Frank Carlson Library

Aristotle Scrimshaw had left his wife and children on their small farm in Wisconsin to pick up some cash in the bustling goldfields of Virginia City. He had done well, buying up claims and collecting gold worth more than one hundred thousand dollars. Angelica Ramirez had left her abusive husband to become the most prosperous madam in the territory. And Professor Randolph Figaro, a Mississippi gambler, had struck his own kind of paydirt in Virginia...

August Beausoleil and his colleague, Charles Pomerantz, have taken the Beausoleil Brothers Follies to the remote mining towns of Montana, far from the powerful impresarios who own the talent and control the theaters on the big vaudeville circuits. Their cast includes a collection of has-beens and second-tier performers: Mary Mabel Markey, once queen of the boards but now a little out of breath; Wayne Windsor, "The Profile," who favors his audiences...

Lewis and Clark: forever paired for their epochal first crossing of the continent in 1804-1806, darlings of the young republic, and the pride of Thomas Jefferson because they made his dream of a nation between two oceans come true. Lewis and Clark: two great but very different men. Plain-spoken William Clark, enjoys the triumphs and acclaim of the expedition, marries his childhood sweetheart, and settles in St. Louis as superintendent of the nation's...

Collected here are all the Western short stories of Richard S. Wheeler, tales which span the Western landscape from Montana to Arizona and Washington to Wyoming in a period that covers the late 19th century through modern times. Here are a wide cast of characters -- madams, miners, morticians, detectives, newsman, and lawman. Some characters are drawn from history -- the Earp brothers, Mark Twain, William Wright, a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise,...