|
The oldest human
skeleton ever found in the Western Hemisphere was discovered in 1953
near Midland,
Texas.
It was first believed that the skeleton, the remains of a 30-year-old
woman, was 10,000 years old. However, the latest estimates are
that it is much older.
The term "red
light district" came from the Red Light Bordello in
Dodge
City, Kansas. The front door of the building was made of red
glass and produced a red glow to the outside world when lit at night.
The name carried over to refer to the town's brothel district.
Clay Allison was described in
a physician’s report as maniacal” with a personality where "emotional
or physical excitement produces paroxysmal of a mixed character.”
Estimates of how many people lived in
North America before the arrival of the European explorers vary from
8.4 million to 112 million. This population was divided into
about 240 tribal groupings speaking an estimated 300 different
languages.
Buffalo,
which were strewn across the Great Plains after the mass buffalo hunts
of 1870-1883, were bought by Eastern firms for the production of
fertilizer and bone china. "Bone pickers” earned eight dollars a ton
for the bones.
Around 1541, the present state of
Texas
was called Tejas, a Spanish version of the Caddo word meaning
"allies."
 Wyatt
Earp was indicted for horse theft in Van Buren,
Arkansas
on May 8, 1871. He escaped trial by jumping bail and fleeing to
Kansas.
Rumor has it that the tradition of
spreading saw dust on the floors of bars and
saloons
started in
Deadwood,
South
Dakota due to the amount of gold dust that would fall on the
floor. The saw dust was used to hide the fallen gold dust and was
swept up at the end of the night.
After serving more than twenty years in prison,
Cole Younger got a job selling tombstones, worked for a while in
a Wild West show with
Frank James,
and died quietly in 1916 in Lee’s Summit,
Missouri
where he was known as an elderly churchgoer.
Wyatt Earp was neither the town
marshal or the sheriff in
Tombstone,
Arizona at
the time of the shoot-out at the
O.K. Corral. His brother Virgil was
the town marshal, who had temporarily deputized
Wyatt, Morgan and
Doc Holliday
prior to the gunfight.
The
Oregon Trail,
from
Independence,
Missouri to
Fort Vancouver,
Washington
measured 2,020 miles. An estimated 350,000 emigrants took the
Oregon Trail
but one out of seventeen would not survive the trip. The most common
cause of death was cholera.
|
Samuel
Clemens, struck by silver fever, tried his hand at prospecting in the town
of Unionville, 
