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It was estimated that 90% of women living in Deadwood, South Dakota in 1876 were prostitutes.

For acts of bravery during service with the U.S. Army in the Indian Wars, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1872. But in 1917, the year of his death, it was withdrawn because of his status as a civilian scout.
Theodore Roosevelt was sent to live in North Dakota for health reasons. He fell in love with the West and wrote a book titled "Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail" before becoming a US president. The book was illustrated by famous Western artist Frederick Remington.

Sixty-Five deputy U.S. marshals were killed in the line of duty between 1875 and 1891 while enforcing the law for “hanging Judge” Isaac C. Parker of Forth Smith, Arkansas.
Bannack, Montana Sheriff Henry Plummer secretly led a band of outlaws who robbed or killed more than a hundred victims. His hidden life was eventually discovered and in 1864, he and his gang were hanged by Montana vigilantes.

In 1876, the lawless town of Deadwood, South Dakota averaged a murder a day.

During the Wild West days in Billings, Montana, the cowboys an scarlet ladies of every saloon performed impossible dances atop bars, tables, and in some instances upon atop the pianos.

Wyatt Earp once operated saloon in Nome, Alaska. In the late 1890’s U.S. Marshall Albert Lowe slapped an intoxicated Earp and took his gun away after Wyatt threatened to demonstrate how guns were handled “down Arizona way.”
About 1/3 of all gunmen died of "natural causes," living a normal life span of 70 years or so. Of those who did die violently (shot or executed), the average age of death was 35. The gunfighters-turned-lawmen lived longer lives than their persistently criminal counterparts.

1776 miles of track were laid during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad from Sacramento, California to Omaha, Nebraska. On April 10, 1869, 10 miles of track was laid in one day. This outstanding achievement has not been surpassed to this day in this country.

During these old west times a gunfighter was also known as a “leather slapper,” a “gun fanner,” “gun trapper," “bad medicine,” “curly wolf,” and a “shootist.”

The telephone was invented in 1876. The first community to have a telephone after the White House telephone was installed was Deadwood, South Dakota.

The famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral did NOT occur at the O.K. Corral. When the Earps and the Clantons shot it out in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881, their famous battle took place in a vacant lot between Fly’s Photograph Gallery and the Harwood house on Tombstone’s Fremont Street. The O.K. Corral was located nearby, however, and somehow its name became attached to the famous shootout.

The famous Lewis and Clark expedition covered 7,789 miles. Thomas Jefferson estimated that the trek would cost $2,500, but, in fact it cost $38,722.25.

Doc Holliday claimed he almost lost his life a total of nine times. Four attempts were made to hang him and he was shot at five times.

According to eye witnesses, Wild Bill Hickok could hit a dime tossed into the air nine out of ten times; he could knock an apple from a tree with one shot and then hit the apple again with another bullet before it hit the ground, all at 25 paces.


Cowboys driving cattle to the market could expect to make between $25 and $40 per month. A Trail Boss might make as much as $125 per month.

Annie Oakley, who’s real name was Phoebe Anne Mozee, never lived farther west than Ohio.
Only one man was ever killed in a gunfight with Wyatt Earp while he was in Dodge City, Kansas. On July 26, 1878, a drunken cowboy named George Hoyt traded shots with Earp and lost.

"Keep your ear to the ground" referred to the practice of plainsmen listening to the ground to hear hoof beats. It became the westerner's warning to stay alert.

Jesse James was called "Dingus" by his friends.

Mattie Earp, Wyatt Earp’s second wife, who was with him in Tombstone during the O.K. Corral gunfight committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum on July 3, 1888 in Pinal, Arizona. She was despondent because Earp had left her for another woman.

Belle Starr, the “Outlaw Queen,” a horse thief, outlaw and part-time prostitute was the first woman to be tried for a serious crime by Judge Isaac Parker. She was sentenced to five months in prison for horse theft. In 1889 she was shot in the back and killed by an unknown assailant.

Despite Hollywood’s depiction to the contrary, Jesse and Frank James were never cowboys. Both were raised on a farm in Missouri, where many of their crimes occurred.

Wild Bill Hickok was killed by an alcoholic drifter named Jack McCall while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota, on August 2, 1876. When he was killed he was holding a poker hand of aces and eights, thereafter known as the Dead Man’s Hand.

Henry Wells, of the famous Wells, Fargo and Company freight line never lived any further West than Buffalo, New York.

The cowboy hat we have come to know today was first designed in the 1860s by a New Jersey man named John Batterson Stetson. Stetson, in Central City, Colorado for health reasons, saw a market for a broad brimmed hat for ranch wear. He opened a shop in Philadelphia and began designing hats under the Stetson name in 1865. By 1906 Stetson employed approximately 3,500 workers, turning out two million hats a year.

The first biography of Billy the Kid appeared only three weeks after his death.

The Long Branch Saloon really did exist in Dodge City, Kansas. One of the owners, William Harris, was a former resident of Long Branch, New Jersey and named the saloon after his hometown in the 1880’s. The Long Branch Saloon still exists in Dodge City and can be seen at Dodge City’s Boothill Museum.

The last Old West outlaw of renown to die “on the job” was Henry Starr, who began his career as a bandit in 1893 and led a gang of mounted outlaws for more than twenty-five years. Starr’s career finally ended on February 18, 1921, when he was shot to death trying to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas.

The main characters of the Dalton Gang – brothers, Grat, Bob and Emmett all wore badges before moving to the other side of the law.

"Boys, I've found a goldmine." - James W. Marshall whose discovery of gold started the California Gold Rush. The location was a sawmill where Marshall withdrew a gold nugget from the American River.

The famous Goodnight-Loving Trail was established in 1866 between Fort Belknap, Texas and Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Oliver Loving was later killed by Indians on the trail bearing his name. Goodnight, on the other hand, died a wealthy man in his nineties in 1929.

Clay Allison, after sitting in a dentist’s chair in Cheyenne, Wyoming, forcibly pulled one of the dentist’s teeth when he doctor drilled on the wrong molar. He would have continued pulling the dentists teeth, but the screams of the dentist brought in people from the street.

On November 24, 1835, the Republic of Texas established a force of frontiersmen called the “Texas Rangers”. The rangers were paid $1.25 per day for their services. The members of The Texas Rangers were said to be able to "ride like a Mexican, shoot like a Kentuckian, and fight like the devil."

Most professional gunfighters died in states or territories where the most shootings occurred: Texas, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, California, Missouri, and Colorado.

Black Jack Ketchum was the only person ever hung in Union County, New Mexico. According the annals of American Jurisprudence, he was the only criminal decapitated during a judicial hanging. The only other recorded example was in England in 1601.

The Pony Express was in operation for only nineteen months from April 1860 through October 1861. The Pony Express carried almost 35,000 pieces of mail over more than 650,000 miles during those nineteen months and lost only one mail sack. The typical Pony Express rider was nineteen years old and made $100-$150 per month plus room and board.

In 1884, the citizens of Montana Territory were fed up with lawlessness and forming a large-scale vigilante force, they executed thirty-five horse and cattle thieves that year.

The famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral only lasted about thirty seconds.

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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.

The Colt Peacemaker, the weapon that became known as “the gun that won the West” was a .45-caliber manufactured by Colt’s Fire Arms Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Connecticut in 1873. At the time it sold for $17.00.

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, Nevada in 1862. Having more luck in trading mining claims than actually producing silver, he wound up leaving the area. A short time latter Clemens, changes his name to Mark Twain and becomes one of the greatest writers of American Literature.

Established in 1827, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas is the oldest military post in continuous operation west of the Mississippi.

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 Infamous Dalton Gang only operated for one year and five months, beginning with a train robbery in Wharton, Oklahoma on May 9, 1891 and ending at the shootout at Coffeyville, Kansas on October 5, 1892.

Jesse James was shot in the back by Bob Ford on April 3, 1882, in St. Joseph, Missouri. Professed to be a friend of James, Ford was reviled for shooting James from behind and was forever known as a “coward.” Ten years later, he himself was himself shot to death in Creede, Colorado.

Lt. Charles Wilkes was given the command of the U.S. Exploring Expedition in 1838 for America's first official expedition to include Antarctica. During his expedition 62 men were discharged as unsuitable, 42 deserted, and 15 died.

If completely melted, the present Antarctic ice sheet houses enough water to raise the global sea level by 200 feet.

Antarctica is depressed more than half a mile to near sea level under the weight of ice.

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.

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.

Billy the Kid was born in New York City on September 17, 1859.

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.”

On December 21, 1876, Clay Allison shot and killed Deputy Sheriff Charles Faber at the Olympic Dance Hall in Las Animas, Colorado. If it weren’t for Allison purposely stomping on the feet of other dancers, the law probably would never have been called.

Buffalo bones, 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.

Judge Roy Bean once killed a Mexican official in a dispute over a girl in California. The Mexican official’s friend hanged Judge Bean, but before he died he was cut down by the contested damsel. Ever after, Bean was unable to turn his head due to the injury.

The first gold strike in the Old West was made by Jose Ortiz in 1832 south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in what would quickly become the boom town of Delores.

Harry Longabaugh became known as “the Sundance Kid” because he served a jail term for horse stealing in Sundance, Wyoming.

The first duck-billed dinosaur found outside of the Americas was located in sands about 66-67 million years old on Vega Island off the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula. The finding of this hadrosaur gives support to the theory of a land bridge between Antarctica and South America during the Cretaceous period. It is assumed quantities of vegetation existed in Antarctica to support these large plant eaters, some of whom may have stood 20-feet tall.

Paul Siple first came to Antarctica as a Boy Scout. He was 19 years old during Byrd's 1928 expedition. His skills with dog handling persuaded Byrd to allow him to join the winter team.

The biggest earthquake in the world in 1998 was the March 25 quake just off the Balleny Islands, which registered 8.1 on the Richter Scale. By comparison, the 1995 quake in Kobe, Japan, measured only 7.2 and killed 6,000 people and injured 35,000.

October 1998 was the coldest and stormiest summer in McMurdo since 1973, breaking a 25-year old record.

Fuel exhaustion forced explorer Lincoln Ellsworth and pilot Herbert Hollick-Kenyon to land 25 miles short of Little America on Dec. 5, 1935. The camp had been abandoned by Richard E. Byrd several years earlier. They walked six days to the camp and were rescued by the British Research Society ship Discovery II a month later. Their plane, the Northrup 2B Polar Star was later recovered by Hollick-Kenyon.

The ice sheet and the South Pole is nearly two miles thick and is constantly shifting, carrying the facilities along with it at a rate of about 30 feet per year.

The highest mountains of Antarctica reach over 14,000 feet, about the height of the U.S. Rocky Mountains.

Capt. John Symmes contended that the earth was hollow and open at both poles. He surmised a 4,000-mile opening at the North Pole and a 6,000-mile opening at the South Pole with five hollow, concentric spheres comprising the mass of the Earth. He petitioned Congress in 1823 to send an exploring expedition to test his theory and received 25 affirmative votes.

In 1965, a private plane carrying 30 passengers and crew flew from honolulu across the North Pole to London and Lisbon then to Buenos Aires and across the South Pole to Christchurch, returning to Honolulu. Leased from the Flying Tigers, the Boeing 707 was sponsored by Rockwell-Standard Corporation of Pittsburgh as a scientific exploration with emphasis on high-altitude meteorology and cosmic radiation.

The first around-the-world solo flight across both poles was accomplished in November of 1971. Flying a twin-engine Piper Navajo aircraft. Elgen Long crossed the South Pole from Punta Arenas and landed at McMurdo en route to Sydney, Australia.

Before WWII, Germany was in possession of 11,600 aerial negatives of Antarctica vistas. Their fate is uncertain but it is believed they were destroyed in the ashes of the Third Reich.

During WWII, most northern nations were too busy with the war to send expeditions to Antarctica. Reconnaissance was largely limited to German raiders and submarine supply ships and the Allied Forces which hunted them. The British secretly established Operation Tabarin at several research bases on and near the Peninsula. After the war, Tabarin was renamed the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey and its mission was changed to exploration.

Hot and humid Florida holds the geological materials collected in polar regions. The Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility and Core Library is located at Florida State University.

A South Polar skua was found in Greenland six months after being hatched and banded on Shortcut Island near Palmer Station on Jan. 20, 1975. It was recovered by an Eskimo at Godthabsfjorden, Greenland on July 31. The South Polar skua is believed to range farther south than any other bird and has been sighted at the geographic South Pole.

Two alpacas were brought to Antarctica with the Ronne exepedition of 1947-48. When purchased in Valpariso, the animals were thought to be llamas and were loaded onto the Beaumont with 1,000 kilograms of hay. On the journey to Stonington Island so of the huskies broke loose on the ship and killed the alpacas.

At Punta Arenas, several men of the RARE expedition in 1947 bought a corgi, a whippet and "some sort of sheep dog" for pets during their winter in Antarctica.

The Adelie penguin is named for Adele, the wife of Jules-Sebastian Dumont d'Urville, France's early explorer. Today's French station, Dumont d'Urville, is situated on the Adelie Coast, also named for Adele.