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Near Wounded Knee


Ghost Cowboy is about real tales from the 19th-century American frontier, when the Old West was young. Most of the posts here are actual news items from the 1800s and early 1900s. We'll be adding "new" content every week. Travel with us and sign up for an account, and you'll be able to leave comments and post in our forums. Your trailmasters, Ken in Alabama and Dave in Virginia, don't get to saddle up and vacation out west as often as they'd like, so they started this site. Drop us a note.

frontiersman


SAW THE KLONDIKE.


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Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette / June 4, 1898

S. K. MYERS HAS SEEN IT, AND TELLS SOME FACTS

Inferred That It Is One of the Most Gigantic Fakes Ever Perpetrated -- Where the Big-Find Stories Originate -- Says he, “Don’t You Go.”

S. K. Myers, the music man, will not be numbered with the winners at Klondike, for he went there, saw how it really was and came home Thursday, thoroughly filled with anti-Klondicitis medicine. He left Cedar Rapids in March and was gone about three months.

The first desire he had to go to the fabulous gold fields was when he had read the

WAR WITH THE INDIANS.


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From Pike’s Peak.

From the Rocky Mountain News, June 20, 1860

On Sunday, the 10th inst., 480 warriors of the Arapahoe and Apache tribes, with a few Sioux, set out from this city on a foray against the Utes. Before starting they visited Capt. BECKWORTH and KIT CARSON, who endeavored to dissuade them from going, but without avail. On the morning of Sunday, 17th inst., they came upon the village of the Utes on the south fork of the South Platte, in the southeast edge of the South Park, and made an attack. By a stratagem the Ute warriors were misled to fly to the defence in the wrong direction, while the combined force fell upon the village, killed a large number of women and children, and took four children prisoners.

Wagons on the Platte: 1859


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Drawing by Daniel A. Jenks of two covered wagons being ferried across the North Platte River in central Wyoming. A man stands on the far bank of the river, with a hook in one hand. In the distance, people have set up camp in three covered wagons and a tent. This camp may be near present-day Casper, where the Jenks party would have joined the Oregon Trail. Jenks and his party arrived at Camp 60 on Wednesday, June 8, 1859. He noted in his diary that they camped in a cottonwood grove. View full size.

EVERY RIFLE TOLD.


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New-York Times / November 20, 1854

MORE INDIAN MURDERS.

Correspondence of the St. Louis Republican.

CAMP ON THE BANKS OF THE PLATTE RIVER,
Monday, October 23, 1854.

Another massacre occurred night before last. Our party, composed of eight, camped, on the evening of the 21st inst., at an old camping place of the emigrants, about 200 miles above Fort Kerney, south side of Platte. During the day of the 21st instant, three Indians came and seemed anxious to trade, but were informed

 

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