Life in the Old West

I was just playing around and found a great way to combine love of the Old West with modern, high-tech Google Maps functions for some fun and useful information.

If you haven’t used Google Maps, especially the new “Street View” function, you really need to give it a try. I just looked up “Gold Hill, Colorado” on Google Maps. One of the options I saw was “Street View.” I clicked on that and suddenly found myself traveling along Gold Hill Road at road level, looking through the trees and roadside rocks as I approached Main Street in this little Colorado “ghost town.”

Read more on Combine love of Old West with modern Google Maps for fun, information…

A recent visitor to our site was asking an interesting question about the Old West — “How much is a bit in money?” I did some digging around to try to find an answer related to the Old West. Here’s what I came up with:

According to Winfred Blevins’ valuable little reference book, “Dictionary of the American West,” a “bit” in relation to money was originally one-eighth of a Spanish or Spanish-Colonial dollar. That was probably the origin of the “two-bits, four-bits, six-bits” method of referring to money since the days of long ago.

Read more on How much is a ‘bit’ in money?…

In recent weeks, literally MILLIONS of folks throughout the Great Plains, Midwest, and Eastern states have spent a lot of nights in the dark (and cold, in many cases) because of storms that caused massive power outages.

Not many miles from where I live, a couple of hundred thousand folks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas (mostly northern Arkansas) lost power from ice storms — a number of them being left in the dark and cold for over two weeks. (We were hit like that in our city in January 2007, so I truly sympathize for those who find themselves in such a fix.)

Read more on Power outages remind us of pioneer ‘lighting’ in the Old West…