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Did Colorado Kill Doc Holliday (Popularity:  )
John Henry “Doc” Holliday’s final words, spoken as he lay dying in the Hotel Glenwood in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, were “this is funny”. We’ll never know, of course, exactly what the Wild West legend meant by this. Perhaps he found it ironic that after a life spent tempting death in the gambling dens of the American frontier, it was at last his 15-year long battle with tuberculosis that had killed ...
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Why Do We Celebrate The 4th Of July? (Popularity: )
The 4th of July has been an important holiday but today, more and more people do not know why we actually celebrate this day. If you are not up to date on your history of the United States, July 4th, 1776 is the day that the colonies decided to declare themselves independent of Britain. By writing a very detailed decree, they decided that they no longer would need to be ...
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Saguaro The King of Cacti (Popularity: )
The visual identity of the American southwest has certain iconic signifiers: desert plains, tumbleweeds, rusty-red rock formations and a certain towering cactus called the Saguaro. These cacti, some as tall as 50 feet and as heavy as 8 tons, are one of the greatest symbols of America’s wild deserts.
The Saguaro Cactus is found only in the Sonora Desert, from sea-level to elevations of approximately 4,000 feet, and limited by freezing ...
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Thomas Garrett and Delaware’s Underground Railroad (Popularity: )
The Underground Railroad’s last stop in the slave-holding state of Delaware was located on Shipley Street in Wilmington at the home of a Quaker merchant named Thomas Garrett. Over 2,700 runaway slaves were given safe harbor there before making their way to the free states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Garrett’s passionate commitment to the abolition of slavery would cost him a great deal over the course of his life. ...
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The Fountain of Hooey: Ponce de Leon in Florida (Popularity: )
It probably won’t come as a surprise to too many people nowadays that the Spanish Conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon was not, in fact, really looking for a genuine fountain of youth on his explorations in Florida. This myth was most likely born in the 1560’s after Ponce’s death. The grain of truth that supposedly sits at the center of every tall tail may have to do with his metaphorical ...
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New-Gate in New England: Hard Time Connecticut Style (Popularity: )
The very 1st state prison in the United States was founded before there were states at all, let alone united ones. Connecticut’s New-Gate Prison, originally a copper mine, was began it’s role as a detention center in the fall of 1773 as the colony’s public “gaol” and workhouse. It was called New-Gate after the fearsome prison of the same name in England. During the early years of the American Revolutionary ...
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