No. 571
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
April 13, 2021

Giving the New Room a Lively Opening.

A Tenderfoot's experience in introducing the first billiard table in Arriba County, N. M.
April 13, 2021
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Via Newspapers.comFile this one under “Life’s random little oddities.”  The “Miller County Vidette,” May 6, 1875:A correspondent of the Toledo Blade, writing from Hastings, Michigan, says:About ten miles south of this place, a farmer, while driving some cows through a deep forest adjoining his fields, unexpectedly came upon an unusually large buck, stretched out upon the ground, and moaning
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Strange Company - 9/2/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
 When John Keys and Eva Dickenson were married in Cincinnati on August 21, 1890, they told their relatives that they planned to honeymoon on the Atlantic coast, but John had another plan. He purchased an Ohio River shanty-boat and planned a slow trip downriver to St. Louis. It would not be their last deception; in fact, what transpired on that fateful journey would remain forever shrouded in
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Murder By Gaslight - 8/29/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Serpent and Dove. | Woman Kicks Second Husband Out.

Giving the New Room a Lively Opening.

Lively-Opening

"I have a room now in Arriba county, N. M., and, a few days ago, a party that had come down from Callego canon took possession of my bar and room and run it for twenty-four hours. They drank all the liquor I had in stock, broke up several chairs, ripped a hole in a billiard table cloth and set an English Cattle Company superintendent and a cowboy to doing a prize dance on the billiard table. I kicked a little at this for fear, they'd break the slate bed of the table and It would take me weeks to get another. They stood me off with a gun, and served notice on me to keep cool and let my hair grow and they'd settle the score. They left me a tough-looking place, but they didn't kick a bit over the itemized bill I brought them of $190 for what they'd drank and smashed and had the use of. They were satisfied, they said, if I was, and they'd settle if the house would set 'em up. I opened the last three quarts of champagne in the county—three I'd been keeping for a girl, and set 'em up for 'em handsome, and they squared the score and went off peaceful as lambs It is a good country if you know how to take people there, and not be too fresh.”


From Illustrated Police News, February 27, 1886.