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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


Chased by Grizzlies


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A dispatch from Gen. Hardin, in the United Service
Published in The New York Times / May 21, 1882

AFTER GRIZZLIES -- I was out with Cadott. Toward sundown, leaving me near a swamp, he went off on the prairie, hoping to scare up some game, which would probably seek refute in the swamp. He was about half a mile away when I saw him motion me to go toward the boats. I started at a walk in that direction, watching him as I advanced. Soon I saw him run rapidly toward the boats, then suddenly stop.

Description of an Exciting Buffalo Hunt


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Ladies Take an Active Part in the Sport.

Published in the New York Times / July 27, 1871

CHARLES B. MATTHEWS, formerly of Buffalo, but now a resident of Kansas, in a letter to the Western New-Yorker, gives an account of a buffalo hunt, participated in by himself and wife and Mr. WHEELER, formerly of Lockport, and wife, from which we make the following extract:

"An hour more and our eyes were gladdened by seeing fifty or sixty buffaloes, which proved to be the outside skirmish line. We drove in the pickets, and in doing so we reached the summit of an eminence, from which point we believe we could distinctly see through the clear air for the distance of fifteen or twenty miles, and all the vast expanse of smooth prairie from the river back as far as the eye could reach, was completely black with buffaloes, and how much further the innumerable throng extended beyond our vision we could not tell. But without the telescope all efforts of ours to comprehend their vastness would prove utterly futile. At all events here is an abundance of game, and we are after them.

Winter Indian Camp: 1908


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Winter Indian Camp: 1908Winter Indian Camp: 1908: Two Apsaroke people on horseback outside a tipi in a thicket of trees. Photograph taken July 6, 1908 by Edward S. Curtis in Montana.

TORTURED BY INDIANS.


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Reno Evening Gazette / April 25, 1882

A Horrible Story of Apache Outrages.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25.

A Tucson dispatch says: A correspondent at Safford gives an account of the recent Indian attack, as follows: Stanislaus Metas, aged 9 years, just arrived from Steven's sheep camp with the following story of the Indian massacre:

"On the 18th inst., before daylight, Indians attacked the camp whilst we were all

 

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