Blog

It is with a heavy heart that we announce we will no longer update Ghost Cowboy. We have thoroughly enjoyed putting together the site, but over the last couple of months our focus has been on our other site, Shorpy, and Ghost Cowboy has been badly neglected. We hope to begin adding old-west photographs and stories to Shorpy in the future. As part of the move we will redirect our RSS feed to the Shorpy feed.

If you haven't checked it out, please give Shorpy a visit.

Bisbee, Arizona, in 1909, with the Copper Queen mining operation and smelter just out of view to the left. Click here for a panoramic version of the photo.

Greetings to everyone who dropped us a line about this post (and especially all you nice people from New Zealand). If you want to get a feel for the Old West, you can’t do better than travel to Bisbee (or Ouray or Jerome), and stay at the Copper Queen Hotel. (Skip Tombstone, which has turned into a tacky tourist trap.) Architectural note: The Phelps-Dodge Mercantile store visible at center in the panoramic photo behind the train barn burned in 1938 and was replaced the next year by an Art Decoish store designed by Del Webb of Sun City fame.

We were going to post the first of series of articles on "China-men" in the West when we came across a detailed account of our hero California Dan's demise. (Dan being the soldier of fortune who inspired this site and the subject of one of our very first posts.) His gruesome end in late 1902 in Mexico at the hands of the Yaqui Indians seems to have been widely reported at the time, with one headline, from the Atlanta Constitution, that stands out as a kind of ghastly haiku:

A former Army scout who hailed from California, Dan was hired by Gen. Luis Torres to serve as his chief of scouts in the Mexican government's long conflict with the Yaqui Indians, who by all accounts were a pretty fearsome bunch. After being taken prisoner by a Yaqui chief called El Renegado, Dan ended up six feet under and two feet short.

I started a blogroll on the right of this page. The first addition is the Wild West blog by Wild West Magazine. Be sure to check out the before and after photos of the bank in Coffeyville, Kansas, which was the scene of the Dalton Gang robbery in 1892.