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Wild West Podcast
Michael King/Brad Smalley
283 episodes
3 weeks ago
Send us a text Cold bites, a promise binds, and a furnace roars—this is the Yukon at human scale. We start with a candid look at why facing reality beats denial, then follow the trail into Robert Service’s world, where men who moil for gold wrestle with fear, loyalty, and the math of survival. Our reading of The Cremation of Sam McGee sets the pace: a vow made on a brutal Christmas run, a body lashed to a sleigh, and a punchline so warm it melts the dread. We unpack the craft that makes this...
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All content for Wild West Podcast is the property of Michael King/Brad Smalley and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
Send us a text Cold bites, a promise binds, and a furnace roars—this is the Yukon at human scale. We start with a candid look at why facing reality beats denial, then follow the trail into Robert Service’s world, where men who moil for gold wrestle with fear, loyalty, and the math of survival. Our reading of The Cremation of Sam McGee sets the pace: a vow made on a brutal Christmas run, a body lashed to a sleigh, and a punchline so warm it melts the dread. We unpack the craft that makes this...
Show more...
Education
Personal Journals,
Society & Culture,
History
Episodes (20/283)
Wild West Podcast
Fireside Truths In The Midnight Sun
Send us a text Cold bites, a promise binds, and a furnace roars—this is the Yukon at human scale. We start with a candid look at why facing reality beats denial, then follow the trail into Robert Service’s world, where men who moil for gold wrestle with fear, loyalty, and the math of survival. Our reading of The Cremation of Sam McGee sets the pace: a vow made on a brutal Christmas run, a body lashed to a sleigh, and a punchline so warm it melts the dread. We unpack the craft that makes this...
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3 weeks ago
9 minutes

Wild West Podcast
John Brown’s Gallows, A Nation’s Reckoning
Send us a text A cold morning, a fortified town, and a scaffold placed just out of earshot—Charleston, Virginia tried to choreograph John Brown’s end and, with it, the story the country would remember. What they could not contain was a single handwritten note that slipped past the rope and into the bloodstream of a nation already splitting at the seams. We walk the final hours with four witnesses whose perspectives refract the moment: Thomas J. Jackson, the meticulous VMI professor whose fai...
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1 month ago
29 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Night The Prairie Burned
Send us a text A single word—fire—ripped through a quiet winter night and changed Dodge City forever. We travel back to late 1885 as flames burst from the Junction Saloon, raced down Front Street, and turned landmark businesses into a corridor of embers. With no pressurized water system and winter winds pushing the blaze, neighbors hacked at ice for bucket brigades while heat made even brick buildings fail. The Long Branch Saloon, Delmonico’s, Zinnerman’s hardware, and more fell in hours, and...
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1 month ago
3 minutes

Wild West Podcast
A Frontier Christmas, A Stranger’s Song, And The Night The Miners Remembered Home
Send us a text A coffin rattles into a mining camp and turns out to be a piano—an unlikely miracle for a saloon that runs on cards, noise, and stubborn pride. We set the scene in a winter-struck gulch where 300 miners live by the hour and try not to think about the lives they left behind. Goskin, the gambler who owns the hall, wants one thing for Christmas: someone brave enough to bring that silent instrument to life. What follows is a story about fear, longing, and the strange ways grace fi...
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1 month ago
18 minutes

Wild West Podcast
How The Old West Shaped American Christmas Traditions
Send us a text Snow that bites, winds that snap, and a cabin lit by a single candle—yet the room still fills with carols and the smell of plum pudding. We journey across the Old West to uncover how pioneers forged the Christmas we recognize today, transforming scarcity into ritual and distance into community. From homestead kitchens humming weeks in advance to stockings hung by a hard‑won fire, we explore the customs that stitched a shaken nation back together after the Civil War and blossome...
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1 month ago
17 minutes

Wild West Podcast
The Great Western Hotel Wasn’t Named For The Cattle Trail
Send us a text Forget the postcard version of Dodge City. We open the door to the Great Western Hotel and step into a town intent on trading dust for dignity, noise for order, and short-term profits for a longer arc of respectability. The surprise is in the name itself: Great Western wasn’t a nod to cattle drives; it was a bid to borrow the prestige of Brunel’s railway and steamship, the Victorian shorthand for speed, reliability, and modern life. That branding choice tells us more about ambi...
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1 month ago
29 minutes

Wild West Podcast
How One Train Chose Ford, Kansas Over Ryansville
Send us a text A single whistle split the prairie air—and with it, the future of two rival towns. We revisit November 25, 1887, when the Arkansas, Kansas, and Colorado Railroad rolled into Ford, Kansas and turned isolation into opportunity, commerce into momentum, and a bitter rivalry into a clear verdict. What looks like a short stretch of track becomes a story about how infrastructure decides who thrives, who moves, and who fades from the map. We set the stage with Dodge City’s fifteen-yea...
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1 month ago
2 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Trail Of Fact And Fable
Send us a text A quiet click in a digital archive set off a bigger question: how did a tidy tale about the “Western Trail” in 1873 outrun the dusty, documented truth of 1874? We follow the breadcrumb trail from a glossy magazine headline to the rail-choked streets of Dodge City, where buffalo hides, not longhorns, drove the economy. From there, we trace John T. Lytle’s government contract to feed the Sioux, the mapped river crossings, and the August 1, 1874 deadline that defined the fir...
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1 month ago
24 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Setting The Record Straight On The Western Trail
Send us a text A trail’s name shouldn’t be a marketing plan, yet that’s exactly how the West’s most traveled cattle route got mislabeled. We follow the evidence from a fresh historiographical review back to 1874, when John T. Lytle cut a new path north after the Chisholm route jammed, and forward to the moment Dodge City exploded into the greatest cattle market on earth. Along the way, we sit with the drovers’ own words—the functional names they used at the time—and weigh them against monumen...
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1 month ago
22 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Harper's Ferry, Minute By Minute
Send us a text A cold wind skims the Potomac, the town sleeps, and nineteen men step toward a federal armory believing they can change the course of a nation. We pull you inside the hour-by-hour chaos of Harper’s Ferry—bridges taken in the dark, telegraph alarms racing east, hostages herded into a small engine house, and a plan that tightens into a steel trap. No tidy hindsight, just the immediacy of crackling dispatches and the raw choices that turned a local raid into a national reckoning. ...
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2 months ago
32 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Halloween in Dodge City 1877
Send us a text Halloween in Dodge City is posted once a year during the month of October. The podcast tells the story of some of the characters who lived in Dodge City, Kansas, during the early frontier days. The story takes place on October 31, when a fictitious character named Luke McGlue visits a resting site known as Boot Hill. While waiting to administer the Kelly Cure, Luke visits and tells the stories of individual characters buried at Boot Hill. These long-lost souls include Lizzy Pal...
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2 months ago
31 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Phantom On The Prairie Ditch
Send us a text The prairie doesn’t forget—and it won’t let us forget either. We follow a chilling thread from a 96-mile irrigation scheme called the Eureka Canal to a vanished laborer whose story was buried in snow, silence, and someone else’s balance sheet. What begins as a Halloween ghost story widens into a study of hubris, place, and the quiet power of naming the lost. We unpack Asa T. Soule’s rise from hop bitters fortune to Western empire building, and how the canal promised a new Eden...
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2 months ago
35 minutes

Wild West Podcast
The Forgotten Grave Of Ed Masterson
Send us a text The wind on the Kansas plains doesn’t just rattle old storefronts; it carries the names we’ve let disappear. We retrace the final patrol of City Marshal Ed Masterson, shot along Dodge City’s infamous deadline in 1878, and follow the paper-thin trail of his remains from Fort Dodge to the overgrown ruins of Prairie Grove to the tidy rows of Maple Grove. What starts as a gripping frontier shootout turns into a forensic hunt for a missing grave, a meditation on how towns expand, an...
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2 months ago
28 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Night Ride to Fort Sumner
Send us a text A contract to feed a frontier post shouldn’t have ended at a river cave, but the Pecos has a way of bending plans. We head out with Oliver Loving and W.J. Wilson on a night-run mission to Fort Sumner that turns into a standoff against a swelling war party, where ground, grit, and a few feet of brush decide the line between life and legend. When a parley sign flickers on the plains and a hidden shot rips through Loving’s wrist and side, the story snaps from strategy to survival,...
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3 months ago
11 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Secrets Beneath the Limestone: The Haunted Legacy of Dodge City’s Home of Stone
Send us a text A limestone mansion built to defy the prairie became a vessel for sorrow—and then a sanctuary. We take you inside Dodge City’s Home of Stone, from John Mueller’s audacious rise and the black walnut staircase that flaunted prosperity, to the winter they called the White Death that buried a cattle empire under ice. Amid ruin, another story took hold: Caroline’s quiet grief, a nursery that never warmed, a rocking chair that swayed without wind, and a whisper that sounded like a ch...
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3 months ago
34 minutes

Wild West Podcast
The Sand Creek Betrayal: America's Darkest Hour on the Frontier
Send us a text November 29, 1864 dawned cold on the Colorado plains as Cheyenne and Arapaho families slept peacefully under an American flag—a gift promising protection. By nightfall, over 200 Native Americans lay dead in what would become one of the most shameful episodes in American history. The Sand Creek Massacre didn't happen in isolation. It grew from a toxic brew of broken treaties, gold rush fever, and political ambition. Once respected Cheyenne and Arapaho territories, recognized in...
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3 months ago
26 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Beyond the Narrative: Jeff Broome Challenges What We Know About Sand Creek
Send us a text Gold rushes change landscapes—both physical and human. When 100,000 settlers poured into Colorado Territory following the 1858 discovery of gold, they unknowingly set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in one of America's most controversial military actions. The newcomers' wagons followed water sources critical to both buffalo herds and the nomadic Plains Indians who depended on them for survival. As these resources vanished, tensions escalated into violence. His...
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3 months ago
23 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Bassett of the Badlands: The Fearless First Marshal of Dodge City!
Send us a text Charlie Bassett may be the most important Wild West lawman you've never heard of. Before Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson became household names, they wore their first badges under his leadership in Dodge City, Kansas—a place so notoriously lawless it earned the nickname "the wickedest little town in America." Born in Massachusetts in 1847, Bassett's journey took him from Civil War battlefields to the heart of frontier chaos. Standing only five feet four inches tall, what he lacke...
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4 months ago
36 minutes

Wild West Podcast
The Mysterious Life of Dutch Henry Borne
Send us a text The tangled web of myth and reality surrounding Dutch Henry Borne reveals a captivating window into the American frontier experience. Our exploration of this enigmatic outlaw's life continues as we examine the controversial claims and counterclaims about one of the West's most fascinating characters. Dutch Henry's transformation from military scout to notorious criminal traverses the shifting moral landscape of the frontier. Beginning his Western career in 1867 as a scout for ...
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5 months ago
27 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Whiskey pours as the true story of the man who inspired Lonesome Dove unfolds
Send us a text Some monsters aren't fiction – they're buried in Dodge City Cemetery beneath stones that read "beloved husband and father." The story of Print Olive might be the most shocking true tale we've covered on Whiskey and Westerns. While sipping Bullet Bourbon (a fitting choice given Print's remarkable ability to absorb lead throughout his violent career), we unraveled the brutal history of a man whose sadistic tendencies would make even fictional villains seem tame. Print began as ...
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5 months ago
38 minutes

Wild West Podcast
Send us a text Cold bites, a promise binds, and a furnace roars—this is the Yukon at human scale. We start with a candid look at why facing reality beats denial, then follow the trail into Robert Service’s world, where men who moil for gold wrestle with fear, loyalty, and the math of survival. Our reading of The Cremation of Sam McGee sets the pace: a vow made on a brutal Christmas run, a body lashed to a sleigh, and a punchline so warm it melts the dread. We unpack the craft that makes this...