering nearly every square inch of its woodwork are scrawled signatures, hinting at its raucous second career in Wild West shows. Among the signatures is that of down-home humorist Will Rogers.

While it can prove challenging to chisel facts from Western lore, this coach and its storied past endures, thanks to Frank C. Miller Jr. The sharpshooter turned Wild West showman once described how he acquired the coach:

“In the late ’80s and ’90s it was on the ‘Bill’ show (meaning the Buffalo Bill circus) on his many tours, but as it became so old that it would not stand up under the hard knocks required of ‘Indian holdups,’ it was traded for a more modern model. I fought hundreds of Indian battles from the top of the coach myself on the shows. European royalty rode in the coach, as well as Teddy Roosevelt and President [William Howard] Taft, and I believe you will still find Will Rogers’ name written on the back.…When the new coach was put into use, I bought the old coach from Cody and sent it home and have owned it ever since.”

Built in 1874 by the Abbot-Downing Co. of Concord, N.H., the light coach is more correctly called a mud wagon. A basic, unglamorous conveyance, it was made to transport passengers and mail over rough-hewn trails. Given the lack of a paper trail tying the wagon to either Miller or Cody, it is difficult to verify Frank’s story. He may have glossed over the facts, but a kernel or two of truth remains.

A renowned marksman, trick shooter and roper, Miller claimed to have toured with Cody in Europe, though which tour is unknown. As he was 40 years younger than Buffalo Bill, Frank probably would have been too young to join any but one of Cody’s last European tours, between 1902 and ’06. The mud wagon would have been retired by that time, as period advertising featured the Wild West’s more elegant Concord stage, with its higher profile and oval body. Dubbed the “Deadwood Stagecoach,” the latter is on exhibit at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyo.

Franklin Carl Miller Jr. was the third of four children born to immigrant parents. His Danish father and Swedish mother had independently followed the promise of gold to the north-central Colorado mining settlement of Black Hawk, where they married in 1876, later moving to the growing frontier town of Fort Collins, where Frank was born on May 11, 1886. The Millers prospered, running a saloon, a mercantile store and, later, a garage.

Taking a page from Cody, showman Frank became a skilled self-promoter. Local newspapers are peppered with notices of his performances, dinner guests and encounters with notable figures, including a visit to Cody’s foster son, Johnny Baker. Miller worked for Zack Mulhall’s Wild West show and headlined with the Irwin Brothers’ Cheyenne Frontier Days Wild West, which billed him as the “Most Marvelous Marksman in the United States.” When that show closed in 1917, Frank bought a ranch northwest of Fort Collins and married Florence “Peggy” Leedle, a gal who loved the spotlight as much as he did. She performed on horseback, crooning songs, and they adopted a son, Franklin, who went by “Teddy.” Naming their spread Trail’s End, the Millers developed it into a dude ranch, offering fishing, Western entertainment and a menagerie of trained wild animals, including bears and wolves. Newspapers announced regular visits from such celebrities as humorist Rogers, circus performer and actor Fred Stone, sharpshooter Captain A.H. Hardy and novelist Rex Beach.

Miller held performances both on the ranch and in neighboring towns. Central to his show was the mud wagon, which he rode in parades and holdup re-enactments. When the wagon deteriorated, he had it loaded onto a flatbed trailer and performed from atop that.

Just when his show seemed to peak, Miller’s life went into a tailspin. First, wife Peggy left him. Next, at the tail end of the Great Depression, he lost Trail’s End to bankruptcy. Finally, the unthinkable happened. In 1946 son Teddy, who’d joined the Army, was killed in a motor pool fire while stationed in occupied Berlin. He was 19.

It was at that low point the mud wagon, among Teddy’s favorite family keepsakes, took on new meaning. As a memorial to his son and the six other soldiers killed in the fire, a grief-stricken Miller presented the coach to the city. It was initially housed in a small purpose-built brick building with a viewing window.

Today, most of the 150-plus visible signatures on the coach are difficult to read or trace, and many bearing earlier dates are questionable. While there is no way to verify the validity of Rogers’ signature on the upper left rear panel, neither can it be discounted. Miller and the humorist certainly knew each other. Most other signatures appear to be those of tourists or perhaps Trail’s End visitors or show hands. Most date from between the 1910s and ’40s and represent citizens of states across the West and Midwest.

Miller lived out his life in Fort Collins’ Linden Hotel, across the street from the red sandstone building that once housed the family saloon and store. In exchange for his room and board he painted Western scenes and visited schools, regaling young listeners with stories of the Old West and his encounters with Cody and Rogers. On Nov. 21, 1953, Miller, 67, died of a heart attack.

In the mid-1990s Miller’s memorial mud wagon underwent conservation. It has since been housed at the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, where it symbolizes the many facets of the Old West. With its ties to mail and passenger service, Wild West performances, and perhaps even showman Cody and humorist Rogers, the mud wagon has gained the celebrity Miller had long envisioned. 

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

A historian with a brush and a palette, David Wright considers it his mission to depict America’s frontier era with precision. “We historical artists march to a different drummer,” explains Wright [davidwrightart.com] from his home studio in Gallatin, Tenn. “We tell a story. It’s our obligation to future generations to paint our subjects with as much accuracy as possible.”

Wright’s insistence on authenticity has found him riding Wyoming’s Wind River Range on horseback and hunting moose on Canada’s Aulneau Peninsula dressed in brain-tanned buckskins and bearing a frontiersman’s guns and accoutrements. “Such experiences enable me to see things from a much closer perspective than if I were just using past masters like Alfred Jacob Miller, George Catlin and Karl Bodmer as references,” he explains. “Landscapes, rifles, bead and quillwork or Indian tattoos—I want it all to be historically dead-on.” His quest draws him to museums and archives, while his home reference library is also extensive.

“The cliché ‘The more I learn, the less I know’ really is true,” he says. “As long as I am a student of history, I’ll never quit learning.”

Rosine, Ken.—the birthplace of Bill Monroe, the “Father of Bluegrass”—was a country hamlet when Wright was born there in 1942. Idyllic remembrances of flint ridges, cornfields and tobacco rows flood his memories. “My first interests were hunting and fishing and have been all my life.” Always he drew, aided by his mother’s creativity.

“Mom would lay a sheet of paper on her lap and draw,” Wright recalls, then she would take his hand and trace the sketches. At age 9 he won a local art show. After high school he took classes at a Nashville advertising school, then studied watercolor in Italy. The latter move, ironically, kindled his interest in the frontier when he spied a 1777 French musket for sale, bought it and fired it, the flintlock’s smoke and flash awakening latent nostalgia.

By 1962 Wright was back Stateside, drawing for the Nashville Banner and Nashville Tennessean until drafted into service in Vietnam. In 1964 and ’65 he flew more than 100 missions as the door gunner on Bell UH-1 Iroquois (aka “Huey”) helicopters. While in-country he sketched everyone from schoolchildren to Montagnard highlanders and soldiers—though never combat scenes. “Life changes your outlook on things,” the artist says.

On returning home, Wright resumed commercial artwork while freelancing on the side. He experienced another awakening when he joined the rugged fraternity of the American Mountain Men, further sparking his interest in the fur trade as he dressed the part and learned frontier skills.

“Utilizing the day’s firearms and tools gives me an edge in seeing what the lives of our frontier forebears were like,” he explains. “I know what it’s like to build a cabin, split rails, hunt with a flintlock and be freezing in buckskins. I know how wool feels in a snowstorm and how wet leather clings to you.”

Wright’s first mountain man portrait, for Gray Stone Press, sold out. Encouraged, he shifted his focus to portrayals of heroic frontier figures. By 1978 he was following his own muses and garnering national acclaim.

The Eiteljorg Museum, in Indianapolis, has devoted an expansive retrospective to Wright’s work and recognized him with several awards. The Booth Western Art Museum, in Cartersville, Ga., named him an artist of excellence. His art also hangs in Nashville’s Tennessee State Museum and the visitor center of Kentucky’s Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. The Hamilton Collection commissioned Wright to render a series of four collector plates depicting American Indian women. “It is pleasing to be accepted in such a widespread market,” says the artist.

Still, every season finds Wright in the woods, sometimes alone, sometimes with kindred spirits, reliving some footnote of frontier history to preserve in photos, sketches and mental images to inform his paintings. “Every day is a blessing,” says the artist turned mountain man. “Make the most of it.”

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

Commandos on Wings” ran the headline of the article in Washington’s Evening Star on November 1, 1942. The subhead read, “They are Uncle Sam’s glider troops, who drop silently out of the sky, seize airfields, blow up bridges and ammunition dumps.” The article included a quote from Brig. Gen. James Doolittle, hero of his eponymous air raid on Japan the previous April. “Don’t forget the boys without motors,” he said. “They will be the spearhead of future Airborne attacks.” 

Yet a decade later the U.S. Army removed gliders from its arsenal. They had been rendered obsolete by the evolution of the helicopter. Helicopters, not gliders, were the spearhead of future airborne attacks.  

The combat life of the military glider was a short but adventurous one. Germany pioneered the use of gliders in warfare and was the first to deploy them in combat, using 41 gliders to capture Belgium’s Eben-Emael fortress on May 10, 1940, along with three bridges over the Albert Canal the fort protected. The Allies were impressed enough to initiate their own glider program. In the ensuing five years the Allies used gliders in some of the most famous operations of the war, including the invasions of Sicily, France and Germany. The engineless craft also served in the challenging terrain of the Burmese jungle.

However, their contributions, as well as the bravery of the men who piloted the craft and those who trained as glider infantry, have not received the recognition they deserve. “It has just been overlooked,” reflected Flight Officer George E. Buckley of the 434th Troop Carrier Group, 74th Troop Carrier Squadron, in a 2007 documentary entitled Silent Wings. “People never heard of them. People to this day, that were old enough during World War II to know about things, say, ‘Gliders? I didn’t know they used gliders.’”     

America came late to the concept of airborne warfare. It wasn’t until May 1, 1939, that the U.S. chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, sent a memo to Maj. Gen. George Lynch, his chief of infantry, entitled “Air Infantry.” Lynch’s instructions were “to make a study for the purpose of determining the desirability of organizing, training, and conducting tests of a small detachment of air infantry with a view to ascertaining whether or not our Army should contain a unit or units of this nature.” 

Lynch replied swiftly and positively, concluding that air infantry had practicable uses, but other priorities sidelined the project until after war in Europe erupted in September 1939. In January 1940 Marshall made the development of an air infantry a priority, and to lead its formation and development he assigned Major William C. Lee, a veteran of World War I. Today Lee is referred to as the “Father of the American Airborne,” and it is said that when the 101st Airborne Division jumped into Normandy in the early hours of June 6, 1944, they did so with a yell of “Bill Lee.” But Lee was also influential in the evolution of America’s military glider.

In his seminal book Paratrooper!, Gerard Devlin—an airborne veteran of Korea and Vietnam—wrote that for Lee the glider “represented a means of delivering troop reinforcements and supplies to his parachute troops once they had landed in remote areas. Equally important, the glider was an aerial vehicle for the delivery of large caliber weapons and light wheeled vehicles.” 

The first step toward reaching that goal was to select a manufacturer from the several prototypes that were being tested at Wright Field in Ohio. The model chosen was the Waco CG-4A  glider, which was 49 feet in length and had a wingspan of 84 feet. Its load-carrying capacity was 4,000 pounds, which equated to two pilots and 13 combat soldiers.

Actual gliders weren’t available until October 1942, so in the interim the recruits in the glider training program had to improvise. Larry Kubale was a newly qualified flight officer when he volunteered for gliders in the middle of 1942. “At that point they didn’t have anything other than sail planes,” he recalled. “Cargo gliders weren’t even invented at that point. After about seven weeks of that stuff, I was an instructor in sail planes, and had about sixteen students in four classes.” 

The pilots underwent glider training at one of three centers in Missouri, Nebraska and North Carolina, and by the end of the war 10,000 of them had qualified. The 88th Infantry Airborne Battalion became the United States’ first glider infantry unit in May 1942. Later designated the 88th Glider Infantry Regiment, it was the first of 11 such regiments that served in the war. It wasn’t a volunteer system. Soldiers were assigned to glider regiments and, to their chagrin, they didn’t get the $50 dollars a month extra pay that paratroopers received on account of their hazardous duty. There were other resentments. “We weren’t even allowed jump boots,” recalled Ernest Platz of the 327th Glider Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. “It was a point of honor that the glider men could not use parachute jump boots.” 

The glider men finally received their jump boots when they were shipped overseas, and in time they earned the respect of the paratroopers as well. “I talked with the paratroopers,” said Platz. “They would never go into combat under the gliders because if there’s a plane that was hit, they had a chance to get out by their parachute. But if we were hit, that was it. You had no way, except to crash land. So we got a little respect from them.” Eventually, in July 1944, after representations had been made to Congress, the glider men began receiving the same pay as the  paratroopers did. 

By that time the glider men had proved their courage and effectiveness.

The Allies’ first major glider operation of the war was codenamed Ladbroke. It was an Anglo-American mission launched on the night of July 9-10, 1943. The destination was the eastern coast of Sicily, where 1,600 men of the 1st Airlanding Brigade were to land ahead of the main invasion force and seize several key objectives, including the Ponte Grande bridge just outside Syracuse.

A total of 144 gliders, 136 of them CG-4As, took off from Tunisia, towed by C-47 Dakota tug planes of the American 51st Troop Carrier Wing as well a handful of RAF Albemarle bombers.

The glider pilots were all British. One of them was Staff Sgt. Alec Waldron of the 1st Battalion Glider Pilot Regiment. To his consternation, Waldron found himself behind the controls of an American Waco CG-4A, known to the British as the CG-4 Hadrian. Waldron had trained on a British Airspeed Horsa. “The Hadrian glider was quite a different aircraft to the Horsa,” he reflected. “It had a lower wing loading, carried about half the load—15 people—had a flat angle of approach, lift spoilers, small flaps and was certainly not ideal from a military point of view.” For the Ladbroke operation, the gliders would cast off at pre-determined heights and simply “glide in more or less dead stick to the landing zones.”

Waldron feared the operation “would be a disaster,” and he was right. In many respects it was doomed from the outset. The crews of the C-47s were inadequately trained and, in some cases, of inferior quality to the airmen assigned to bomber and fighter squadrons. It was a similar story for British glider pilots with virtually no experience of night flying and little opportunity to familiarize themselves with the CG-4A glider. 

As the aerial armada sighted Sicily, the glider tugs began ascending to 6,000 feet, the release altitude for the gliders. Simultaneously vessels of the Allied invasion force spotted them and opened fire in the belief they were Axis aircraft. Confusion, panic and inexperience resulted in most of the glider pilots cutting themselves loose prematurely. Ninety of the 144 gliders crashed into the sea south of Sicily, and hundreds of men drowned.

Waldron’s glider came down in the sea about 400 yards from the shore, enabling the soldiers inside his craft to swim to the beach. “I couldn’t swim,” he said. “I floated on a wing…they were machine-gunning us down a searchlight beam and I got a ricochet through my thigh.” 

After Waldron spent about seven hours in the water an Allied vessel picked him up and transported him to a hospital in Malta.  

Paul Gale from Brooklyn was a navigator in one of the C-47s and recalled that none of the crews had been trained properly for such a hazardous night mission. Their instructions were to release the gliders 3,000 yards from the shore but, he reflected, “How the devil do you know when you are 3,000 yards from shore at night without any instrumentation?” Nor were there Pathfinders ashore to light up the landing zones. “There is no fixed point of reference,” he said. “You can see the shoreline maybe, but we had never had any practice.” 

Nonetheless 12 gliders did land close to the target, with 83 British soldiers, enough to seize the Ponte Grande bridge.

Overall, however, and certainly in terms of lives lost, the Sicilian operation was a failure, a result of inexperience and a poor chain of command. But in March 1944 another Anglo-American glider operation provided an audacious example of how gliders could transport special forces behind enemy lines. 

The Chindits were a British unit raised in 1942 by the unorthodox general Orde Wingate. His second-in-command was Michael Calvert, nicknamed “Mad Mike.” The first Chindits operation was a long-range reconnaissance patrol behind Japanese lines in Burma in early 1943. A year later their task was to carry out guerrilla raids against the enemy in Northern Burma to support General Joseph Stilwell’s major offensive there. The Chindits would use CG-4A gliders towed by C-47s of Colonel Phil Cochran’s 1st Air Commando Group to penetrate deep into the Burmese jungle. Sixty-two gliders took off from Lalaghat on March 5 and 35 of them covered the 400 miles to the target. Calvert was aboard one of the gliders and recalled the moment the tow line was cut. “The Dakota’s engines faded away and a tremendous silence enveloped us, weird and frightening after the sound of the familiar and comforting machinery that had carried us through the air,” he wrote. He glanced at the glider pilot, a gum-chewing American named Lees, “who sat relaxed as if driving a Cadillac on a wide American motorway.” 

Three hundred and fifty Chindits landed safely, along with a bulldozer brought in to clear the landing strip of glider detritus. Over the next few days Dakota troop carriers made scores of landings, bringing in 9,000 men, 1,500 mules and 250 tons of equipment. Wingate issued an order of the day in which he declared the Chindits “are inside the enemy’s guts.” Calvert concurred. “Thanks to the Air Force boys we were, indeed, inside the enemy’s guts and it was now up to us to start giving him a stomach-ache.” 

The British and Americans heeded the costly errors of Operation Ladbroke in Sicily as they planned for Operation Overlord, the invasion of northern France in early 1944. Tug and glider pilots received more thorough training, and the wings and fuselage of the gliders were painted in black and white stripes so Allied naval gunners could identify them.

In addition to the nearly 300 CG-4A gliders available for Overlord, there were more than 500 British Horsa gliders, which could carry two pilots and 30 fully equipped troops. The plywood Horsa was also considered more maneuverable on account of its large “barn-door” flaps that made it easier for pilots to execute steep descents onto smaller landing zones. The Horsa had a tricycle undercarriage for takeoff. Once airborne, the pilot would jettison the wheels and use a sprung skid under the fuselage for landing. It had a hinged nose to make loading and unloading of cargo easier, as well as a reinforced floor and double nose wheels to support vehicle weight. Despite the improvements over the CG-4As, the British gave their Horsa a nickname: the “silent coffin.” 

The landing precision of the Horsa was brilliantly demonstrated at 16 minutes past midnight on June 6 when Major John Howard and 180 men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry glided to earth beside two small bridges over the River Orne (Ranville Bridge) and Caen Canal (Bénouville Bridge) in Normandy. The operation was codenamed “Deadstick” and beforehand its pilots had practiced landings in southern England. One thing they concluded was that 28—not 30—soldiers was the correct payload capacity based on each fully-equipped man weighing 240 pounds.

One factor was left to luck: the number and location of the Nazis’ anti-glider obstacles, dubbed “Rommel’s Asparagus.” These were thick poles sunk into the ground at intervals of 15 to 40 feet and intended to spear unfortunate gliders.

Howard was in the lead glider, which was piloted by Staff Sgt. Jim Wallwork. At seven minutes past midnight, Wallwork released the nylon towline from the tug aircraft. For the next seven minutes he piloted the glider down from 6,000 feet to just over 500, reducing the airspeed as he did so from 160 mph to 110 mph. As he approached the landing zone, Wallwork shouted over his shoulder to the men sitting in rows along both sides of the fuselage. “Brace!” The 28 soldiers linked arms and raised their legs to reduce the risk of breaking them during the landing. “The look on his face was one that one could never forget,” said Howard of Wallwork as the glider came in to land. “I could see those damn great footballs of sweat across his forehead and all over his face.” 

When the glider hit French soil it was more a crash than a landing. The soldiers crawled out of the glider just 30 yards from Bénouville Bridge. Lieutenant Den Brotheridge was shot dead at the head of his men, the first Allied fatality of D-Day, but within 10 minutes the target had been secured.  

Late on D-Day, after tens of thousands of Allied soldiers had landed in Normandy by parachute or landing craft, gliders were used en masse to resupply the troops fighting to secure the beachhead. Nearly 250 gliders came down on two landing zones near Caen to reinforce the British Airborne Division, while to the west 176 gliders, part of Operation Elmira, descended inland from Utah Beach, a couple of miles south of the village of Sainte-Mère-Église, onto a landing zone just over a mile in length and 500 meters wide that covered both the 82nd and 101st Airborne sectors. 

Most of the gliders—140—were Horsas and one of the pilots was Larry Kubale. In his glider was a jeep, a trailer loaded with munitions and ten men. “They figured that fifty percent of us wouldn’t make France, and of the fifty that made it half of them would be coming back after it was over,” he recalled.

Kubale’s glider came down in a field but careered on until it hit some trees. The impact sheared off the wings and catapulted the copilot out of the aircraft. “The guy flying with us, he went right through the nose of the glider,” remembered Kubale. “He had the control in his hands…and he went right through the nose, the steering column in his hands and foot still on the rudder.” The copilot suffered a broken leg.

Kubale’s work was far from over. Having helped bring in the reinforcements, he now became one of them in the field. “The guys that I had with me, they were actually paratroopers, with the 101st Airborne, so I was with them for about four or five days,” he said. By the time it was over, Operation Elmira resupplied the American Airborne with 1,190 troops, 67 jeeps and 24 howitzers. Casualties, compared to the Sicily operation, were light, with 157 troops killed or wounded, and 26 of the 352 pilots killed or injured. 

There were other significant Allied glider operations in 1944, in southern France and in the Netherlands. In France, more than 400 Horsa and CG-4A gliders were used for Operation Dragoon on August 15, landing some 20 miles inland to prevent the Germans from disrupting the landings. The Holland action was part of Operation Market Garden, intended to establish a bridgehead over the lower Rhine at Arnhem and open a pathway into Northern Germany. Despite the support by gliders, which transported more than 14,000 troops as well as weapons and supplies, the operation failed. The last mass use of gliders was for Operation Varsity on March 24, 1945, when the American 17th Airborne Division and the British 6th used more than 900 gliders to pass over the Rhine into Germany. Overall, 21,680 paratroopers and glider men landed on a total of 10 zones in 1,696 jump planes and 1,346 gliders.

Among the U.S. regiments participating in Varsity was the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment, whose instructions were to land just north of Wesel and seize the crossing over the Issel River. The ground fire was murderous as they approached the landing zones; twelve C-47 tug aircraft were shot down just after releasing their gliders and another 140 were damaged to varying degrees. Nineteen-year-old John J. Schumacher was in one of the gliders. He was in a double tow—two gliders  behind a single C-47—with his jeep and his passenger. He remembered terrible turbulence cause by four traffic lines of aircraft, and something else. “There was an unusual sound as you went along that it took a little while to figure out what it was, but it sounded like popcorn,” he remembered. “It was bullets and shrapnel going through the wings of the glider…pop, pop, pop.” 

As they neared the landing zone the glider pilots were presented with a new problem—poor visibility caused by crashed and burning aircraft plus a smoke screen laid down by the British. Nonetheless, Schumacher’s glider pilots managed to get the craft down in one piece and then helped him lift up the tail and get the nose lowered enough so they could open it and release the jeep.

Another glider used in Operation Varsity was the General Aircraft GL.49 Hamilcar. Intro-duced on D-Day, it was the biggest craft of its kind that the Allies deployed during the war. It had a wingspan of 110 feet and a length of 68 feet and could carry a payload of 36,000 pounds, which meant it could carry either two Bren Gun Carriers or one small Tetrarch tank. The Hamilcar was never again used in combat after Operation Varsity.

In 1946 gliders began to be phased out of the American military. Their contribution to the war effort faded from memory, unlike that of the more glamorous and gung-ho paratroopers. “It’s aggravating,” admitted George Buckley in the Silent Wings documentary. “And that is another reason I like to collect glider stuff and let people know about it.” 

Glider pilots were a small and skilled band of brothers, whose perilous existence cultivated not only a camaraderie but also a sardonic humor, encapsulated by one of their favorite songs, “The Glider Riders.” Sung to the tune of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” one of its verses ran:             

We glide through the air in a tactical state,

Jumping is useless, it’s always too late,

No ’chute for the soldier who rides in a crate,

And the pay is exactly the same.

If you ask me, World War II’s coolest airplane is the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It looks like something a kid might have doodled in a notebook while daydreaming in class. I became enthralled with the airplane in junior high when I read a book by Martin Caidin called Fork-tailed Devil: The P-38. I also made the Revell model kit of the Lightning flown by Richard Bong, America’s highest-scoring ace with 40 victories. I believed then that the P-38 was the war’s greatest fighter, but the more I read, the more I realized that the North American P-51 Mustang probably made a bigger impact. The P-38 was a much more complicated beast, and it experienced all sorts of mechanical issues in both theaters of the war, while the single-engine Mustang proved to be a relatively trouble-free “Big Friend” to American bombers over Europe.

In the Spring 2024 issue of World War II we told the story of a P-38 pilot, Laurence Elroy “Scrappy” Blumer, who flew in the European Theater. While the Lightning did perform valuable service there, it really made its reputation in the Pacific, where, among other things, P-38 pilots flew one of the most amazing missions of the war. On April 18, 1943, 16 Lightnings of the 339th Fighter Squadron under the command of Major John W. Mitchell flew out of Guadalcanal to shoot down Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack. They knew where to find the admiral because the United States had cracked a coded Japanese message that detailed his plans. And find him they did, after Mitchell led them on a circuitous 600-mile course over the ocean, guided only by his wristwatch, a newly installed navy compass, and dead reckoning. Amazingly, they arrived just as Yamamoto was descending over Bougainville Island to land in his Mitsubishi G4M1 “Betty” bomber on an adjoining island. (The deteriorating wreckage of the admiral’s Betty still lies in the jungle on Bougainville.)

Two pilots, Tom Lanphier and his wingman, Rex Barber, were later awarded a half credit each for the admiral’s Betty, but Lanphier publicly claimed he was the pilot who alone shot down Yamamoto’s airplane. Barber later came to believe that he deserved sole credit. When Barber contested the credit allocation in 1991 before a U.S. Air Force board, I wrote a magazine article about the mission and the ensuing controversy. I got to meet and interview Barber and Mitchell (Lanphier had died in 1987) and I did phone interviews with all the other surviving members of the mission, known as Operation Vengeance. It was quite a thrill to talk to these men and hear their personal recollections of this historic incident. I came to believe that Barber was probably correct, but the board decreed that there just wasn’t enough evidence to change anything after the passage of so many years. To this day Barber and Lanphier share the credit for shooting down Yamamoto.

I still treasure the memories of interacting with these men who had become part of history. I also treasure P-38 Lightning, a book I own by writer Jeffrey L. Ethell and illustrator Rikyu Watanabe. It’s a beautiful volume, with lots of foldout illustrations of the airplane, but my copy is special because it includes an inscription and signature by John Mitchell himself. I think that’s pretty cool—just like the P-38. 

If Hollywood ever gets around to making a movie about “Scrappy” Blumer, the plot won’t need any embellishment. In fact, scriptwriters might have to tone down Blumer’s extraordinary achievements and full-throttle shenanigans during World War II to make them appear more believable. But such is the true-life story of a tougher-than-a-coffin-nail fighter pilot who came to be known as “The Fastest Ace in the West.”

Laurence Elroy Blumer was born May 31, 1917, to Paul and Geoline Blumer in Walcott, North Dakota. Like many immigrants who settled in the area, his maternal ancestors hailed from Norway, and undoubtedly passed down an adventurous Viking spirit to young Larry (his first of many nicknames). Growing up in the rural Midwest, he learned to hunt and fish while developing sharp hand-eye coordination that would later serve him well 5,000 miles from home. He was a student at Kindred High School (naturally, the “Vikings”), where he excelled in basketball and track. After graduating in 1936, he spent a couple of years working in carpentry and construction before enrolling at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.      

America’s entry into World War II saw the Blumers relocate to the Pacific Northwest, where Paul found work at a munitions plant in Puyallup, Washington. Meanwhile, Larry enlisted in the Army Air Corps in March 1942 and learned to fly at Mira Loma in Oxnard, California. Next, he earned his wings at Luke Field, near Phoenix, and then reported to Marysville Cantonment, a large military garrison in Yuba County in northern California. Although his time there was brief, the repercussions would last a lifetime. 

Blumer posted to the 393rd Squadron of the 367th Fighter Group, an assignment that punched his ticket to the European Theater of Operations and an eventual showdown with the Luftwaffe. But before shipping off to Europe, he received an indelible nickname befitting his fiery demeanor. As the story goes, he had been at a party on the base when he got into a fight with several Marines. The next morning, his commanding officer, who had witnessed the brawl, summoned the North Dakotan to his office. But instead of reprimanding him, the C.O. praised Blumer for holding his own against two of the Marines in the dustup, thus forever branding him “Scrappy.”

The 367th FG had three squadrons—the 392nd, 393rd, and 394th—and they trained in Bell P-39D Airacobras at bases in the San Francisco Bay area. Additionally, they had bombing and gunnery instruction in Tonopah, Nevada, where Blumer decided to expand target practice to the nearby town of Mina. “We were taking a bead on everything—it didn’t make no difference,” Blumer recalled. “I was about 20 feet off the ground coming through town, pulled the trigger, and had about seven shells left. Right through the water tower!” After hightailing it back to the base, he grabbed a bucket of paint and altered the nose and tail of his airplane to cover his tracks.

As the war dragged on, it created an increasing demand for replacement pilots, including those of the 367th.

The group finally departed for Europe from New York Harbor on March 26, 1944, for an 11-day convoy to Britain. The 367th shipped aboard the transport ship SS Duchess of Bedford, a former Canadian Pacific liner drafted into wartime service and dubbed the “Drunken Duchess” for the way it wallowed through heavy seas. The fighter group, now under Lieutenant Colonel Charles M. Young, eventually arrived at USAAF Station AAF-452 on England’s southern coast. The build-up for the D-Day invasion of Normandy was in full swing and security prevented the pilots from providing people back home with the base’s geographical location at a place called Stoney Cross. Once they arrived, the pilots, having trained exclusively on single-engine airplanes, expected to find North American P-51 Mustangs waiting for them. Instead, they were greeted by rows of twin-engine Lockheed P-38 Lightnings. The curveball required several weeks of training and familiarization before the men could finally take a whack at the enemy in their new airplanes.

In an August 1943 issue, Life magazine reported that the Germans called the P-38 “der Gabelschwanz Teufel” (“Fork-tailed Devil”), and for good reason. The fast, versatile Lightning had been designed primarily as a fighter but could also carry two 2,000-pound bombs. Although mostly remembered for its role in the Pacific (where P-38 pilots ambushed and shot down Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto on April 18, 1943, and was the aircraft flown by America’s highest-scoring ace of World War II, Major Richard Bong, for all of his 40 victories), the unique aircraft saw extensive action throughout the war in ground attacks, photo reconnaissance missions, and as a long-range escort. It was powered by a pair of turbo-supercharged 1,600-horsepower engines with counter-rotating propellers. A central pod between its twin booms contained the cockpit and nose-mounted armament of four 50-caliber M2 Browning machine guns and a 20mm Hispano cannon. The technologically advanced fighter did suffer from various teething issues, but its potent arsenal made sure the Lightning packed more punch than most other fighters—and it was especially lethal in the hands of a crack shot like Blumer. 

As part of the Ninth Air Force, commanded by Lieutenant General Lewis Brereton, the 367th entered combat for the first time on May 9, 1944. The group initially carried out fighter sweeps over western France before serving as bomber escorts on D-Day, June 6. These “air umbrella” missions continued into the second week of June, followed by fighter-bomber campaigns in response to the enemy reinforcements scrambling to reach Normandy. On June 22, the unit took part in a large-scale attack on the Cotentin Peninsula, where German ground forces maintained a perimeter defense around the fortress city of Cherbourg. The deep-water port had become critically important to the Allies due to recent storm damage to the invasion beachheads. Capturing the ancient harbor would come at a steep price. By the end of the first day, the 367th lost seven pilots and suffered extensive damage to most of its airplanes, grounding all three squadrons for several days.

The airmen adopted the moniker “Dynamite Gang”—a tribute to an air traffic controller named “Dynamite Donovan” who guided scores of wounded warplanes safely back home. After a brief move from Stoney Cross to nearby RAF Ibsley, the fighter group relocated to the advanced landing grounds (ALGs) in France. Their makeshift air base, located next to the small village of Cretteville (ALG-14), featured steel plank runways, Spartan accommodations, and a steady diet of C and K rations. If choking down ham and lima beans wasn’t bad enough, the men also frequently endured assaults by pesky yellow jackets during chowtime.

Appropriately, Blumer christened all of his mounts Scrapiron. (And also added a painting of a naked woman with the word “censored” bannered across her.) He lost three P-38s during his first four months of combat, which included a particularly harrowing bombing mission over German-occupied territory near Caen. Blumer recalled the incident in an army press release: “I was flying at about 6,000 feet when I began to notice the rest of my flight taking evasive action to avoid the flak,” he said. “I began to veer my plane around when a machine gun bullet passed through the cockpit floor, passed through my outstretched legs, and went right through the canopy. I decided to get the Hell out of there in a hurry.” After bailing out of the burning Scrapiron III, Blumer tried to dodge machine gun fire while helplessly dangling from his parachute. He then spent the next eight hours evading capture in No Man’s Land before he finally stumbled onto a friendly patrol. “I was picked up by the British, who gave me a drink of Scotch, and each time I arrived at another station, I received another drink,” he said. “When I finally got back I was pretty plastered.” His report, however, fails to mention how he not only completed the bombing run but waited until his squadron reached safety before ditching the crippled aircraft. His exploits earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, and membership into the Caterpillar Club, reserved for people who had to bail out of a damaged aircraft. He also picked a “Winged Boot” for walking back from a mission. More decorations followed.  

By late summer 1944, German forces, despite being given plenty of chances, had failed to kill the plucky American called Scrappy, who would soon spearhead one of the greatest dogfights in U.S. military history—an action that earned him the Distinguished Service Cross—and cemented his improbable legacy. On August 25, 1944, the recently promoted Captain Blumer was returning to base after leading a dive-bombing mission on three Luftwaffe airfields in northern France when he received a distress call from Major Grover Gardner, Squadron 394’s leader. His flight had been jumped by more than 40 Focke Wulf Fw-190s approximately 25 miles away. With Lieutenant William Awtrey on his wing, Blumer quickly changed course and radioed back, “Okay, let’s pour on the coal.” After climbing to 10,000 feet, he plunged his P-38 straight into the German swarm, scoring his first kill with a 40-degree deflection shot. The hard-charging American continued to employ the same strategy of climbing and diving as more P-38s joined the fray. In the span of 15 minutes—about the same amount of time it takes for an oil change—Blumer shot down five enemy planes, making him an ace in a single mission.

Awtrey, a soft-spoken South Carolinian, had a ringside seat to the wild melee as he watched what seemed like scores of aircraft explode and drop out of the sky from all directions. He later recounted Blumer’s fifth scalp: “By this time, I was holding my breath,” said Awtrey. “My mouth was dry, and I couldn’t keep my head still. I remember jerking my head around in every direction, waiting for someone to jump Scrappy. As the Nazis began to scatter, looking for safety in flight, Scrappy picked out the last remaining Jerry and dove on him like a hawk. It was so fast I could hardly see it myself. He peppered him with bullets, and the pilot went into a roll, and later I saw him bail out. When I look back on it now, it was like watching a movie.” Remarkably, Scrapiron IV returned to base without a scratch. “It was a pilot’s holiday,” said Blumer. “It was the sort of a day a pilot dreams about and probably gets once in a lifetime.” 

Accounts from the Germans illustrate the carnage from the battle’s losing side. Feldwebel Fritz Bucholz of II. Gruppe Jagdgeschwader 6 had logged only a handful of hours in the Fw-190 when he encountered “der Gabelschwanz Teufel” for the first time. “It was utter chaos, with Focke Wulfs chasing ‘Lightnings’ chasing Focke Wulfs,” said Bucholz. “Our initial attack hit the Americans hard, and I saw some Lightnings go down. We might have been new to the business of dogfighting, but with the advantage of the sun and numbers, we held the initiative. Then, suddenly, there seemed to be ‘Lightnings’ diving on us from all directions; now it was our turn to become the hunted.” 

For their efforts, the 367th Fighter Group received the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest possible award for a unit in combat. Of the 33 P-38s engaged, the Americans lost two pilots and had four others bail out over enemy territory. The Germans lost 16 airplanes, with 14 pilots killed, disastrous losses for the unit. 

With the U.S. First and Third Armies penetrating deeper into France, the P-38s conducted relentless sorties, attacking trains, destroying railroad tracks, and menacing Nazi airfields. The 367th provided crucial cover during Operation Market-Garden in September 1944, and fought both the Germans and freezing cold weather during the Battle of Bulge that December. American aviators also received high praise from Lieutenant General George S. Patton, who hailed the joint effort as “the best example of the combined use of air and ground troops that I have ever witnessed.” As a token of his appreciation, “Ol’ Blood and Guts” had cases of captured German booze distributed among the fighter groups. 

The start of the new year brought several new changes to the 367th, including the transition to the single-engine Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. But after completing more than 100 combat missions and scoring six victories, Blumer—who had been promoted to commander of the squadron on November 10, 1944—ended his tour in mid-January 1945. He then returned to Marysville (renamed Camp Beale) as a major, lending his expertise as a flight instructor. Along the way, he made a pit stop in North Dakota, where the hometown hero visited family and friends. For most returning soldiers, especially those who had repeatedly cheated death, a weekend furlough typically called for rest and relaxation. Unless your name is Scrappy Blumer. Upon arrival at Hector Airport in Fargo, the restless fighter jock noticed a fleet of P-63 King Cobras sitting on the field, designated for a Lend-Lease program with the Soviet Union. Blumer, however, had other plans. He “requisitioned” one of the planes for the remaining 25 miles to Kindred and proceeded to buzz the main street at treetop level, pulling up just in time over his old high school. Not surprisingly, military brass wasn’t the slightest bit amused and severely reprimanded the now famous pilot.

Blumer eventually eased into civilian life and started up a contracting business on the West Coast. But his love of flying never diminished. He bought an old P-38 that had once belonged to the Honduran Air Force and had it fully restored, replete with his trademark “Scrapiron IV” and “Censored” nose art. He flew the celebrated fighter at air shows around the country and, per his custom, could usually be found chomping on a cigar with five more in his shirt pocket. As the years marched on, members of the 367th would occasionally gather at reunions, where conversation invariably turned to stories involving Scrappy. Such as the time he clipped a telephone pole after strafing a train and returned to base with communication lines wrapped around the wings. Or the one about a French gal he took for a ride during a bombing run. Or was she English? No matter. Regardless of the fuzzy details or seemingly impossible odds, they could always agree on one undeniable truth: anything was possible with the man once dubbed “The Scourge of the Luftwaffe.” 

Records show that Blumer received 28 decorations for his actions in World War II. The wide range of awards includes a Silver Star, Air Medal with 22 Oak Leaf Clusters, Belgian Croix de Guerre, and a .45 Pistol Expert badge. In 1996, U.S. Representative Peter DeFazio of Oregon presented Blumer with a collection of his medals that had been previously lost or stolen over the years. When asked by a reporter about his thoughts on the ceremony, he tearfully replied, “I think of all my buddies we lost getting them.”

At age 80, having lived a full life—and a sometimes tumultuous personal one that included four marriages—Blumer passed away from leukemia in Springfield, Oregon, on October 23, 1997. He was buried with military honors at Woodbine Cemetery in Puyallup, Washington.

Frederick Pabst was captain of a Great Lakes steamer when Maria Best came aboard his ship and caught his attention. He started courting her, the daughter of the owner of Milwaukee’s Phillip Best Beer Company, and they married in 1862. It didn’t take long for his new father-in-law to talk him into giving up the wheelhouse for the brewhouse.  

Just as the German immigrant worked his way up from cabin boy to captain, he rose from the bottom to the top of his new trade and turned Best into America’s largest brewery. In 1889, he renamed the company Pabst, and four years later, his beer was competing head-to-head against its archrival, Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis, at the Chicago World’s Fair. The judges chose Pabst. The captain put his blue ribbon on the label, and it survives to this day as the beer’s instantly recognizable branding.  

If Pabst became America’s king of beers that year, he already had his castle. In 1890, he had hired an architect to design him a mansion, a building that took shape with an exterior fashioned in the Flemish Renaissance Revival style to complement a Neo-Rococo and Neo-Renaissance interior. When construction wrapped in 1892, the family moved in.  

You could say the mansion was more than what one family needed. The 20,000-square-foot, three-story building featured dozens of well-appointed large rooms and a dozen bathrooms. Priceless works of art and furniture filled the interior. Expert craftsmanship and ornate detailing were everywhere. The home boasted the city’s first central heating and electrical systems.  

Family members lived here until 1908, when they sold the property to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee. “The Pabst Residence on Grand Avenue is one of the most handsomest in the city,” Yenowine’s Illustrated News had written of the building that was now home to Milwaukee’s five archbishops. “It is a model of what wealth, luxury and good taste can secure.”       

Brewhouse and Home  

Pabst brewed beer in its hilltop facility northwest of downtown Milwaukee until 1997. The complex was purchased in 2006, and residential units, offices, storefronts, and the like popped up alongside a tavern and event facility called Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery. A statue of Frederick Pabst stands watch in one of the courtyards. Best Place offers a beer history tour that tells what happened on these grounds during a century-and-a-half of beer production.

When the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee sold the Pabst Mansion in 1975, it was almost torn down to put in a parking lot for a hotel. A crusade to save the historic building ended with its inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places. The doors were opened to the public in 1978. The renovated site is open for tours as efforts continue to restore the house to its 19th-century glory.

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

Who was Etta Place?

She was the lover and perhaps wife of Pennsylvania-born Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the “Sundance Kid,” and a peripheral associate of the Wild Bunch, the outlaw gang headed up by Robert LeRoy Parker, aka “Butch Cassidy.” But little is known about her origins and less about what happened to her after Sundance and Butch were killed in South America.

Larry Pointer, author of the 1977 book In Search of Butch Cassidy, wrote that Etta’s identity is “one of the most intriguing riddles in Western history.”

Place was likely born in 1878 and as an adult was described as having “classic good looks,” with a nice smile and a refined bearing, a description confirmed by a full-length portrait of her and Longabaugh—some say the couple’s wedding picture—taken in February 1901 at Joseph B. De Young’s photo studio at 815 Broadway in New York City. She spoke in an educated manner and knew how to handle a rifle.

She had met Longabaugh a year or two earlier and may have been involved in some of the Wild Bunch robberies, scoping out a bank in advance or holding the group’s horses during a heist. But the New York City picture, historian Thom Hatch wrote in his 2013 book The Last Outlaws, “hints of proper high teas, Central Park carriage rides and evenings at the theater.”

Even her name is probably false. “Place” was the maiden name of Longabaugh’s mother, Annie, and Sundance sometimes used the alias “Harry Place.” It has been suggested she took to using the first name “Etta” in South America after Spanish speakers mispronounced “Ethel,” which may or may not have been her actual first name. The Pinkertons variously referred to her as Ethel, Eva, Rita, Etta and Betty Price.

In a letter to friend David Gillespie shortly after the gang’s June 2, 1899, train robbery near Wilcox, Wyo., Longabaugh enclosed a copy of the portrait of himself and Place, whom he described as his wife and a “Texas lady.” The Pinkertons, who spent a lot of time and effort pursuing the Wild Bunch, always believed Etta was from Texas, which fits with her noted skills with horses and firearms. In 1906 William Pinkerton, his detectives having traced Place to Fort Worth, asked that city’s police chief to “find out who this woman is.”

Based on the theory Etta’s real name was Ethel and she hailed from Texas, researcher Donna Ernst compiled a list of all women named Ethel born in or around Fort Worth and San Antonio between 1875 and ’80. Over time she eliminated each as a contender for the youthful Etta Place.

Except one.

That one was Ethel Bishop, who resided with four other women in what was probably a brothel near notorious madam Fannie Porter’s San Antonio pleasure palace, a known Wild Bunch hangout. Another oft repeated story suggests Butch rescued Etta from a brothel when she was 16. Longabaugh biographer Ed Kirby believes Place was the daughter of one Emily Jane Place of Oswego, N.Y., who was related somehow to Sundance’s mother. Still others have suggested Etta was in fact Colorado rancher Ann Bassett, a Wild Bunch associate known to have vied with sister Josie for Cassidy’s affection.

Could Bassett have won Sundance’s attentions as well?

Probably not. By 1903 Bassett had married Hirum “Hi” Henry Bernard and that same year was arrested (and later acquitted) on a charge of cattle rustling while Place was in South America.

On Feb. 20, 1901, after posing for their portrait, Place and Longabaugh boarded HMS Herminius in New York, disembarking in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on March 23. Traveling with them was Cassidy, using the alias “James Ryan” and claiming to be Etta’s brother. In 1902 Place and Longabaugh returned briefly Stateside for Etta to seek treatment of an unknown disease, and again in 1904, when Pinkerton operatives believed she visited family in Texas. In 1906 Place returned Stateside for keeps, possibly due to her illness. Sundance returned to South America, where most historians believe he and Butch died in a 1908 shootout with soldiers in Bolivia.

Meanwhile, Etta vanished.

Several researchers have suggested she became a brothel operator in Fort Worth under the name Eunice Gray. But in an article in the October 2010 Wild West Donna Humphrey-Donnell noted she’d seen an alleged portrait of the young Gray, and the woman in that photo definitely “was not the same woman seen in the famous New York City portrait of Etta Place and the Sundance Kid.”

In 1909 an unidentified woman fitting Etta’s description asked a U.S. diplomatic official in South America for help in obtaining Longabaugh’s death certificate. But she never returned to his office. At most, however, the incident only proves Place was alive in 1909.

Other theories have since surfaced: that Etta was the wife of legendary boxing promoter Tex Rickard; that she relocated to Paraguay and remarried; that Longabaugh had survived the 1908 shootout in Bolivia and lived happily ever after with Place in Alaska; that Etta died in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; or that she was either killed during a domestic dispute or took her own life in Argentina in the 1920s. In 1970 Cassidy’s sister, Lula Parker Betensen, told Los Angeles Times reporters that her brother had not been killed in Bolivia as thought, and that Etta had lived out her days as a schoolteacher in Denver.

In the end, speculation, guesswork and coincidence aside, we only know for certain she was a pretty woman who once carried on a romance with the Sundance Kid and then disappeared from the pages of history.

Nothing more.

To this day similarly incredible tales circulate about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, stories relating their escape from the Bolivian gunfight and their subsequent lives of anonymity in various locales out West or in South America.

Like the theories surrounding Etta Place, though, they are unsubstantiated and probably false.

But tempting. 

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

Military use of remotely piloted aircraft, or drones, dates to World War I experiments with practice targets, and guided aerial weapons were operational by World War II. But it took advances in electronics and satellite technology to realize unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capable of being controlled from thousands of miles away. The first operational reconnaissance drone, the Predator, went on to assume a more aggressive role.  

Its inventor, engineer Abraham Karem, is an Assyrian Jew born in Baghdad—ironic, considering how much his invention would serve in Iraq. Karem’s family moved to Israel in 1951, and he built his first UAV for the Israeli Air Force during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Immigrating to the United States, he soon drew the attention of the CIA. Karem developed a series of prototypes, the Amber and Gnat 750, for General Atomics before test flying his ultimate design on July 3, 1994. A year later it entered service with the CIA and the U.S. Air Force as the RQ-1 (recon drone) Predator.  

Coinciding with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense was developing an operational drone capable of toting ordnance. The RQ-1 proved adaptable to carrying an AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface antitank missile under each wing. Accepted in 2002 and promptly deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, the armed Predator was designated the MQ-1 (multirole drone). On Dec. 23, 2002, over the no-fly zone in Iraq, an Iraqi Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 engaged an MQ-1 armed with AIM-92 Stinger air-to-air missiles and shot it down, winning the first encounter between a conventional warplane and a UAV.  

In 2011 the 268th and last MQ-1 left the General Atomics plant. By then it had accumulated more than 1 million flight hours and truly earned its Predator moniker. On March 9, 2018, the Air Force retired the MQ-1, which had been supplanted by General Atomics’ improved MQ-9 Reaper.

This story appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Military History magazine.