Wild West Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Get ready for a chilling walk down memory lane as we take you on a ghostly journey through Dodge City with our mischievous guide, Luke McGlue. Picture this: it's Halloween night, and the usually bustling streets are eerily silent. Luke has a mission - to administer the infamous Keely Cure to a stubbornly intoxicated judge. Sounds simple, right? But things aren't always a...

Send us Fan Mail In November 2026, The Wild West Podcast will launch a new month-long series, Beyond the Legend: The True History of the Frontier , that deconstructs popular Hollywood myths about the 19th-century American West. Drawing on primary sources, court records, and historical archives, the series will examine the facts behind romanticized cowboy clichés to reveal a grittier, darker, more...

Send us Fan Mail Halloween night in Spearville, Kansas, arrived with a blizzard so dense it erased the horizon and pressed the cold into the marrow of every bone. The wind rattled the windows of the Ford County Bank, carrying with it the scent of scorched kerosene and the faint, metallic tang of fear. Inside, Oliver Yantis, Bill Doolin, and George "Bittercreek" Newcomb moved with the pra...

Send us Fan Mail The script tells the chilling story of a 1958 archival discovery at Fort Hays State University, where a graduate assistant listening to a reel-to-reel tape recorded by local resident Mary C. Highland uncovers a dark, hidden secret from the Kansas frontier. Prompted by a cryptic note left in the tape box, the narrative flashes back to 1888 Bucklin, Kansas, where investigator Jack S...

Send us Fan Mail This special Halloween episode of the Wild West Podcast, hosted by Brad Smalley, explores the dark history and haunting of Soule's Eureka Canal in Cimarron, Kansas. The story centers on Asa T. Soule, a wealthy New York tycoon who made his fortune selling Hop Bitters and sought to carve a massive irrigation ditch across the plains to build an agricultural empire. The venture u...

Send us Fan Mail In the summer of 1867, a terrifying cholera epidemic swept through Fort Dodge, Kansas, striking down healthy men by dusk and leaving a young eastern private named Walter "Walt" Hall among the fallen. Amidst a raging prairie thunderstorm, soldiers heard frantic scratching coming from the stone "Dead House," but the exhausted post surgeon dismissed the terrifying...

Send us Fan Mail The wind that sweeps across the Kansas plains in early April is sharp enough to peel paint from the clapboard facades of Dodge City’s Front Street, and it carries with it the names of men who once kept order with a Colt and a badge. On the morning Ed Masterson walked his final patrol, the temperature hovered just above freezing, the kind of chill that seeps into the bones and make...

Send us Fan Mail On the edge of the prairie, where the wind could strip paint from a fence post and the sun baked the grass to brittle straw, a limestone mansion rose in defiance. Its walls, quarried by hand and mortared with ambition, promised permanence in a land that devoured dreams. Inside, John Mueller’s fortunes climbed with each black walnut step, the staircase polished by boots that tracke...

Send us Fan Mail Step into the captivating world of the American frontier, where history, grit, and surprising truths converge to reshape everything you thought you knew about the Old West. In this engaging address, our speaker Dr. Frank Sharp peels back the layers of myth to reveal a astonishing reality: post-Civil War Texas was pulled from deep economic depression not just by hard-working cowboy...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine standing atop Pawnee Rock in May of 1872, looking out over the vast, windswept plains of Kansas. As far as the eye can see, the earth itself seems to move—a living, breathing ocean of dark fur and thunder. Welcome to The Wild West Podcast . Today, we invite you to travel alongside Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: soldier, keen naturalist, and eyewitness to the final, awe-insp...

Send us Fan Mail Journey into the raw, untamed frontier of June 1872 with former buffalo hunter turned saloon owner George W. Brown. In this gripping episode, Brown details the chaotic birth of Buffalo City—a bustling boomtown sparked when a strict military ban on alcohol at Fort Dodge sent thirsty soldiers, hunters, and freight drivers searching for a new watering hole just beyond government line...

Send us Fan Mail Step back in time to the summer of 1872 and experience the raw, untamed spirit of the American frontier. Narrated through the vivid recollections of George W. Brown, this episode transports listeners directly onto the sun-drenched plains of Kansas, following the massive buffalo herds alongside legendary frontiersmen. Richly atmospheric soundscapes—from the crackle of evening campf...

Send us Fan Mail Saddle up and tune in to this thrilling episode of the Wild West Podcast , hosted by Brad Smalley! The show shines a spotlight on an upcoming doubleheader event in Dodge City, Kansas, featuring Dr. Frank Sharp—an educator, author, cattleman, and lead educator for the State of Texas Herd of Longhorns at Fort Griffin. In a captivating interview, Dr. Sharp dismantles common misconcep...

Send us Fan Mail In episode 6 of Buffalo Days , the narrative opens with a sudden and intense prairie storm that triggers a massive buffalo stampede. As lightning strikes and kills a bull in the herd, the animals scatter in panic, threatening to crush the hunters and their heavily loaded supply wagons. The men are forced to make a desperate run through the blinding rain and mud, barely escaping th...

Send us Fan Mail Before sunrise, Josiah Wright Mooar sets out with Jim White to learn the technique of buffalo hunting from a stand. Moving six miles out, they locate a massive herd, utilizing the cover of sandhills and a riverbank to approach the animals while the skinners wait with a freight wagon nearby. As the buffalo draw close, Jim criticizes the animals' lack of intelligence and explai...

Send us Fan Mail Part Four of Buffalo Days details the intense encounters between the U.S. Army and 400 Native Americans and a regiment of "Buffalo Soldiers"—and the resilient Indigenous warriors of the Great Plains. The section also features a memorable account from Jim White, who shared a campfire story about the harsh realities of life on the plains. White’s tale illustrated the unpre...

Send us Fan Mail Part Three of Buffalo Days details Josiah Wright Mooar's transition into the life of a buffalo hunter on the American Great Plains during the 1870s. Mooar recounts the arduous process of outfitting an expedition, highlighting the logistical challenges of securing reliable teams, specialized rifles like the Sharps, and enough supplies to sustain a hunting party for months in t...

Send us Fan Mail This historical yarn recounts the classic frontier hazing of "Herb," a boastful Dodge City resident who claimed to be an irresistible lady-killer but instead fell hook, line, and sinker for a mail-order prank. Orchestrated by local tricksters, the scheme buried the gullible romantic under a mountain of fake, hilariously absurd love letters from imaginary admirers. Unable...

Send us Fan Mail The story opens in the waning light of 1872, as Carl Ludvig Hendricks boards a steamship in Liverpool, the salt air thick with anticipation and the sharp tang of coal smoke. The decks soon fill with a raucous knot of Irish travelers, their laughter rising above the groan of the engines. For twenty-four days, Hendricks and his companions endure the relentless pitch and roll of the...

Send us Fan Mail A man rides east through New Mexico with a coffin in his wagon, charcoal packed tight to fight decay, because his dying friend asked for one last mercy: don’t bury me in a foreign place. That single promise opens the door to the full, complicated life of Charles Goodnight, one of the most important names in Texas Panhandle history and a key figure of the American cattle frontier....

Send us Fan Mail The Wild West didn’t run on courage alone. It ran on nerve, repetition, and a cold understanding that “the law” often arrived as a Colt revolver, not a badge. We take you into the real world behind the legends of Old West gunfighters, using sharp stories and historical color drawn from Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal by Stuart M. Lake, plus hard-edged accounts connected to Bat Master...

Send us Fan Mail A river can look calm and still be a trap. We drop into the Solomon River valley in 1857, where the U.S. Army launches what many consider the first true campaign against the Plains Indians in this series: the Cheyenne Campaign of 1857, better known as the Battle of Solomon Fork in northwest Kansas. The stakes are bigger than a single clash. This is the collision between a mobile C...

Send us Fan Mail A 17-day march ends with a shock of movement on the open Plains: roughly 300 Cheyenne warriors in line of battle and the US cavalry scrambling to form up before the infantry can even arrive. That’s the doorstep of the Battle of Solomon Fork, the 1857 Cheyenne Campaign, and the third chapter in our five-part series on the early Cheyenne Indian Wars leading toward the Sheridan Winte...

Send us Fan Mail Mud, rain, and a riverbank so soft every step sinks, that’s where Fort Dodge begins. We rewind to April 10, 1865, and follow Captain Henry Pearce and a tired group of soldiers as they plant a military post on the Arkansas River while most of the country’s attention is fixed on the war’s end in Virginia. This is Kansas frontier history at ground level, where “progress” sounds like...

Send us Fan Mail Dodge City doesn’t just welcome the cattle drives; it feeds on them. When the herds arrive, so do the wages, the whiskey, the gambling, and the dance halls, and the town’s “wide open” side of the tracks turns into a nightly test of nerve for anyone wearing a badge. We tell the story of one of those nights, when Deputy Marshal Ed Masterson and Assistant Marshal Nat Haywood walk the...