It’s a dreary winter afternoon in Huron, South Dakota. Standing in his safety gear — hard hat, coveralls, harness — mechanic John Tapken is ready to get back to work on trains. It’s a few hours past lunchtime, but the day is far ...
Americana
How One Woman Found Her Calling as a Long Haul Trucker
TJ O’Shea attracts the occasional odd look as she steps down from the cab of her big rig in a skirt, combat boots, Waxtrax hoodie, and fedora. She could be anywhere from Florida to Idaho, spending 14-hour days listening to audiobooks while flying ...
Meet Nat Love, the Most Famous Black Cowboy of the American Frontier
If Nat Love hadn’t learned how to read and write, then we’d never know one of the greatest Black heroes of the American frontier. We wouldn’t have learned his firsthand account of life growing up as a slave. We wouldn’t have the perspective of one of ...
5 of the Wildest Presidential Pets To Stay at the White House
If you’re expecting a list of all the presidents’ doggos and good boys, this isn’t the place for that. The most common presidential pets to have blessed the hallowed White House grounds have been dogs, cats, birds, and horses. Even President Joe ...
6 Reasons America’s First Daredevil Is a Dude Worth Remembering
Long before Evel Knievel, Travis Pastrana, or Smagical, Sam Patch was launching off Niagara Falls for money, wowing crowds, and, notably, not dying in the process. America’s first daredevil was the original extreme sports badass — and here are six ...
Tom Crean: 5 Facts About the Most Badass Explorer You’ve Never Heard Of
Rugged and tough, athletic and gritty, with a tobacco pipe clenched between his teeth, Tom Crean was the toughest Antarctic explorer you’ve never heard of. He spent more days in Antarctica than both Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. His crew ...
Carl Akeley: The Father of Modern Taxidermy
Carl Akeley had never been to Africa. Daniel Elliot, one of Akeley’s mentors and the curator for the zoology department of the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, invited the 32-year-old in 1896 on an eight-month expedition to Somaliland. Akeley ...
Mountaineering in a Skirt: 4 Trailblazing Female Climbers
Sexism and ill-suited clothing didn’t stop these four 19th-century women from achieving greatness in mountaineering. One climbed two dozen peaks that hadn’t yet been named, most of them while wearing a wool skirt. Another bicycled up mountains ...
The True Story Behind ‘Jeremiah Johnson’: What We Know (and Don’t)
Back in the frontier days, it was not uncommon for the lives and deeds of famous gunfighters and personalities of the Wild West to be greatly exaggerated in newspaper stories and dime novels, until an entire alternate, bloviated life history attached ...
The Trailblazer Who Pioneered Prospecting in the Canadian Wilderness
Conformity wasn’t an accepted word in the vocabulary of Kate Rice. The blond beauty had all the basics and intangibles to lead a safe and risk-averse life. She was born to wealthy parents, but her father, Henry Lincoln Rice, may be to blame for ...
4 Little-Known and Unusual Stories from Past US Presidential Elections
Election years throughout the more than 200-year history of the United States are often rife with contention, political upheaval, social unrest, and surprise. On Jan. 7, 1789, Congress required state electors for the nation's first presidential ...
Blood Brothers: Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick Selous
Nineteen days after leaving the White House and his second term as president, Theodore Roosevelt kissed his wife goodbye. He boarded a train in Oyster Bay with his son Kermit, bound for a steamship, bound for Africa. Roosevelt was embarking on a ...
John Wesley Powell’s Geographic Expedition of 1869: The Discovery of the Grand Canyon
Four fragile wooden rowboats, 10 months’ worth of provisions, and 10 courageous men set out on May 24, 1869, on an audacious expedition from the Union Pacific’s Green River Station in Wyoming en route for the “Great Unknown,” the last unexplored ...
Watch: 19th Anniversary of the Sept. 11 Terrorist Attacks
Those of us who are old enough to remember it happening no doubt have vivid memories of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. Four commercial airliners were hijacked by terrorists — two targeted New York City, crashing into the north and south towers of the World ...
Catching Waves on Camp Pendleton: Surfing Culture Provides Community of Strength
It is common knowledge that nearly all Marine Corps duty stations are next to the ocean, and that surfing comes with the territory. With surfing comes a community strengthened by a shared desire to be mentally, emotionally, and physically strong, ...
No Dog Gets Left Behind: Reuniting Service Members who Bonded with Stray Dogs
Deployed service members can find themselves in a range of situations. Some face life-threatening decisions every single day, while others deal with endless days of severe boredom. Some are firing rifles, others are turning wrenches, and others are ...
Hard-Working Americans: The Beekeeper
Being a double-amputee doesn’t mean you can’t find your place in the agricultural world — and for Alex Jauregui, that place is as a beekeeper. Jauregui served for 11 years in the U.S. Army and deployed four times — twice to Iraq and twice to ...
Hard-Working Americans: The Mechanic
These days, being a mechanic means changing with the times. No one knows that better than Ernie Alix, who owns and operates Ernie’s Garage in Windham, New Hampshire. Because his father was also a mechanic, he’s spent his whole life in garages, but ...
Lewis and Clark: The First Independence Day West of the Mississippi
Isolated and far from home, the members of the Corps of Discovery celebrated the Fourth of July three times in the wilderness in 1804, 1805, and 1806. Led by Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark, the expedition left St. Louis in ...
Buffalo Is Experiencing a Renaissance That Is Revitalizing the Once-Dying City
For decades, if someone drove north into Buffalo, New York, they would encounter an aerosolized wall of lingering pollution from the long-defunct Bethlehem Steel plant in the suburb of Lackawanna. The plant shuttered almost entirely in 1983, leaving ...
