Fix Bayonets: Colonel Chamberlain & Little Round Top

In the fall of 1874, about three hundred men of Canada's newly formed North West Mounted Police were lost on the prairie, watching their horses die and searching for a whiskey fort they couldn't find. Their rescue came in the form of a short, bow-legged horse trader named Jerry Potts. The son of a Scottish fur trader and a Blood woman named Crooked Back, Potts lost his father to a bullet meant for someone else and was raised among traders and his mother's Blackfoot people. By adulthood, he had earned a fearsome reputation, taking sixteen scalps at the Battle of Belly River in 1870 and working as a hunter for the whiskey men at Fort Whoop-Up until the murder of his own mother turned him against the trade. Hired by the Mounties at Fort Benton, he would spend the next twenty-two years as their guide and interpreter. But separating the man from the legend means sorting through tales of Lakota war parties, a snow-blind ride through a blizzard, a council with Sitting Bull, and a child’s chamber pot.

In July of 1881, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett in a darkened bedroom at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was just twenty-one years old, possibly younger, and had spent the better part of three years among the young women of Fort Sumner, earning a reputation as something of a ladies' man. That same year, rumors swirled that Paulita Maxwell, the teenage sister of the man in whose bedroom Billy died, was carrying the Kid's child. More than a century later, a book by Elbert Garcia would claim that Billy fathered a son with Fort Sumner resident Abrana Garcia. But the records tell a different story, and the search for Billy's children leads instead to the women who mourned him, a would-be brother-in-law who may have helped set him up, and a photograph that bears a stark resemblance.

Was the Civil War fought over slavery or states' rights? Today we’ll examine the primary sources: the secession declarations of South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas, the ordinances of the other Confederate states, Alexander Stephens's Cornerstone Speech, Jefferson Davis's own words to the Confederate Congress in 1861, and Lincoln's letters on slavery and the Union. We'll also discuss the Corwin Amendment, the Crittenden Compromise, the tariff argument, why poor Southern farmers enlisted, the truth about Black Confederates and the Louisiana Native Guard, Black slave owners, Union atrocities, and how the Lost Cause myth spread from Edward Pollard's 1866 book through the United Daughters of the Confederacy and into Southern history textbooks, including the ones I used growing up in Texas.

Did Custer deserve to die at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and did the Lakota steal the Black Hills? In this reaction episode of the Wild West Extravaganza, we’ll dig further into the history behind the Great Sioux War of 1876. Topics include the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the Black Hills gold rush, Ulysses S. Grant's secret White House meeting, the Watkins report, the December 1875 ultimatum, and the 1980 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Sioux Nation. We also cover the Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Arikara claims to the Black Hills, Red Cloud's War, the Grattan Massacre, Major Reno and Captain Benteen at the Reno Court of Inquiry, Bloody Knife and Gall, the jammed Springfield carbines, Custer's rumored presidential ambitions, the Washita, Sand Creek and Chivington, the Pawnee and Massacre Canyon, the Dakota War of 1862, and whether historians are biased about George Armstrong Custer and Native American history.

In the spring of 1886, two El Paso madams went to war over a young prostitute named Bessie Colvin, and by the time the smoke cleared, one of them was shot in her privates and the other was under arrest for attempted murder. This is the story of Alice Abbott, the six-foot-tall brothel operator known as Fat Alice, and her rival across the street, Etta Clark, better known as Etta the Grasshopper. We cover how prostitution actually worked in the Old West, from the crib girls at the bottom to the saloon girls and the high-end parlor houses, along with the $10 weekly fine that conveniently went straight into the pockets of the El Paso police department.